Ducie Is The Hot London-Based Brand That's Keeping Us Warm

In New York, where your outerwear game is key, ‘Ducie’ has become both an adjective and a noun. Eagle-eyed fashion fans will ask someone wrapped up in a Mongolian fur jacket, “Is that a Ducie?” while others will spy an on-trend chocolate suede trench and say, “That coat looks so Ducie.” It turns out, Ducie is the name of the designer behind everyone’s latest hyper fixation, hence it being on the tip of everyone’s tongue of late.

Since landing on Revolve, appearing on Hailey Bieber in her Cinnamon Roll lip peptide campaign for Rhode, and receiving the thumbs up from Jennifer Lopez, Selena Gomez, and Lady Gaga to name a few, it seems like Ducie is everywhere you look both online and offline. But unlike many Instagram-induced overnight success stories, the backstory to the brand begins in 2004 — a time when some of today’s most buzzy influencers and tastemakers on the platform were still in diapers.

At the start of the millennium, clothes-obsessed Ducie Keam-George was working in the hotbed of pop culture and entertainment as a talent manager at MTV in London. The network was in its heyday and her then-boyfriend/now-husband, Dan, was running events and parties at the company. “It was so fun, but eventually we wanted to be free and try new things. We went traveling to India to ‘find ourselves’ and what we ended up doing was very capitalist and started our own business instead,” Keam-George laughs. “We just couldn’t stop working. I had so much inspiration while in India and could see that I could create something. I managed to meet a man who taught me everything I needed to know, so we used our travel money and I designed a collection in about two months, and brought it back to the UK.”

The very first Ducie endeavor was a line full of ultra-feminine silk dresses and camisoles — perfect for what people were gravitating to in the early aughts. Keam-George had been watching Fashion TV while in India and put her spin on the types of pieces she was seeing on the runways at Anna Sui, Chloé, and Alexander McQueen. “It was all about underwear as outerwear then, with a big furry coat over it. It’s so funny how things come back around, because that’s what we’re all talking about again now.”

Once she returned to London, she was grateful for the Rolodex she had built up while at MTV. “I knew the fashion director at Vogue, Lucinda Chambers, which was very handy,” she recalls. “I asked her if there was any chance I could show her my collection. I said, ‘If you don’t like it, don’t feel under pressure,’ but she invited me in.”

While trying to get the word out, Keam-George also needed to make money, so she took a stall at the famed Portobello Road Market in Notting Hill. There, she started out selling other pieces sourced from India while, with the help of Chambers, she convinced some of the city’s most notable and influential independent boutiques to stock her own wares. It didn’t take long before the West London it girls — think: Sienna Miller, Poppy Delevingne, and Daisy Lowe — flocked en masse. Thanks to her ‘in’ with MTV presenters, who wore her creations on air, and placements in You magazine and on notable English shows like The Big Breakfast and The Word, she was off to the races.

“I’ve always had [a knack for creating] something that becomes a best-seller; something that’s on-trend at just the exact right time,” Keam-George reflects. “I had this one silk dress, the Pocket Dress, and I sold hundreds and hundreds.” (Y2K-era fashion lovers should take note here, as there’s an abundance of the style on sites like Vinted and Vestiaire Collective.)

To keep up with demand, she eventually began selling her own pieces at the market, too. “Portobello gave me a feeling of who the Ducie girl was and I could meet her face-to-face and hear what she liked,” the founder says. “It’s crazy, but it hasn’t ever changed — she’s a girl who's not afraid to show off, I guess, and she wants to be noticed.”

The market experience also helped Keam-George understand what’s it’s like to sell out of product. “Even in Portobello, I had waiting lists,” she says. “People were giving me cash deposits and waiting for things to come back.”

After several years, the timing felt right to take another step. “We thought, ‘Why are we just doing this from a little market stall? We need to sell worldwide.’ What I find is that if it sells somewhere, it sells everywhere — there’s lots of Ducie girls out there.” After her dad helped her build a website, they were initially shocked when orders started flooding in from week one. The next move? Experimenting with a budding new platform called Instagram.

“My best friend at the time showed me Poppy Delevingne’s Instagram,” she recalls. “I couldn’t believe a whole one million people were following her! She said I should try it, and so I did, and it just kind of grew naturally from there. Instagram gave us more reach, and I think the US audience is the same as the UK now.”

Having innate intuition when it comes to what shoppers want has been a business-boosting North Star for Keam-George. While women around the world were starting to yearn for everything in rich brown shades and in sumptuous suede fabrics, she was already two steps ahead. Similarly, having made her name with slinky dresses and going out tops, Keam-George was noticing that there was a void for trend-driven outerwear that felt cool; high-quality, desirable coats that weren't what you’d find at Moncler or Burberry, but were more elevated than what was popular on the British high street.

The runaway success that is the Corrin suede trench, in a good-enough-to-eat shade of ‘Coco’ brown, made its debut two years ago. This year, it has been the number two best-selling item on the whole Revolve website. (The Revolve partnership came after Raissa Gerona, chief brand officer at the fashion giant, personally reached out on Instagram to inquire about a Rochelle jacket for a ski trip.)

“I got swatches of that fabric from our factory,” says Keam-George. “I’ve always been into brown — someone I work with said, ‘Oh no, brown doesn’t sell. Black sells.’ But I knew! I’ve always wanted to create clothes that make you feel like you're in a sweet shop. I go to the color first, and then I think of the style.”

Another fast-selling hero style, the Faye, was given the biggest seal of approval there is when it was chosen by Hailey Bieber for a recent Rhode campaign. A 100% Mongolian shearling coat in a dark chocolate hue, it was a quintessentially-decadent accompaniment to the supermodel’s adverts for her ooey-gooey brown lip product. And the internet went bananas for it.

“I’d no idea if it was going to work out. It all happened very quickly. We heard, ‘Hailey Bieber needs earmuffs and this whole list of Mongolian stuff…and she needs it tomorrow!’ I thought she probably wouldn’t even end up wearing it. Then the campaign came out and I was floored. There was an instant reaction — it really was the biggest moment for us.”

As for what’s in her crystal ball about what people are going to want next, Keam-George is hunkered down thinking about spring and summer-ready jackets in luxe materials. There’s also going to be Ducie’s first foray into denim, but not your regular run of the mill blue jeans. (Watch this space, she says.) Due to demand, the brand is also going to make some tweaks to the sizing of its outerwear so that Ducie guys can become card-carrying members of the fan club. In another inaugural milestone, the team is readying to activate stateside during New York Fashion Week in September too.

“I do feel like, wow, it’s taken this long. But this is the beginning of a different phase. Everything was kind of leading up to now. We’ve learned so much and we’re in a whole new zone, so I can really go for it and create amazing things with nothing holding me back. I just want to keep growing.”

And fear not — there’s still plenty of brown and suede on the horizon to keep appetites satiated. “Loads more suede,” Keam-George agrees. “Full-blown suede; I’ve leaned all the way in, and 50 shades of brown, too!”