The Claire Amelia Sewing Story
I come from a family of creatives, and sewing has run through it for as long as I can remember.
That grounding shaped what I studied next: fashion, tailoring, millinery, historical costume, props, set design & much more. It is a wide education, and it is exactly why I have never thought of sewing as one skill. It is a range of disciplines that happen to share a needle.
I found my way into the wedding industry through fast paced bridal shop work and from working in house couture designers, and then built my own brand out of it: Bridal Emporium, a bridal boutique in Leeds city centre, West Yorkshire. It grew fast, net profit doubling year on year, and eventually its own in house collection. That growth is what let me invest further, over £250k into Claire Amelia Couture and Emporella, an online B2B and B2C business serving the wedding industry. By the time Covid hit, I was running three businesses and no active wedding industry, and just invested all my money.
Covid did not treat them equally. Only one of the three qualified for government support, despite the other two carrying employees of their own. That one supported business could only carry the weight of all three for so long, and I kept everyone else looked after first, staff, brides, suppliers, before I looked after myself. This is the part I received support from family & friends, I am forever grateful of them, & owe them so much.
I announced the closure of Bridal Emporium at the end of August 2023, and saw the last of our brides through by the following month in store & at home for the next 6 months. What I have not said publicly until now is that it had been a profitable business before Covid, and it absorbed losses through the pandemic that it never fully recovered from. I kept Claire Amelia Couture and Emporella going as long as I could after that, but by Easter 2024 the exhaustion caught up with me.
Three children in four and a half years, five to six weeks of maternity leave between all 3, three businesses through a pandemic: I became bedridden, with severe side affects and had to close everything else down too. This ultimation became a bankruptcy, going from my own investor of over £250k to bankrupt, not having a penny to my name, something broke me, but only to rebuild myself, as I understand now.
I have been rebuilding my health ever since, & my way of living with my family. Part of that rebuild has been accepting what actually happened, not just the practical facts of three businesses closing but the loss underneath them. That acceptance is not a one time thing. It is an inner journey as much as an outer one, and the grief still surfaces sometimes, right here in the sewing process. That is the hard part: not the doing, but the accepting.
Since recovering, I have been building back out through Claire Amelia Couture, made without the corporate scaffolding this time, and through an online portfolio at claireamelia.com. And alongside it, a long term project I did not expect to take on: The Atelier Hub, a home for documenting every sewing discipline I have ever worked in, properly, in the open and for others to share theirs too.
The Atelier Hub started as a simple idea. Sewers who are past the beginner stage rarely have anywhere to go, I remember the late nights of crazy sewing, needing to find an answer but no one to turn to. Most sewing spaces online are built for people just starting out, which is valuable, but it leaves experienced dressmakers, bridal makers, tailors, corsetieres, milliners, and costumiers with nowhere that matches where they actually are. So I built that space. Free, worldwide, organised by discipline rather than by chronology, and structured around real practice: a Creative Crisis Desk for when a project has gone sideways, a Studio Wall for finished work and works in progress, a Little Black Book of trusted suppliers and resources, and Discipline Deep Dives that take one craft area and go properly into it each month.
That is the throughline, from a family of creatives to three businesses to a health rebuild to a global community of sewers: the belief that this craft deserves serious spaces, not just beginner ones, and that documenting it properly, discipline by discipline, is worth doing in the open.
If you sew past the basics and have been looking for people who understand exactly what that means, The Atelier Hub is free to join at https://www.skool.com/the-ateliers-hub-9961/about
This is my long term project, and I'm happy it's building out my confidence again, from all the experience I have prior. Whilst I build out in real time, there is a lot not shown in the classroom, and I can not wait to share it with you over the coming months.
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