The £1 Business: What Touker Suleyman Actually Did With Hawes & Curtis

Touker Suleyman posted this week that he bought a business for £1 and it now generates £50m a year. The business is Hawes & Curtis, the Jermyn Street shirtmaker founded in 1913. When he took it on it had one shop, a debt pile and not much of a future. His line is that he saw what the business could become when nobody else did.

That is true, and it is a good line. But "seeing value" is not what turned a £600,000 shirt shop into a £46.7m business. Something more specific did, and it is worth pulling apart because it is a playbook a scaling brand can actually use.

The starting position

The facts of the acquisition are slightly fuzzier than the post suggests, so here they are as reported. Suleyman's Low Profile Group bought Hawes & Curtis for £1 in 2001 or 2002 (he says 2002; contemporary records say 2001). Turnover at the time was around £600,000 from a single shop. The debt is reported at £500,000 by some sources and Suleyman himself puts it at around £800,000. The business was close to administration either way.

So: a 90-year-old brand with real heritage, a Jermyn Street address, one store, no cash, and a shirt that people still wanted to buy. That is what he paid £1 for, and the price tells you what everyone else thought it was worth.

What he actually did

Suleyman is not a retailer who bought a shop. He is a manufacturer who bought a brand. That distinction is the whole story.

By 2001 Low Profile Group had been making clothing for Marks & Spencer and other high street names for the best part of two decades, from factories in Turkey, Bulgaria and Georgia. When Hawes & Curtis came in, its shirts went straight into a factory the Suleyman brothers already ran in Turkey, one that was already producing for M&S (Real Business, 2009). No sourcing search, no supplier onboarding, no MOQ negotiation, no working capital locked up with a stranger. The brand plugged into a production engine that already existed and already had capacity.

That gave him three things most turnarounds have to buy:

Cost of goods he controlled. A shirt made in your own factory at M&S volumes is a different margin proposition from a shirt bought from a supplier who knows you have one shop.

Speed. New ranges, new sizes, re-cuts and repeats ran through an operation he owned, not a supplier's order book.

Cash. He said in 2009 that all the expansion had been internally funded. That is only possible when the gross margin is wide enough to pay for the next shop out of the last one, and that margin came from owning the make.

On top of the manufacturing base he did the retail things you would expect, but in a specific order. The core Hawes & Curtis shirt stayed the heart of the business (around 35% of sales by 2009). He added a fashion range and a women's department to widen the basket. And he rolled out stores, from one to 30 by 2009, with an 8,000 square foot Jermyn Street flagship he called probably the biggest shirt store in Europe. Turnover was £15.3m in 2008, up 54.8% in a year, and £30m by 2014.

The part the post leaves out: he shrank the estate

Here is the detail that matters most for an operator, and it is nowhere in the LinkedIn version.

By November 2023 Hawes & Curtis had 14 UK outlets (Yahoo Finance UK). Not 30. The estate had roughly halved from its peak. Suleyman credited the growth that year to "a focus on flagship stores over smaller ones", with six more due to open by mid-2024 in locations like Cheapside.

In other words the business that had grown by opening shops then grew faster by closing the wrong ones. Fewer, larger stores in the right places, with online taking the weight the small stores used to carry. Turnover went from £24.3m to £43.8m in a single year coming out of the pandemic, with pre-tax profit from £1.4m to around £7.9m. That is not a result you get from 30 small stores. It is what you get from a tight estate, a strong online channel, and a product people were buying again as offices and weddings came back.

The accounts say the strategy now is "to continue to invest online and open stores in key strategic locations with suitable terms". That last phrase is a manufacturer talking: open where the economics work, not where the map has a gap.

The numbers

Sources: Hawes & Curtis Limited accounts as reported by City AM (FY2024, FY2023) and Yahoo Finance UK; Real Business (2008 figures); Wikipedia (2014 turnover and store count). Starting figures as reported at the time of acquisition.

The honest read

Suleyman's post says £50m. The filed number is £46.7m for FY2024, which is close enough to be a fair round-up but is not £50m, and it is worth being precise because the trend underneath it is not all one way.

Pre-tax profit has fallen for two consecutive years, from around £7.8m to £4.7m to £3.7m, while sales kept rising. Gross margin slipped 1.1 points on cost increases. Expenses rose 10.4%, mostly on online marketing and staff, with headcount up from 242 to 262 and the wage bill from £8.4m to £9.6m (City AM, August 2025). Like-for-like sales were up 8.7% and online was up 18%, so the demand is there. The margin is being squeezed between the cost of making the product and the cost of selling it online.

That is a very familiar shape. The business has moved from a store-led model, where the shops did the marketing, to an online-led one, where you pay for every customer. The manufacturing margin that funded 30 shops is now funding paid acquisition, and paid acquisition is less forgiving. None of that undermines what Suleyman built. It does mean the £1 to £50m story is still being written, and the current chapter is about protecting margin, not finding growth.

Two other things worth knowing. The post leans on 50 years in business, and the record includes a serious failure: Suleyman's early-1980s stake in Mellins and Bamber Stores collapsed with a £20m to £26m deficit, and he sold his house to repay bank debt. The Hawes & Curtis judgement was made by someone who had already been badly burned. And his instinct for distressed heritage brands is a pattern, not a one-off: in 2008 he bought Ghost when its Icelandic owner pulled funding in the banking collapse.

What this means if you run a scaling brand

You will not get a brand for £1, and you probably do not own a factory. But the mechanics that worked here are available at your scale, and most of them are decisions rather than assets.

Own, or get as close as you can to, the cost of your product. Suleyman's advantage was not the brand, it was that he could make the product at a margin his competitors could not. For a $5m to $100m brand that means direct factory relationships rather than agents, consolidated volume with fewer suppliers, and knowing your landed cost to the cent. The brands that fund their own growth are the ones whose gross margin can carry it. If you are buying through intermediaries, the first job is to find out what you are actually paying.

Expansion that pays for itself is the only kind that lasts. "All expansion internally funded" is a discipline, not a boast. It means every new store, channel or market had to clear its own cost before the next one opened. The DTC equivalent is refusing to scale ad spend, SKUs or markets faster than contribution margin can fund them. Growth that needs the next raise to survive is not the same as growth.

Be willing to shrink the estate. Halving the store count was the move that set up the post-pandemic numbers. Most founders find it far easier to add than to cut, and end up carrying channels, SKUs, markets and locations that made sense once and do not now. Our piece on weeks of cover covers the inventory version of this; the same logic applies to everything else that ties up cash.

Keep the core at the centre. The Hawes & Curtis shirt is still the business. Fashion ranges and womenswear widened the basket without replacing it. When a hero product carries the brand, every expansion should be judged on whether it strengthens that product's economics or dilutes them.

Watch what happens to margin when the channel mix shifts. The current squeeze at Hawes & Curtis is the cost of moving from stores that sold the product to marketing that has to. If your online share is rising, your customer acquisition cost is rising with it, and the margin that used to absorb that is the one that funded everything else. Rebuild your unit economics every time the channel mix moves, not once a year.

The £1 was the easy part. The business was turned around by someone who could make the product cheaper than anyone else, fund growth from the margin that created, and then cut the estate when the model changed. Seeing what others cannot is a good story. Owning the supply chain is what made it true.

If you want to know what your product actually costs to land, and whether your margin can fund the growth you are planning, see how we work.