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Aligne's CEO Put Her Lawyer Husband in Customer Service. It Fixed Everything.
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."
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.
Seymour spent an intense last year living between the US and UK, launching Aligne abroad, and, over here, bringing her online brand into John Lewis and Anthropologie stores. When it became clear that the move to New York wasn't working for her sons, Mark moved back to London with them while Seymour finished out the year.
"I've actually found this stage with the kids finishing primary and starting secondary school harder than when they were babies. As babies, it was about survival: nursery, a nanny, keeping them alive. Now it's about raising confident, respectful boys with manners, and they have bigger problems that need a parent around. It made sense for him to be there for the children while I focus on work."
As a devoted supporter of Aligne ("I have to warn anyone new that he'll reshare and repost everything with the ugliest filters and colours, so I have to try and beat him to unsending Instagram Stories"), Mark this year became more involved on a more fundamental level.
"When the wheels were coming off in wheel three, my best solution was to take my lawyer husband, who had time between 10am and 2pm, and put him into customer service," says Seymour. "It shifted every dinner conversation to what was happening in the company and gave me someone who cares equally about Aligne's success."
With the US launch, one immediate change was a simple change to website sizing.
"My husband was seeing return after return because customers were ordering the wrong size in the US. It broke a year-long internal debate, everyone insisted 'everyone knows about sizing differences,' and I said, I didn't, and I'm in this industry. It wasn't until I bought Topshop in UK sizing that I understood it.
"We also had feedback that some pieces were too small across the chest. I came back from one meeting to fifty texts from Mark that just said 'boobs'. So, we standardised our fit measurements, I'm quite flat-chested myself, and I think the team sometimes adjusted to my feedback rather than the customer's. It's been useful having him in that customer-facing role, even if people would be surprised to learn they're talking to the CEO's husband."
Seymour says she's heard it's reasonably common for family, whether male or female, to get pulled into founder-led businesses, although as the older member of her friendship group, she is the sole example, currently. Not that that matters, as she has two key people to set an example to.
"But as a mother of two boys, and it could just as easily be daughters, the pride and joy in how they talk about me, even when I worry I'm not playing the traditional maternal role, is the coolest thing," she says. "We stereotype women and men into certain roles, but my kids know the Lionesses' names as well as they know male footballers' names generally, they don't see any of it as unusual. It's daddy at drop-off, daddy at pick-up, daddy at sports, and mum's off to New York next week. They don't see it as different. It's probably older people looking in who do."
Older people may judge (and boo to them) but they won't find any holes to pick in what she's wearing. Today she's sporting the Daphne blazer, one of Aligne's icons, its various iterations have sold more than 15,000, and a rather smashing pair of SS27 camo trousers. "I wear-test every style before it goes into the collection, at least three different ways," she says. She points to a ravishing tie closure at the trousers' hem, which she is thinking of changing to a snap for more polish, and strokes the fabric thoughtfully. "That's how I know what will be a bestseller: I have to love it a year out and still love it when it actually arrives."
Go on then, what will have us hooked this winter?
"We've got new updates to the Daphne blazer, one in charcoal grey with a button detail, and a red version with a tie-knot detail. Fun updates to a classic silhouette." Her winter go-to is the George coat, which was glued to Sienna Miller, and comes with a snuggle removable fur collar. "At that price point, under £300, I don't think there's another wool coat out there with the same length, weight and quality."
That focus on the holy trinity of style, materials and price is arguably what netted Seymour the CEO job when she pitched her vision to the board back in 2022. It's reality, and that extends to the brand's values.
"We try to be responsible. It's about making the best choices you can, always trying to learn and evolve, in our fabrics, who we work with locally, how we ship, and holding ourselves accountable to good decisions, rather than branding ourselves as sustainable." She is reassuringly matter-of-fact about the nature of making new clothes: "It's hard for any fashion brand to genuinely claim to be sustainable unless it's a repurposing brand."
It's a relief to hear this, after five years of being gently gaslit by most brands about their supply chains. Seymour's focus is Aligne's providers. This extends to every element, from fabric to using local florists for events and shoots. Even print factors into longevity.
"We're a 'non-print-print' brand, stripes, checks, plaids, even animal print, but always low-contrast." Seymour points to her trousers. "Camo counts too; in the US, animal print is treated as a neutral rather than a print. It's how we add texture. As a design-led, not trend-led brand, we use colour and those 'non-print prints' to lean into a season's mood, while keeping the silhouettes classic enough to stay in your wardrobe for a long time. We steer away from anything too trend-driven and stick to classic shapes, using colour as our main tool."
Aligne is one of the few fashion brands I actually believe when they say they're dressing women for their actual lives. This is underlined by their associations with women's football. Seymour, a formerly non-sporty person who has since become resolutely so (along with her team: "We're all on Teams on Monday talking about the weekend's matches"), remembers how men's players in the US get to enjoy being on posters and wearing glamorous clothing. That didn't seem to be an option for many female players.
"I don't like women being boxed in," she says frankly. "Like, I love being a mother, but as a brand, we don't do Mother's Day because who's to say that everyone should be one. There's so much that goes into that whole journey for people. Women in sport follow the same path."
Aligne dresses the Lionesses, and now Gotham FC. When the Welsh team needed to be dressed for their first ever appearance at the Euros in 2025, they asked Aligne, Seymour herself went down to measure them all up, as the team didn't have a seamstress.
"Women's football is not trying to take a chapter from the men's book. They're trying to create their own chapter, so it's a different audience. It feels very inclusive, very positive, very warming. Commercially, will they ever be the same? Who knows? I don't want to be compared to brands that are 15 years old when I'm three. The Premier League has been going on for how many years?" (I google this later: since 1994, with roots back to 1888.) "Whereas women's football was banned between 1921 and 1971, it's like you can't compare the two."
What you can do is see the work going on under the surface. These are beautiful clothes, thoughtfully made, and the animated young team in Spitalfields are clearly devoted to what they do and relish the purpose and clear values of their founder.
"That's what women's sport means to me: articulating our values in a way that isn't self-serving. It's not about being the obvious brand in that conversation, it makes sense for Nike to be there, they sell that kind of product. It's more unexpected for us to be part of it, but we're there consistently. Gotham called us when they wanted a specific thing; Wales called us again to dress their homeless women's team for the World Cup, because they'd seen us dress the women's team at the Euros and wanted to wear the same kit. We did it, but it's not about recognition. You can't expect that."
Like I said, I'm tired just hearing about Seymour's love for her work and sheer passion for her brand and its customers. I wonder what keeps her sane?
"Reading, at the moment. I've set a goal to read a book a day this year, and I'm on track."
I'm sorry, a book a day? I'm hyperlexic but this is next level.
"I needed to replace doom-scrolling TikTok with something else, and my brain can't sit still, so I channelled a bad habit into something better," says Seymour. "I read five 'fun' books a week: easy, light reads, campus romances, the same idea written in different ways. Then one non-fiction, and one business book. I've just moved to a Kindle, which helps a lot with accessibility, and if I don't like the first chapter, I move on."
So, the Aligne Book Club is clearly the next brand extension.
"We're actually talking about starting one in January, though I'm not sure my reading habits qualify me. They do have to be fairly light, given I'm reading one a day. It helps me switch off from work." And, as if to remind me what's been going on in that fast-moving brain of hers for the last year, she says: "When I was working UK hours from the US, getting up at 2am, I needed something to shift my mindset, reading in the kitchen did that."
Before I head back out into September, leaving Seymour with her children heading back to school and her husband happily ensconced in customer comms, I ask Seymour for her new year hopes. She smiles, glances through the windows at her team the next room over, and at the handsome samples for spring-summer 27 hanging up on rails in the next room.
"We've spent a lot of time picking through lessons and preparing. This year's goal for me is really to enjoy it." Words, and clothes, to live by. What a woman.
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