Perhaps it's a summer of heatwaves having melted my brain into soup but turning into Spitalfields to meet Aligne's plate-spinning CEO, Ginny Seymour, I am genuinely tickled to find its HQ located on, where else, Fashion Street.

This is the beating heart of London's historic "rag trade," and the woman I am here to see has ensured that her brand is just as full of quality, values and abundant style.

"I still think of September 1 as the new year," grins Ginny Seymour, vivacious and capable. "Partly because Aligne's year runs August to August, partly because January 1 is grey doom. September feels like the step change in the calendar. There's something about autumnal dressing that is super exciting."

Seymour, 41, is no stranger to the "trade," having started her career in the training program for the New York retail giant, Saks. She joined Aligne, it rhymes with "line," in 2022 as MD and, seeing the writing on the wall for the brand shortly afterwards, pitched the board a new vision that totally reimagined it from the ground up, and was then promoted to CEO. Last year, Aligne launched in the US, and this year, after three years' selling direct to customers, started selling in John Lewis and Anthropologie.

Going into the fourth year of the "new" Aligne, Seymour has been on arguably as much of a treadmill as her two school-age sons.

"Last year was a lot," she says, with an abundance of irony, sitting in her bright office, bedecked with Aligne works in progress, and mementoes from women's football, Aligne is style partner for many of the England and Wales teams, and Gotham FC in New York. "I was living in two different countries, running two different warehouses, a bunch of different stuff. It was a long year of learning, and I'm happy to close the book on it."

“Year one with a business you're running, year two you're learning more about your customer, and year three all the band aids fall off because you're moving so fast. ” Seymour became CEO at a literal turning point for the brand that saw her reinvent it from the ground up. She saw a gap in the market for accessible, well-made women's clothing that provided investment quality without the multiple zeroes on the price tag. She immediately took the brand out of wholesale and sold directly to consumers online to understand what they wanted. It's all been a lot, to put it mildly. Just listening to her is impressive. I am two years older than Seymour and feel extremely impressed and very tired. But she is utterly hooked on her job, her eyes light up just talking about her work and what's involved in recreating a brand that she embodies, quite literally, she always wears Aligne in case someone asks ("The only time I don't is in sportswear because that's the one thing we don't do!").

"Year one with a business you're running, year two you're learning more about your customer, and year three all the band aids fall off because you're moving so fast," she says candidly. "Luckily, we learned all the lessons at once, rather than spreading them out."

Seymour is a very jolly woman who would clearly be extremely good company. She is also crystal clear about how she makes it all work as a married mother of two boys, and that is very much as a team.

"I grew up in a fairly traditional household and I never imagined a different dynamic," she says. "But the reality now is we've built our identities before becoming a wife or mother. It used to be an assumption that the wife would step back; for us it became an actual conversation about who genuinely enjoyed work."

The other half of the "us" is Seymour's husband of 13 years, Mark, a successful family lawyer who went part-time after falling out of love with his work just as Aligne was ramping up.