Quince, the San Francisco direct-to-consumer brand that built a following on $50 cashmere sweaters and designer-adjacent goods, has officially crossed into the United Kingdom — its first market outside North America. The company launched its UK storefront on October 19, selling womenswear, menswear, children's clothing and homeware, with prices starting at £12 for a cotton modal tank top and climbing to £250 for pricier pieces.
The expansion comes just months after Quince raised $500 million in a Series E round that pushed its valuation to $10.1 billion, according to Reuters. That March funding round was led by ICONIQ Capital, with participation from Basis Set Ventures and Wellington Management, and the company said the money would support global expansion of what it calls its manufacturer-to-consumer operating system. In the UK, that valuation translates to roughly £7.5 billion, as reported by Retail Gazette, whose Kieran Howells covered the entry into the UK discount retail and ecommerce landscape.
Quince's pitch rests on cutting out the middlemen. The company sources products directly from manufacturers and ships them straight to customers, bypassing the traditional retail distribution layers that typically inflate prices, per Reuters's reporting. On the UK site, a Mongolian cashmere jumper — now in its seventh iteration, according to Drapers — sells for £50, while silk blouses run £55 and leather handbags start at £95.
How the Math Is Supposed to Work
The company estimates its prices sit 50% to 70% lower than comparable market prices, the same report notes. Quince backs up that claim with published cost breakdowns on its product pages, covering materials, manufacturing, packaging, shipping and fees, according to FashionUnited. Those same pages reportedly feature comparisons against premium brands on cost and materials, a tactic WWD has previously documented with Quince's $50 cashmere crewneck sweater pitted against $128 and $158 versions from J.Crew and Everlane, respectively.
None of this runs through physical stores. Quince has no brick-and-mortar locations and relies entirely on ecommerce, though it has experimented with pop-ups, including a recent furniture pop-up in Los Angeles. The UK offer mirrors the model: free standard delivery plus a 365-day returns policy, subject to conditions, on most items shipped from the company's San Francisco base.
A Billion-Dollar Business Built on Smaller Batches
Quince's total revenue surpassed $1 billion in 2025, Reuters reported, and the company has since said it has surpassed $2 billion in sales over the trailing 12 months, per WWD. The brand has also expanded well beyond its original cashmere sweater into more than 100 categories spanning apparel, home goods, jewelry, travel items, furniture and gourmet food, the same outlet noted, with growth driven by returning customers and newer categories like home goods and scrubs.
Behind the pricing is a tech platform that uses artificial intelligence to forecast demand and identify popular products, allowing Quince to place smaller orders with manufacturers and limit excess inventory, according to Reuters. The company has framed this efficiency as the reason it can, in the words of its investors cited by TechCrunch, produce higher-quality products at low costs compared with fast fashion. Quince was reportedly already eyeing international markets after seeing interest from shoppers outside the United States, per earlier WWD coverage, and the UK launch follows through on that ambition.
Legal Fights Have Followed the Growth
The dupe-retailer model has not gone unchallenged. Williams-Sonoma, the U.S. homewares group behind Pottery Barn, sued Quince last year, accusing it of misleading customers through comparisons with more expensive alternatives, according to Retail Gazette's reporting. A federal judge dismissed Williams-Sonoma's claims in September but gave the company an opportunity to amend its complaint. Quince has also defended a design patent case brought by Deckers, the owner of UGG, in which a jury found the patent covering the boot design in question was invalid.
Founding dates for the company vary across accounts — some reporting places its origin in 2018, others in 2019 — but its trajectory since is not in dispute: triple-digit year-on-year growth, a jump past $2 billion in annual sales, and now a first toehold in a market outside North America. Quince joins other brands like Beauty Pie and Rise & Fall that have built businesses around cutting out traditional retail mark-ups, placing it in a crowded but growing corner of the affordable premium products market as it tests whether its £12-to-£250 pricing can translate across the Atlantic.
