Five minutes with Ashley Westall

By Jo Dunbar

Local businesswoman Ashley Westall has reacted to Covid-19 with a range of high-quality, stylish masks.

Ashley developed the Breathe+Protect facemasks alongside business partner James Rose and the pair have received a nomination for Start-Up Entrepreneur in the Great British Entrepreneur Awards for the North East region. Ashley also runs 37 Studios – an agency for accessories brands aiming to take their products to market. High Life North caught up with Ashley about responding to unprecedented events and running a fashion business from the North East.

Where did the mask concept come from?

We thought fairly early on in the pandemic that we should develop the masks – but the reason it was so early wasn’t a stroke of genius, I’m not going to claim that! It was purely that other countries were ahead of us, and when you work in product development and fashion, you are constantly looking at the world around you and taking yourself out of your own smaller space to look at what is going on in the world. That tends to give you a direction of how trends will happen. Really, it was part of that same thought process. It could just have easily been, ‘I think we’re all going to stop wearing skinny jeans and start to wear boyfriend jeans.’ You could easily say oh it’s incredible having that foresight to produce masks but, in fashion, you’re doing that all the time.

Masks aside, you run an agency…

My other business is 37 Studios, based in North Shields, and we are an agency representing different brands. We are a route to market for those brands that don’t have in-house sales and marketing. What they have is the capability to design, create a brand and produce a product but ultimately a business can’t survive without being able to sell that product. An agency such as mine would come in and try to match up distribution based on where your market positioning should be, and then – having built up years of contacts – make that distribution come to fruition, thus bringing in the sales arm to their business. With every collection we would make sure it was in front of all the right buyers within the right market for that business, matching distributors to brands.

It’s great to hear a fashion and commerce success story that’s operating from the North East.

I’m proud that the masks have come out of the North East. Both my business partner and I are born and bred here and we’re proud to shout about it. I think it’s great to be able to promote the fact you can work with London-based brands but not need to be in London. I know we feel in this country that everything is so London-centric but that is a perception rather than a reality.