Burnley’s Briony Gorton hit the headlines earlier this year as the girl who turned £100 into £100k in the first 6 months of launching her online clothing business, Talliah Rose.
Now aged just 23, Briony both lives and runs her empire out of Burnley and is on track to make her first million this year, all thanks to pure determination and being a savvy social media influencer.
The lightbulb moment mid-lecture
The story goes that prior to setting up her company, Briony was working part-time at Pandora and studying for a degree in Fashion, Buying and Merchandising – all the right ingredients for a career in fashion one would presume.
But inspired by the social influencer lifestyle, Briony too wanted a life in the fast lane working for herself, rather than learning how to work for somebody else.
“I wanted to become my own boss. I used to sit in lectures thinking I was being taught how to work for somebody else – and that wasn’t what I wanted.’
She started out with swimwear and took her ideas to a seamstress and family friend who brought her designs to life with the £100 worth of fabric she had invested in.
Using her social media account to promote her designs, Briony quickly grew an army of 4,000 followers and then set up a Depop account to sell through.
She modelled the designs herself and it wasn’t long before the orders came rolling in. And in… and in.
“I started taking orders from my samples and had them made up, packaged and distributed from my mum’s kitchen at home. I’ll never forget my first sale. It was the day after I listed my first design. I couldn’t believe that not only did other people like what I’d designed, but that they actually wanted to wear them on their holidays.”
Dealing with the haters & copycats
Success doesn’t come without its fair share of problems and the rise of Tahlia Rose was no exception.
“Everything was amazing for the first year or so until I hit my first hurdle. My images had been taken from my Instagram account and my designs had been replicated, and mass produced by a factory in China, and were being sold on eBay for a fraction of the price.”
Briony quickly made the decision to take this as a sharp learning curve and it only spurred her on to develop her swimwear line and branch out into clothing and accessories.
Within six months, talliahroseuk.com had launched and to date has taken over 20,000 online orders from customers all over the world.
Life on the influencer platform
Along the journey of using her personal social media accounts to promote Tallia Rose, Briony caught the eye of some big-name fashion houses including Public Desire (1.3 million followers) and Quiz (503k followers) who contacted her to do some paid-for Instagram posts to promote their products too
“I have now grown a following of over 170,000 followers on my personal Instagram account and am a full-time social media influencer with personal management – alongside running Talliah Rose.”
“I have the perfect platform to advertise my brand and boost my sales, but I also try my best to promote girl boss vibes on my Instagram and encourage people, especially young girls, to chase their dreams. There is no limit to success!”
