Winner of a prestigious Drapers Award and designer of last summer’s viral Barbie shoe, Nicki Hoyne explains how her eponymous accessories brand came to be.
Photography: Lee Malone
It mightn’t surprise you to learn that Nicki Hoyne studied theatre, what with her collection of wildly fun bags and shoes featuring oversized bows, clashing prints and a bold and brash colour palette. From an entrepreneurial family, she has merged her business acumen with her creative curiosity to form a hugely successful brand – but it wasn’t a direct path.
A self-described “messer at school”, Nicki soon realised a theatre career wasn’t for her and pivoted to marketing, witnessing the success of small businesses on a new app called Instagram. “I just knew I could do it, and do it better.” In 2014, she launched jewellery and stationery brand My Shining Armour and it took off, shipping to 40 countries. Yet she found herself disillusioned. “I visited the factories in China where I was buying product from, and there was just no way everyone who made a €5 T-shirt got paid. That cotton was grown, then picked, bleached, made, tagged, shipped around the world, marketed, the shop staff paid and the lights kept on. That just got to me, and I wanted to change.”
Long fantasising about creating a shoe collection, her My Shining Armour education had fine-tuned her vision, with a focus on quality and sustainability. By the time Covid hit, Nicki had two years of research under her belt. She closed My Shining Armour and launched her accessories brand at Christmas 2020. “I launched with bags because they were faster to get to market, but my passion was always the shoes. Handmade in Spain and Portugal by master craftspeople, they were so hard to get right that they were my focus from day one.”
Since then, it’s been a wild, fun, hard ride, says Nicki, who sets big goals for the company every year, which included launching a trainer collection in 2024. “I want to be a niche global brand, that’s rare and small and scarce yet well-known.” When it comes to her design approach, Nicki admits that she relies, as ever, on her gut instinct. “I love art and texture and sometimes things just sit in my brain until I just have a compulsion to get them out: ‘I just need to do neon pink and a huge theatrical bow!’” she laughs, referring to her sell-out Barbie-pink heels from the summer of 2023. This year, an oxblood palette has been central to her designs, as well as capturing the return of animal prints in metallic hues.
“For a long time, I didn’t realise the benefit of that time in theatre but looking back, it taught me to stand up, to think quickly and be flexible.” Nicki is certainly that, and her creations are a culmination of all her life experiences: bold, brave, beautiful and entirely unique. nickihoyne.com
This article originally appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of IMAGE.
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