Nell Diamond, CEO of Hill House, shares how her tiny business skyrocketed to global achievement with a straightforward, singular product.

At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Hill House Home’s Nap Dress became more than just a piece of clothing – it was a symbol of comfort and versatility for a globe in flux. What started as a direct-to-buyer bedding and home business in 2016 had grown into a fashion movement, reflecting how a single dress could adjust to your body over the years and transform depending on the demands of the day.

The business introduced the Nap Dress in 2019, a design that leaned into the concept of smocked fabric from the 1950s and reimagined it with modern, universal appeal. It didn’t receive long for the dress – now with over 50 designs – to leave viral on social media and become ordinary in many closets around the globe.

“Our crazy growth happened from 2019 to 2020 – correct in the middle of quarantine and while I was pregnant with twins,” CEO Nell Diamond tells the BBC. “I could obviously view how much the business was changing internally from the sales volume, but one really pivotal instant for me was working from home, sitting in my bedroom in recent York City, and looking out the window to view someone walking down the street wearing one of our dresses.

“Entrepreneurship can feel really lonely and insular, so to realise that people recognize about your little assignment is incredibly rewarding. I’ll never overlook that instant.”

Since then, the business has sold over one million Nap Dresses, expanded into categories like outerwear and swimwear, and opened five retail locations across the United States, from recent York to Charleston. The brand’s reach has also expanded within other retailers, including Shopbop and Saks. Hill House puts its current evaluation at approximately $150m (£118m), although the BBC was unable to obtain an independent evaluation.

The business has faced challenges, too, including navigating global supply chain disruptions during the pandemic and scaling operations to meet increased demand. But at a period when tiny businesses battle to stand out amid economic uncertainty, Hill House’s narrative underscores the importance of adaptability and building powerful connections with consumers.

“We’ve had the biggest year in business history,” Diamond said. “The business has continued to develop history even our optimistic plans.”

Diamond’s adore of fashion started early, during her teenage years while attending the American School in London, UK. After graduating from Princeton University, she joined the buying and selling desk of a finance firm, initially entering the same sector of business as her father Bob Diamond, the former CEO of Barclays financial institution. She quickly realised, however, that her thrill lay elsewhere.

“I was always drawn to retail,” she says. “I’d steal my friends’ ownership research papers to discover what companies were doing in the retail space. I realised that this thing which started as a guilty pleasure – loving fashion – turned out to be a viable career chance.”

Now, as CEO, Diamond oversees every facet of the business, from growth way to creative path. Below, she talks with the BBC about the business’s biggest challenges, its rapid growth into a lifestyle brand and plans for the upcoming.

Hill House dates back to a recent business incubator you joined while in business school at Yale University. How did you turn the concept into a fully fledged business?

I wanted to bring a design-forward point of view to the home category. We started with just home products: bedding, pillows, a little bit of pyjamas and robes. But I really concentrated on the home and, in particular, the bedroom, drawing off of some of the design elements of my London upbringing – great British brands like [interior decorating firm] Colfax and Fowler and amazing prints that I had seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

There were many businesses launching direct-to-buyer [approaches] and talking about cutting out the middleman. I wanted to do the same thing and … commence tiny and focus on just one or two products. While I was at business school, I spent period on the little parts of starting a business – trademarks, legal documents, hiring my first few contractors and setting up our Instagram account. After graduating, I spent the first couple of years bootstrapping the business and really focusing on conference our customers. It was a very tiny throng in a co-working space in recent York City.

By 2019, everything dramatically changed overnight. We went from low and leisurely and careful growth to the achievement of the Nap Dress. Within a few months, our business was majority a fashion business based off the strength of this one product line. We went from five people to 30 people and from one store to now having almost six stores. It really changed the scale of the business. I recall our very first order was for a hundred units and being petrified that we wouldn’t actually sell them. To have sold a million of them now is really crazy.

Why do you ponder this one particular product, the Nap Dress, resonates with so many people?

It’s so many different things. We didn’t invent smocking, which is what makes our dresses most identifiable. My grandmother was wearing smock dresses in the 1950s. Juicy Couture [the Los Angeles-based clothing brand] popularised smocking and terry cloth in the 2000s. But I ponder what was so significant to us was figuring out a very proprietary type of smocking that could stretch with you. I wore it all throughout my twin pregnancy and then the snap back. It works with your changing body and throughout the day – it feels comfortable but you still look benevolent of put together.

When we first launched the Nap Dress, we would have somebody email in and declare: “Oh, my partner was wearing this dress at a dinner event, or at work or at preschool pickup, and I have to have it.” It was exacerbated by social media, but organic social media, which is the significant distinction there. Even today, 30% of orders on our site arrive from word-of-mouth referrals.

What are some challenges you faced in the early days that you had to overcome?

There were – and continues to be – challenges every day. Early on and certainly during Covid, there were constant disruptions in the global supply chain, whether it was that one factory had to shut down or another one had delayed shipping.

In 2021, we expected we’d be able to have all the products here by a sure date for a product drop. There were crazy delays at ports all over due to shipping freight issues. That can affect your entire summer selling, your entire quarter of selling. In this increasingly online, seamless-delivery Amazon-dominated globe, it is straightforward to overlook how many human touch points there are and how fragile they can be. We internally would get so anxious and nervous any period one of those human touch points had a blockage.

But when we told our customers what was happening, people loved having that insight into the humanity behind the products they’re actually buying. I ponder it made it feel more personal to them. And that might be one of the many reasons why we have such a faithful customer base – we let them into that side of the business. It’s obvious that it’s not so robotic and transactional.

How do you check that manufacturing partners and suppliers are abiding by the highest standards?

We have manufacturers in 12 countries across nearly all continents. It’s all about tracking at every stage of the advancement procedure. We receive that very seriously. We work with an organisation called Transparency One that helps us track across our supply chain at every stage and audit what our manufacturers are reporting. We’ve had many of the same manufacturers since day one and developed those human relationships with the people who make our clothes. One of our main manufacturers is the same person who we sent those first hundred unit orders to, and they should feel a tremendous amount of ownership over the growth that we’ve seen over the history couple years.

You’ve publicly said before that the business is very reliant on global buying and selling routes and global supply chains. Now given that President-elect Trump has campaigned on raising tariffs for imports, are you concerned about how this might affect costs and global trade more generally?

I can only talk for our own business, but I ponder that tariffs are certainly something we are thinking about.

How have you been expanding the brand?

We have a concept called Nells at our store in Charleston, South Carolina, inspired by my British upbringing. It’s a pick-and-mix candy station, and there’s a coffee and fountain soda bar, a nod to the Americana roots of the brand as well. It’s never been easier to shop online, so if you’re asking customers to arrive into your store, you should be delivering an encounter that makes it worth it.

The home category is still really large for us now. But it just seems tiny in comparison to how all the fashion is doing. A recent category we recently launched is swim – and that’s performing really well. We asked what else our customers wanted to view from Hill House, and swim was an early respond.

The fashion globe can be notoriously fickle. How can you ensure your products remain relevant across changes in fashion on the street?

We focus on our core customer, so I’m not so worried about what’s relevant for anyone except for them. It can be straightforward in fashion to get caught up in a pattern pattern, but our core customer is really concentrated on cute clothes that make them feel great and carry them through all of their different things that they have to do that day. Within that formula, we can deliver a product that makes them joyful and not be so concentrated on a constant pattern of newness. It’s about building pieces that last in their wardrobe.

What advice do you have for smaller businesses hoping to expand and construct?

One of the most significant pieces of advice I got when I was first starting out was to keep your blinders on. I recall constantly playing the comparison game in the early days and looking at other brands, Instagrams or advertisements or stores, thinking: “We should have done that and we should have done this, and why can’t we do that?” That was never productive for me.

I had a real unlock when I started to tune out some of that noise and focus on what we have going on internally and how to make that as excellent as it possibly could be and can be. I mute a lot of people on Instagram if I’m getting a negative feeling from it. I always talk about putting the mute button on in real life, too, if something’s not serving you in that way.

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Where do you view Hill House in the next few years? Do you ponder the Nap Dress will always be the centerpiece of the business?

My perception is that the Nap Dress will always be a hero product for us. But the growth correct now is coming out of these recent products, categories and from the retail channel. It’s really exciting because I ponder that our customers have given us permission to leave into not only these other rooms of their home but other activities they’re doing with swim and outerwear.

I’m also incredibly bullish on retail. I would adore to open more stores. We’re very much a one-year-at-a-period brand, so I’d like to commence with a couple more. But because we are very customer led, I’ll let them inform us [what’s next].

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