As online shopping became nascent, Mathews knew she had to “develop a language to tell people who we were, what we stood for”. She spent “so much money” on consultants, trying to articulate the Lee Mathews brand, she says.
“These were questions I’d never really asked myself. For a very long time it was just, you go to work, you make some clothes, you sell them. I never set out to start a business.”
Before she launched her eponymous label, Mathews was an art director at Vogue Australia and worked at luxury boutique Belinda Seper and at Country Road. She discovered a love of printmaking and, with the sewing skills she had learnt from her grandmother as a child, she began making clothes for friends and family – who urged her to take them to market.
An early Mathews dress, sold at Belinda Seper, from the early 2000s. Steve Baccon
She ran her own race then, and runs it still. Growth has been organic, but is often still scary, she says. “As opportunities presented themselves, they begat more and more of them,” she says. “And there was very little planning until we got to about the sixth store, I think.
