Nadine Merabi, a self-taught dressmaker whose designs are now worn by celebrities from Claudia Winkleman to Lauren Sánchez Bezos, credits her Lebanese father as the inspiration for her statement dresses and suits — although while growing up in Manchester, she didn’t appreciate his “extravagant” style.
“He was a very eclectic dresser, to the point where I would be so embarrassed,” said Merabi. “He would turn up in a full white suit, with a big, open flowery shirt and a gold chain, and I’d be dying. I’d say, ‘Can you please just be normal?’ It took me to the age I was when I started the business to realise I was fed up of trying to fit in.”
Her father’s ability to “always be the centre of attention” was something she channelled first into creating bespoke dresses for the red carpet and other glamorous events, and then into a ready-to-wear business with online sales in the UK, US and Europe, and a store in London’s Mayfair. Revenue was £40 million in 2024, a doubling since 2021. Pre-tax profits came in at £400,000.
Strictly’s Claudia Winkleman, left, wearing a Nadine Merabi, outfit, with Tess Daly, has helped get sales dancing at at the fashion firm
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It’s certainly not where Merabi, now 43, thought she would be as a teenager. At school, she excelled at sport and ended up playing hockey for England and winning a scholarship to Bath University as a result. However, her inspirational father died two weeks before she started, and she left at the end of that year, both because of grief and because “I just knew it wasn’t for me”.
Merabi returned home with no clear plan. She started working in a gym and in a bar as a glass collector, and then began putting on events, which she publicised in the early days of Facebook as guest-list only to give them an air of exclusivity. As the organiser, she needed a lot of outfits for the different events, but she didn’t have the budget for designer dresses.
She did, though, still have clothes that she had bought in her mid-teens from independent designers based in Manchester’s Royal Exchange. “They were one-off designs and whenever I wore them, people were like: ‘That’s cool — where’s it from?’ ”
Then, aged 29, she had “an epiphany”. “It was a Thursday night, I was dancing on a table, having a great time, and I looked over and saw another events promoter there. They were probably five years older than me, and I thought, ‘I can’t be a 35-year-old doing this.’ “I got down off the table and decided something needs to change, tomorrow.”
Merabi had saved up enough money to tide her over for three or four months, so she bought a £250 sewing machine from Argos and watched YouTube videos to teach herself how to use it. And then she stayed at home sewing, making dresses using off-cuts of fabric from a local haberdashery shop.
The Barton Arcade in Manchester, where the success of Merabi’s early dresses led to an order from the Selfridges in the same city, below
ALAMY
After a few weeks of experimenting, a friend told her about a pop-up shop for designers in the Barton Arcade in Manchester, where for £125 a week she could hire a rail.
“I had two weeks to make 20 dresses to fill the rail and I did it,” she said, although she admitted that none of those early dresses had zips because she hadn’t learnt how to sew them in yet. “People just had to squeeze themselves in.”
They proved a hit, though, and after six months, Selfridges in Manchester asked to stock her collection. Merabi recalled: “I went to see them with my dresses in a suitcase, with no thought that this was a ‘collection’, and they said: ‘We’ll take 60 of this and 80 of that and when can you deliver?’
“At that point, I had never bought a full roll of fabric and I didn’t really have any paper patterns because I’d cut everything freehand and just sewn it up, never thinking I was going to make a second one of the same dress. So, it was honestly one of those ‘how am I going to do this?’ moments.”
She got a bank loan for £10,000, secured against the order from Selfridges, and was given a helping hand by fellow Manchester dress designer Vicky Martin, who had a factory in Whitefield on the edge of the city and introduced her to manufacturing ready-to-wear clothes.
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The next few years taught Merabi lesson after lesson about the fashion business.
“I was manufacturing in the UK, I was buying fabrics from agents in the UK rather than going direct to the mills, so I didn’t have very good margins at all,” she said. “I was still having to work all day and all night to make the bespoke dresses to keep everything afloat. And finally, I thought: I need to create my own website.”
The early days were intense, said Merabi. “I was having to work all day and all night”
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That was in 2015, when she founded her eponymous company. She took out a £65,000 loan to set up the website but never felt it was a risk too far. “I never second-guessed myself or the product, and I had paid it back within a year,” she said.
For the first five years, she made only long dresses and jumpsuits for events — “very dressy and over the top” and heavily embellished with sequins or crystals. In 2020, Merabi designed a range of white dresses and jumpsuits that were “not the full-on wedding dress but for everything before and after”, such as the outfits that brides change into for the evening reception. The average price of Merabi dresses is £395.
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But almost simultaneously, everything was derailed by Covid and Merabi was also expecting her first child. “I went through an initial period of panic and worry — every occasion in the world cancelled.”
Initially as a marketing ploy, the company started making silk pyjamas with feathered cuffs and diamanté buttons. “I needed influencers to still keep posting about us, but they were at home and they would look weird putting on something too over the top,” Merabi said. “I ordered 100 pairs to gift 50 of them to influencers, but within a couple of days we needed to reorder, and then for the next few years, the pyjamas were 10 per cent of our revenue.
“I got tagged in a picture on Instagram and it was Kate Moss and Rita Ora wearing matching pairs on a private jet.”
Once the pandemic had passed, the white dresses and bridal styles took off and now account for 50 per cent of Merabi’s revenue. They were especially popular in the US, where 40 per cent of the company’s sales are now generated, with 40 per cent in the UK and the rest in continental Europe, where the company has recently started selling again after stopping because of Brexit.
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Nadine Merabi also opened its first shop last year, on South Molton Street in Mayfair, and will shortly open a second, in New York, after delaying the opening amid Donald Trump’s introduction of tariffs on imports to the US in April. Last month, its chief executive, Jacobo Hachuel, stepped down after just a year in the role; Merabi credited him for leading the company’s recent growth.
“I do wonder what the next thing is going to be, because there’s always something,” said Merabi. “But I really like hard work. If things get too easy, I feel like I’m not pushing myself enough. I like the graft.”