N.Peal: Behind the brand

You’ve heard of ‘farm-to-table’. It’s a movement — cooked up decades ago by Californian chef Alice Waters — that taught us to care where our food comes from, who grows it, and how many hands it passes through before it reaches our plates. By the early 2000s, the idea had gone global.

At roughly the same time, Yorkshire-born businessman Adam Holdsworth was having similar thoughts about cashmere. Working with Mongolian producers, he was swerving the knitwear industry’s murky supply chains in favour of direct relationships with herders — a new model built on visibility and quality. He called it ‘goat-to-garment’: a fashion-world riff on farm-to-table, and a neat reminder that provenance is often the key to quality.

“It’s incredibly important,” says Holdsworth, owner and managing director of N.Peal since 2007. “We have a complete understanding of origins, and can track production right back to specific areas — not specific herds, but areas. This gives us full oversight, and that transparency is super important in maintaining quality.”

A goat herd in Mongolia

Holdsworth was born on Ilkley Moor, and began his career trading wool in Bradford, a family business. He refined his focus to cashmere after first visiting Mongolia in 1992, and the more he brushed up on the fine fibre, he realised that a direct-to-consumer model would serve the raw material best. “It might sound basic now,” he tells Gentleman’s Journal, “but 25 years ago, it was actually a relatively revolutionary concept.”

In 2003, Holdsworth co-founded Pure Collection knitwear. But N.Peal, he says, was always the “benchmark”. “A lovely little brand with a lovely heritage, and a nice feel,” he adds. “But one that lost its way. It was owned by Chuck Feeney of Duty Free Shoppers, an impressive fellow who loved the brand, but never really did anything with it.”

By 2006, Feeney had shuttered N.Peal, allowing Holdsworth to buy it — and embark upon a “labour of love” to turn it into the £35 million brand it is today. “It’s about having a real passion and vision for where you want to take it,” Holdsworth says of acquiring an existing company. “I did it slowly — bit by bit — and all with my own money. Open a store, make it profitable. Then open another, and grow it organically.

“We’ve never needed to borrow money,” he adds, “which means it’s just me and my wife, so a family business. And that’s nice. But we’re also not leveraged in any way, and we’ve built everything on what we hope — touch wood — are solid foundations.”

Inside N.Peal’s new Kensington store

The goat-to-garment approach sits at the heart of the modern N.Peal. Holdsworth is very hands-on, especially with the menswear offerings, and works closely with the design team to formulate ideas. Once stitch types, thickness and finishes hashed out, new product ideas are put to paper, then sent to a design team on the ground in Mongolia, who pick it up and translate the designs into what Holdsworth describes as “computer language”.

“Knitting machinery these days is all computerised,” he explains. “All fully automated. And that’s been a massive shift within the industry. Even within relatively low-cost environments like Mongolia, we’ve now got whole garment machines. And these get rid of linking, which is very time-consuming, because you can literally knit a whole garment down in one piece.”

“Transparency is super important in maintaining quality…”

In the luxury sector, it’s rare to hear automation talked of with such affection. For other heritage brands, hand-crafting is still king. But Holdsworth is staunchly pro-progress. “In our game, somebody used to just be sat in a soul-destroying factory. That isn’t our idea of craftsmanship. Automating into highly sophisticated computerised machinery, which can also do that much more, is far more beneficial. So, for me, the craft thing works the other way around — I think we’re more sophisticated and have got more quality and reliability because we’re not having to rely on human intervention.”

The proof is in the proverbial cardigans, sweaters and socks — as well as the sales figures. While 2025 wasn’t without its issues (Holdsworth cites Trump’s tariffs and problems in the Middle East), the brand ended the year well into double-digit growth. Two new stores opened in London, one on Kensington’s Walton Street, another on Sloane Square. “We didn’t even intend to open the Sloane Square store,” says Holdsworth. “But there was an opportunity, and we just couldn’t turn it down. It’s doing terrifically well.”

The Burlington Arcade store

The Walton Street store

With the recent new openings, London has seven N.Peal stores — with the flagship, in Westminster’s Burlington Arcade, celebrating its 90th anniversary in 2026. The brand itself was founded the same year, 1936, by Nat Leapman (who changed his surname to “Peal” as he believed it sounded more British). It began as a haberdashery, until Peal was stationed in the Shetland Islands during the war and became a champion of fine knits. He was soon christened “the British King of Cashmere” and would embark on frequent trips to the US to sell his wares and spread the cashmere word. On the first of these Stateside visits, he travelled with a menagerie including a miniature alpaca, Vicuña, Cashmere goat and Shetland goat as living testaments to the quality of his premium wools.

It’s a fascinating tale — but Holdsworth is ever humble. “To be honest, I always try to underplay it,” he laughs. “I just tell people that we’re a little cashmere brand with a couple of stores in London.” But that’s not where the anecdotes end. When Peal made it to Hollywood, his eponymous knits found fans in Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Cary Grant. They were the toast of the West Coast.

Movie magic is still woven through the brand: last year, Stanley Tucci collaborated with N.Peal on a capsule collection. “It was fantastic,” says Holdsworth. “He had a desire to create something that went beyond monetary gain. We’re not a brand of a size that would make him fabulously wealthy, but he still had the passion for it.”

Stanley Tucci for N. Peal

A second Tucci collection will launch next year. And, this September, N.Peal will unveil “a little product” to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Casino Royale. The brand has outfitted 007 since Skyfall in 2012, and recently extended its partnership with the James Bond franchise through to the end of 2027. “Although Bond’s obviously been taken over by Amazon now,” says Holdsworth, “so that’ll be interesting.”

But, like Peal before him, Holdsworth's eyes are currently on the US. “We’re focused on rolling out more US stores,” he says (there are currently two in Manhattan). “It’s an enormous market, but we’re being selective. We’ll do the right deals when the right deals come up. Perhaps another Soho store in New York, or San Francisco, Chicago, Boston or Texas. It’s about putting down at those key locations over the next four or five years.”

Back in Britain, Holdsworth is also expanding the brand’s headquarters, which moved to Yorkshire’s Broughton Hall in 2021. “It’s a beautiful estate, with thousands of acres we can explore — whether that be for wild swimming or just walking in the woods. We’re in The Vineries, which is effectively this great old greenhouse. But, this year, the plan is to take over the old stable block and huge courtyard, and turn that into our headquarters for the next five or ten years.”

Inside the Walton Street store

A team of 30 work at the Yorkshire HQ, but an office above the new Walton Street store provides a London base for certain members of the creative and social media team. That instinct for place — from rural supply chains to urban retail — has long underpinned N.Peal’s success. As the brand extends its footprint globally (its first continental European store opened in Munich in 2024), Holdsworth sees expansion not just as growth, but as education: an opportunity to introduce more customers to his pioneering direct-to-consumer philosophy.

“And that’s the critical thing for me, as the owner and driver of the brand — to focus on how we can do things better,” he adds. “It might be storytelling, or product details or visual marketing in store, but there are never-ending areas in which I just have to keep driving forward. And that can often be an affliction, because I can never just sit there and say: ‘That was fantastic’. All I ever do is say: ‘But what could we do?’”

This impulse to improve has always served N.Peal well. Few brands have reinvented themselves so thoroughly without losing their identity, or balanced heritage with progress so convincingly. In Holdsworth, N.Peal has found its steadiest pair of hands yet, and his diligence, long-term vision and insistence on transparency continue to move the brand forward — from goat to garment, to greatness.