From M&S Buyer in London to Founder in Dubai, with No Team and No Funding

People often ask me what made me leave. The question always assumes there must have been a moment, a final straw, something dramatic that pushed me out of a buying career most people would consider a great one.

The honest answer is quieter than that.

I had a good job. I had a good city. I had a clear runway in fashion buying ahead of me. And every time I sat down to map out the next five years, I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd already done the version of the work that taught me the most.

What buying at M&S actually taught me

I owe my buying career a lot. Working at M&S in London gave me something most founders in fashion don't have. I'd sat on the other side of the table. I knew how a range was built, how a margin was protected, how decisions about what women would wear next season were made twelve months in advance with imperfect information and a lot of nerve.

I also learned the part of the industry that's harder to celebrate. I saw how much was made. I saw how much didn't sell. I saw the systemic over-production baked into the way fashion plans its seasons. Once you've seen that you can't quite unsee it.

So when I started thinking about Endless, I wasn't designing it from the customer side alone. I was designing it from the supply side too. Circular fashion makes sense to me because the maths makes sense to me. There is already enough beautiful clothing in the world. The job is to make it move.

Why Dubai

I get this question a lot, particularly from London friends who still don't quite understand the move.

The short version is this. I came to Dubai for a holiday and immediately knew it was where the brand needed to be built. Not London. Not Paris. Not New York.

Dubai had three things going for it that mattered to me.

First, the women here actually wear the clothes. Events are constant. Style is taken seriously. There's a real wardrobe rotation happening at the top of this market that doesn't exist in the same way elsewhere.

Second, the infrastructure rewards speed. You can deliver a dress across the city in two hours. You can scale a logistics operation here in a way that would take years in a more fragmented European market.

Third, the energy. The UAE is in a building phase. Founders are welcomed, female founders included. The conversation around women in business here is more open and more practical than people assume from the outside.

I moved with one suitcase and no plan beyond getting on the ground and figuring it out.

The first year was the hard one

I won't make the first year sound romantic. It wasn't.

I had no team. I had no funding. I had a small UK version of Endless I'd already proven - having launched in 2019 - and the strong belief that the version I needed to build was different and bigger and required being physically here.

I spent the first few months doing every job in the business. Sourcing dresses. Photographing them. Writing the listings. Driving deliveries myself. Building the customer service from a phone in my handbag. The kind of unglamorous founder work that gets edited out of the interviews.

Two things kept me going. One was the response from the women who used the platform. They came back. They told their friends. They sent me messages about events they'd worn an Endless dress to. That feedback loop in the first year was everything.

The other was something I've come to believe more deeply as the business has grown. You don't need permission to start. You need a decision and the willingness to keep showing up.

Where the business is now

Two years on, Endless has over 500 designer brands on the platform. We have a team. We have a community of women across the UAE who shop circular as their default, not as a one-off. We've raised from people who back us as much as the business.

None of that was a guarantee when I got on the plane.

The thing I'd say to any woman sitting in a good job, in a good city, with a quieter version of this same feeling, is that the safe route only looks safe because nobody's measuring the cost of not going.

Sometimes the bigger risk is the one you don't take.

You can see what we've built at Endless.