| Net Worth: | $60 Million |
Karen Millen was founded in 1981 when Millen and her partner, Kevin Stanford, hatched the idea and took out a loan for £100 to purchase one thousand meters of white cotton to begin manufacturing and selling white shirts to their friends. In 1983, they opened their first store in Kent, which was followed a few years later by branches in Tunbridge Wells, Brighton, Guildford, and London. The brand expanded throughout the nineties and was acquired in 2004 by Icelandic Mosaic Fashions. While Karen Millen and her then husband and partner, Kevin Stanford, were going through a divorce in 2001, she and her former husband gradually sold off their interest in the company in a series of complex deals that left them heavily exposed when Iceland's economy collapsed in 2008. In 2008, Millen and her former husband Kevin Stanford had combined interests in Oasis, All Saints, Whistles, Ghost, House of Fraser, French Connection and Principles. The Icelandic banking crash put an end to this power couple's retail dominance, however, when Kaupthing Bank went bust in October of 2008. Millen and Stanford began to reduce their interest in the brand in a series of deals enacted with Baugur, an Icelandic investment group, and the couple allowed Baugur to become the dominant investor. Millen is currently working hard to get her company back under her ownership and she and former husband and partner, Kevin Stanford, are now suing the Icelandic Bank of Kaupthing.
