Emma Willis Brand Guidelines: The Jermyn Street Shirtmaker With a Gloucester Factory

Shirts sold in person, then a shop in St James’s.

Emma Willis is a London shirtmaker named after its founder, who remains a director of the company. The company says she started the business in 1989, and The Rake (May 2017), Spear’s (June 2020) and Luxury London (February 2021) give the same year. In a 2014 interview with Merchant & Makers she said she had been in shirtmaking since 1990, and Country & Town House wrote of “the late 1980s” in 2017.

Accounts of her training differ. The company says she trained at the Slade School of Art, and Country & Town House says she attended the Slade. In the 2014 interview she spoke of completing a fine art degree; in 2020 she told Spear’s that she had gone to art school and to UCL without completing either. She also told Spear’s that a part-time job selling clothes was what took her into fashion.

The early business was built face to face. Country & Town House says she sold shirts door to door while establishing herself as a portrait painter and singer-songwriter, then set up her own company and sold bespoke shirts in City offices. On one morning visit to the stockbroker Kitcat & Aitken, the magazine says, she sold more than a hundred shirts before the market opened. The Rake describes her travelling to customers’ homes and workplaces and building a client list through referrals. She told Merchant & Makers that she first opened a workroom in London, where all the shirts were made.

The shop came next, at 66 Jermyn Street, at the St James’s end of the street. The company, Spear’s and Country & Town House date it to 1999; The Rake and her own 2014 interview say 2000. Companies House shows Emma Willis Limited incorporated in January 1999 under another name and renamed that February. Spear’s says she was finding it hard to run the business without a shop, and that she opened with the backing of one of her American customers.

An 18th-century townhouse in Gloucester.

Production moved in 2010 to Bearland House, an 18th-century townhouse in the centre of Gloucester, between the docks and the cathedral. The company and Spear’s both give that year, and The Rake visited in 2017, describing bespoke and ready-to-wear cutters, a room of sewers, and staff who buttonhole, finish and pack. She told Merchant & Makers that everyone who works there knows the building as Downton Abbey. Luxury London reported 23 employees in February 2021, most of them at the factory. In July 2026 the company said that each experienced machinist can make up to 1,000 shirts a year.

The company describes its method in detail: cloth cut by hand, patterns matched at the seams, single-needle sewing at 18 stitches to the inch, collars hand trimmed before turning, handmade gussets and real mother-of-pearl buttons. For bespoke customers a paper pattern is kept at the factory, she told Merchant & Makers, and Spear’s describes a sample shirt being made and tried on before the rest of an order is cut.

Cloth is central to the brand’s account of itself. In 2017 she told The Rake that she had used the same Swiss mill, Alumo, for 25 years, and that most of the shirts were made from its cottons, woven from Egyptian Giza 45 or West Indian Sea Island raw cotton. The company says in August 2026 that it buys linen from the family-run Italian mill Solbiati. In 2014 she named two styles as the ones the house was best known for: a slim-fit, double-cuff shirt in white and ice blue, in two-fold 120 Swiss cotton, and an ivory evening shirt in Italian silk woven for the company.

The range has widened around the shirt. She told Merchant & Makers that the factory also made women’s shirts, boxer shorts, dressing gowns, pyjamas, and walking socks knitted on a Victorian sock loom. The Rake reported plans for tailoring and a womenswear relaunch in 2017, and the website now has a women’s section and trousers. In July 2026 the company wrote that its seamstresses had trained to make polos, T-shirts and casual linen trousers. During the pandemic, Luxury London reported, the company switched to making to order and made about 850 garments of scrubs for hospital staff in 2020 under the name Style for Surgeons.

How shirtmakers present themselves.

Shirtmakers show their work through cloth. A bolt of poplin, a stack of stripes or a swatch book does what a logo does elsewhere: it tells a customer what kind of house this is. Charvet presents its shirtings in full bolts rather than on swatch cards, according to English Wikipedia, which describes a wall of four hundred white fabrics on its bespoke floor. Turnbull & Asser says its pattern books from the 1920s and 1930s survive, and it sells bespoke and made-to-measure shirts from its London shops.

Collars are the category’s other recurring image. They are small, repeatable shapes, easy to set out in rows and easy to tell apart. A Highsnobiety visit to Charvet found collar samples pinned to velvet and framed on the wall, and Turnbull & Asser names a collar of its own, the Classic T&A, as its signature style, English Wikipedia says. Paper patterns and fitting shirts belong to the same picture of a trade built on measurement.

Place matters as much as product. London’s Jermyn Street, in St James’s, is home to shirtmakers whose shop fronts appear in their own storytelling, and Turnbull & Asser dates its address there to 1903. In Paris, Charvet’s full name includes Place Vendôme.

Neckwear shares the same visual stock: silk ties folded and laid out by colour, and woven or printed patterns shown in ranges rather than one at a time. This guide sets out what can be checked about each house, including who founded it, who owns it now and where it says its products are made. Where a story rests on a company’s own account, the text says so. The tones and typefaces shown are our own interpretation.

A drawing room on Jermyn Street.

The strongest documented part of the brand’s look is the shop. The company says its curved front and its oak stairs and shelves were made by hand by carpenters in Wiltshire. Country & Town House says it was designed as a “relaxed English drawing room,” with an oak staircase, stone floors and a chandelier; Spear’s likened the premises to an old-fashioned chemist’s and noted a fireplace and antique furniture. She told Luxury London that the windows were definitely important to the business, and in 2026 the company wrote that they had moved from plain, striped and checked cotton shirts and pastel silk ties to rolled-sleeve linen, dressing gowns, T-shirts and polos.

The house style is described as softer than the street’s norm. “I don’t tend to like the really bold, masculine look at the very traditional end of British shirtmaking,” she told The Rake. Merchant & Makers called her the only female shirtmaker in Jermyn Street in 2014, and Luxury London’s 2024 street guide called the company the newest of its shirtmakers, with a contemporary cut.

The other constant is the Made in England label. The company says its shirts and other goods are all made in England, and she told The Rake that she kept to it when others on the street were moving production away: “I do make as much noise as I can about British shirtmaking skills.” The Rake and Country & Town House both describe shirts being cut and sewn at Bearland House. Spear’s adds a sewing school in Gloucester, with scholarships backed by Condé Nast.

Her public profile is tied to Style for Soldiers, the charity she founded in 2008 to give shirts to seriously injured service personnel. Country & Town House counted around 1,500 shirts given away by 2017. The company says she received an MBE in the 2014 New Year Honours for entrepreneurship. Spear’s named the then Prince of Wales, now King Charles III, among the customers in 2020, and Luxury London shows him at the Gloucester factory that February. The business remains in its founder’s hands: Companies House lists Emma Willis Limited as active, with her as the person holding 75% or more of the shares.

For a design guide, Emma Willis shows how a young house on an old street can build an identity from a room, a building and a label of origin. Compare Hilditch & Key, a Jermyn Street shirtmaker founded a century before her shop opened, and Turnbull & Asser, another neighbour on the street. For this guide we use oak, ink, ice blue and ivory with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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