Sam Denny-Hodson is a force to be reckoned with.
As we chat, her ‘guard dog’ pug Vinny at our feet, she bursts with energy, having just held a warehouse sale with other Woodbridge retailers at her store, New Street Market, raising funds for local social enterprise Dora Brown.
The event was one of those “middle of the night, midlife moments” for the entrepreneur, who gives off an air of complete serenity, but (inside) is actually always two, three...no, make that five, steps ahead of herself.
“I don’t stop,” she chuckles, giving away a little of her Stoke-on-Trent accent – largely lost when she moved ‘down south’ to chase her dreams of being an actress as a teenager.
“We’ve been waiting for our next Canteen pop-up at New Street, I’ve got all this amazing space in the middle of our town I’m not using. I wanted to do something good. I’m so in awe of what Dora Brown do [cleaning up and redecorating houses for people in need]. I don’t have time to roll up my sleeves and clean toilets, but I can do pop-ups. Lots of local shops turned up. They all gave 20% of their takings on the day and paid £20 for a stall. The Dora Brown girls made cakes.
“It was just fantastic. People made new friends – even the shopkeepers – and there was this immense sense of community, which, I’m going to say this a lot, post-Covid, is really important.”
“I only make plans six months in advance now,” she adds. “Post-Covid (here I go again), my saying is ‘make plans to make God laugh’. I used to have a five-year plan. Now I’ve had to rip that all up. But that gives me a fresher outlook all the time because I’m constantly reacting and making up my plans as I go along.”
As a self-confessed serial planner, doesn’t she find that a bit scary?
“Nope. I’m living my best life,” she exclaims, beaming. Shining as a poster child for being fabulous in your 50s (she’s 54).
She’s in what she calls her ‘next chapter’, dedicating the majority of her time to expanding and amplifying her clothing brand, Homespun (as seen on the likes of Sarah Jessica Parker, Julianne Moore, Emily Blunt and Nicole Kidman), adding new lines of homeware.
“This is where my passion lies,” she says. “My primary focus at New Street Market, going forward, is Homespun. It’s the bulk of our sales. I want to grow it to a brand the size of Margaret Howell or Toast.”
Recently Sam has collaborated with Yarmouth Oilskins on new signature pieces, and sees herself doing more of this with other makers. “It keeps the collections so fresh. Yarmouth Oilskins are a joy to work with. They are wonderful people and the finish is impeccable. What they make isn’t cheap...but this is not about disposable fashion. We’re making clothes for life.”
And that’s so important to the designer whose own wardrobe is a blend of retro pieces from 20 or so years ago, pieces she’s made, and the odd new item. “I’m not about clothing you wear once and forget about. The aim with Homespun is that it’s easy-to-wear, luxury basics. You can get up every morning, pick two pieces, and they will always work together.” More on that later.
In addition to clothing, Sam is working on more Homespun interiors products. Customers can expect block print linens, a line designed in collaboration with a local designer who’s worked with the likes of The White Company, and an expansion of her beautiful range of Moroccan rugs.
As for the Canteen space, which was taken over for four months by L’Escargot as a pop-up. “I’ve realised restaurant pop-ups are the way forward,” Sam admits. “We’ve had Korean, Greek, Japanese. People here, I think, want something different – as long as the quality is impeccable. Our next pop-up will be announced soon and will run in autumn through to December. It’s going to be fabulous and I cannot wait to tell everyone who it is!”
Sam puts her verve for life, and infectious ambition =, down to growing up in a working-class family in Stoke, where torn clothes would be mended, and everyone had to graft to get what they wanted.
“My accent only comes out when I talk to my dad,” she laughs. “My kids think it’s hilarious. Dad’s moved here now and he can’t understand me unless I speak Stoke!”
Sam’s dad worked in the potteries from the age of 14, while her mum had a job in a local dairy. “Making something. Having a product. That always stuck with me,” she reveals, adding her parents probably only earned £16,000 a year between them, the family living in a 30s semi. Sam wanted, especially once she hit her teens, to get out and see the world.
Kent called, and a drama degree alongside English (which her parents insisted on so she’d have a back-up plan).
The idea was to become “an internationally renowned famous actress”.
But there was a crucial flaw to this plan.
“I’m not very good! There wasn’t a big opening for really poor, hammy actresses. I did some bits at a few old people’s homes and even they were turning their hearing aids off!”
A friend encouraged Sam to leave with them for Singapore to try her hand at PR, at a time when there was just one newspaper and one magazine in the country.
She was catapulted from sleeping on mates’ sofas, to living the absolute high life. Her flat mate was running Barings Bank after the Nick Leeson scandal, and she was suddenly organising parties for high flying clients such as Calvin Klein.
Aged 21, Sam was out every night in designer clothes and feeling, she says, like an imposter. “I kept waiting for someone to say ‘hang on a minute, do you know what you’re doing?’
“And the answer would have been ‘definitely not’. But I put my high heels on and did the whole ‘fake it ‘til you make it’ thing.”
When she returned to London, it was like slapping back to Earth with a bang. The city’s PR agencies didn’t appear to rate Sam’s experience in Asiaa, nd she was paid “a pittance”. When one of her biggest clients, M&S, offered her a role, that could have been seen as a golden goose. But Sam told them she’d be “too naughty” to work in their office...however, she could set up on her own and represent them.
It wouldn’t be too hard...would it? They seemed on board with the idea and she breathed a sigh of relief about that. “I mean, I was going to parties till 6am, coming in for a shower and in the office again by 7am. I was not made to be corporate!”
Sam set-up her own PR agency in the basement of a friend’s dental practice in Covent Garden, where she’d have to shut the door when the drills were running, and take calls on the loo.
“I turned around £3,000 per month. A grand in the pot, a grand for me, and a grand for the taxman. I loved it. It was a slow burn, but I added more and more clients and ended up with four staff on the fifth floor of a building in Soho in the late 90s. It was the time of my life.”
This really was like Ab Fab, she says. Utterly hedonistic and wild. Sam worked with international fashion brands, and on campaigns with supermodels Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. She put on events for The Designer’s Guild and Conran Shop. Diageo Drinks was a client, so there were a lot of film premieres.
“We had movie stars doing vodka luges in the small hours with my staff. The rule was, as long as you turned up to work the next morning (usually looking sorry for yourself with a bacon roll and wearing sunglasses) it was OK.”
Sam moved from club to club. From party to party. Saying the men’s mag events were the best. “Oh the women’s magazine parties were rubbish. It’d be a glass or two of Champagne, and pushing a few salad leaves around on a plate. The men’s magazines started around 11am with a beer, then you’d have lunch, and keep having lunch, and then go for more beers because it’s 6pm. It was bloody brilliant!”
There would be multiple trips every year to New York, Milan and Paris.
Then...Sam’s biological clock started to tick.
She got married and had three sons in quick succession, Felix (22), Rudi (18), and Milo (17).
And life took a surprising turn when she came to stay for a weekend with her then-toddlers.
“I wanted to do something different. I’d done 15 years in PR, and they’d been brilliant, but I needed a new chapter in my life. I knew I couldn’t stay in London if I wasn’t doing PR, so I came up here for a break.
“My husband was off at Glastonbury and I rented a cottage in Friston with the boys. I arrived in the pouring rain, I got lost, the kids were crying. It was miserable. But the next morning the sun was shining. The guy who owned the cottage apologised for not removing the ‘for sale’ sign before we got there.
“I said ‘well, don’t bother taking it down now, I’m buying this place’.
“When we got home my husband said ‘I could have sworn blind you called me while I was away and told me you bought a cottage’...I said, ‘I did’.”
Six months later Sam, her (now ex) husband and the children moved to a 16th century house in Chediston, just outside Halesworth, where Sam changed career again, becoming a casting director while raising her boys and renovating the property.
“My approach is, life is like a salad bar – how much can I get on my plate?” she giggles, adding that all the while she was doing casting, a new plot was formulating in her head.
She’d always kept fashion clippings, and had worked with designers such as John Smedley – known for his exquisite knitwear. She wanted a product. Her motivation? Living in a cottage with one side missing for three years.
“I knew I wanted to make something. It was always in me. And I knew I wanted to do something with knitwear. One of the directors of John Smedley introduced me to a phenomenal family-owned company in Mongolia. One day I said to my husband ‘look after the kids, I’m going to Mongolia’.
“It was a bit like the Wild West. My factory manager was kidnapped at one point!”
Cashmere, says Sam, had become her uniform. “With Homespun, I looked at what I wore day-to-day. In summer it was T-shirts and jeans and in winter, a jumper and jeans. I was living in Suffolk but doing freelance jobs in London. I needed to make something that would work in a draughty old house, but be smart enough for meetings.
And cashmere fit the bill. However, it had to be the best. “You can get cashmere for £30, but that’s the kind that’ll shrink in the wash! Good, long fibre cashmere gets better with washing. It becomes plumper and softer and more sumptuous. I’ve never had a piece back.”
Homespun launched in 2014, and with backers including Will Hobhouse, Sam rented a shop on Woodbridge’s Market Hill.
Always on the lookout for the next opportunity though, Sam was soon drawn to the building that would become New Street Market, just down the road from her original shop. At the time it was an antiques store.
“Originally it had been a stables, where the dray horses came in, and in the 50s it was a dairy. Someone told me there were milk floats in here,” she says, looking around at the space almost in disbelief.
When she took it on, much of the back part of the building was derelict and it was crying out for renovation - one of Sam’s other passions.
On opening in 2019, spaces were rented out to various businesses, with New Street fostering a hip, market vibe. She had seven “wonderful” months before Covid hit, but is a great believer in the phrase ‘crisis causes change and change is good’.
When she was able to travel, she spent time ruminating her next move at the lovely villa she bought, for a snip at £10,000 on a Greek island.
Sam has since added new lines of dresses, jackets, jerkins and is working on jeans.
“They are not cheap,” she admits, “but they are built to last. And the idea is you might buy one piece a season and keep adding to your wardrobe. We keep the prices as realistic as possible and the margins aren’t huge. These are pieces of clothing you won’t see anywhere else. We have a very strong Homespun signature, all edited and designed by me.”
Inspiration often comes from old movies. Spring/Summer 2023 for Homespun includes chalky pastels inspired by Charleston artists such as Duncan Grant, while the Autumn/Winter range is rich with deep shades favoured in the 40s.
Trousers are cut to suit men and women. A best-seller is the longline, water-resistant waxed cotton jerkin made with Yarmouth Oilskins. And Sam had to include a really good white shirt.
A big thing in all her designs is pockets. She cannot be without a pocket. “I’m not a fan of bags. All our dresses, jackets and trousers have massive pockets. When I’m out I’ve usually got the dog with me and I don’t want to be holding lots of things. Everything I design tends to be very functional.”
Denim is coming in, slowly but surely, with the designer working hard on making the ‘perfect’ cut of jeans. And “soft, gorgeous” cord has started to appear in the Homespun collection.
“I’m moving more into homeware as the months go by as well. I became a bit home obsessed in lockdown, spending ages setting the table. We’re having our own label on all the things I would want on a table myself. Beautiful linens, candlesticks, jugs. I have to admit, I have a bit of a tablecloth obsession!”
Sam says, long-term, she’d even like to design some home interiors in the Homespun style for photo shoots.
“Oh, I’ve got a million ideas percolating away in my brain,” she admits. “Thank God I’m single. I’ve got a massive sketch pad by the bed and I’m always scribbling ideas down, then waking up and thinking ‘what the hell did that mean at 4am?’”
The ultimate dream is to build a legacy brand. Something for her children to be proud of and to carry on - a little like the Missonis.
“I’d love that. I’d really love one of my kids to be involved. And I’d love to spend more time in the future at my place in Greece and to travel. But with what I do, I don’t feel like I’m working. This is my life and I adore it.”
Sam certainly doesn’t see herself retiring any time soon – if at all.
“My mum once said I have a butterfly mind. I’m like Dory from Finding Nemo. I’m a big blue sky thinker. I love having big ideas and I think you do need people like me. The dreamers and schemers.
“I exhaust myself sometimes and I will need to slow down at some point, but not for a long time. My motto is: ‘what’s next?’”
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