Left & Right
East London Cloth
From airplanes to pillows
How Gemma and Ben Moulton combined to build two businesses that play to their practical and creative strengths.
Dec 2025
Practice: You have very different professional backgrounds and skill sets - what made you decide to launch a business together?
Gemma: I'd always worked in design led jobs but was weary of desk-based work and wanted something more physical and creative. I signed up to the AMUSF upholstery course in the hope that it would fulfil both the creative and the practical in me, but fell accidentally onto the soft furnishing side, as there was more opportunity for paid work. I was interested to see if there was a business opportunity in combining made to measure product, with a design lead approach, that could also scale. This idea soon became East London Cloth.
Ben: I’m more practically minded - I worked in aviation. My income was badly affected during Covid, and I was at home, which gave us the push to start the business. But I’d never had any real interest in curtains or interiors. In fact, if you'd told me six years ago I'd be here doing this now I'd have thought you were mad!
Gemma: At the start, we did whatever was necessary to make it work. But now the business has evolved, we have very separate roles. Ben really enjoys making the machinery of the business function smoothly, whereas I love product design and the conversations between creativity and commercial viability that forces. I also love turning the story into a visual narrative, combined with styling and photography.
Practice: It is hard to scale a business that relies on the founder as the maker - how did you deal with this?
Gemma: In short, yes. But this was never the vision. At the start, I was making product through necessity - but found a way to step back from that as soon as possible and found a way to scale that element.
Ben - We were aware of this from the beginning. Gemma took a step away from this side of things as soon as she could. In 2023 we partnered with a brilliant 3rd party logistics and production company, this really allowed us to scale by being more organised and keeping checks on stock to provide customers with a more efficient experience.
In the early days, so much of what we were doing was all stored in my brain, so I was bogged down in the day-to-day operations, while Gemma was making. The changes have been revolutionary. They freed us both up to develop the business.
Gemma: For me, it’s given me the space to start CC Moulton, which runs alongside the main business and is where I now work full time.
Practice: Lots of creative founders have multiple ideas for businesses - how did CC Moulton first start as a germ of an idea and why did you separate out the businesses?
Gemma: In 2021, I spent a year, on and off, developing a range of fabrics with a mill based in Suffolk. Initially we introduced them under East London Cloth, but the price point alienated some existing customers. We decided to separate the brands, which has allowed CC Moulton to develop into something completely different to East London Cloth. It took a year to become profitable on its own.
I had actually started to feel ready to move on from East London Cloth. But stepping back allowed me to regain a lot of respect for the business. It’s a really healthy and functional business and its success has afforded me the time and space to start CC Moulton.
Practice: What did you learn from the experience?
Gemma: It was a great exercise in understanding how each business functions, who they serve and what their values are. East London Cloth’s products are task-based: the products are beautiful and elegant solutions to a problem. Whereas CC Moulton is a luxury purchase.
The two businesses represent the two sides of Ben and I. It’s allowed us to make the most of our strengths, but also spend less time working together – because we do have different visions and ways of working, and working this way enables us to acknowledge and respect that. We're both glad to be in a place where we get to pick and choose the parts we enjoy and apply our different skill sets in a complementary way.
Ben: We’ve never disagreed on where we’re going, but we often have a different view of how we’re going to get there. But I think we have a very happy balance, because I’m always focused on the here-and-now, but Gemma brings dynamism and momentum; and it’s her energy that pushes the whole thing forward.
Practice: How has working with Practice helped you start, and accelerate the business?
Ben: Neither of us had any business experience at all. When we started out on our own, we worried we were going to make some catastrophic error and end up in a lot of trouble. Practice has been good at demystifying that and making sure we’re not doing anything really silly.
Gemma: Working with Nick at Practice has helped us identify what we want to do over a year, break down all the figures and see if we’re working towards what we need. That kind of planning has been essential for me.
Practice: You’ve been in business for five years now, and the business is incredibly successful - how do you reflect on where you are?
Ben: We’ve stopped asking ourselves: is this a viable thing? Will this business work long-term? Those worries are in the back of your mind for a long time, especially when you have low periods, but we’re at year-five now, and my huge satisfaction comes from having a functional product and a really efficient business that provides our family a living.
Gemma: We don’t feel like we’ve ‘made it’, but I don’t ever really want to think that because that’s the start of being complacent. I think you have to feel like things are precarious to keep driving yourself forward.
