PrettyLittleThing

PrettyLittleThing is a British online fast-fashion retailer founded in Manchester in 2012 by the brothers Umar and Adam Kamani. It sells womenswear, footwear, accessories and beauty to a young female audience, and its catalog of bralettes, lingerie sets and swimwear is a small but busy corner of a business built on speed, low prices and social media. It has been fully owned since 2020 by the group that began as Boohoo, the company founded by the brothers' father, Mahmud Kamani.

An accessories site in Manchester

The start was modest. PrettyLittleThing launched as an accessories-only shop with a short list of products on its website. Clothing followed, and the site grew into a full wardrobe retailer aimed at women in their late teens and twenties who shop on their phones.

The family connection shaped what came next. Boohoo, founded in 2006 by Mahmud Kamani and Carol Kane, had already shown that a Manchester online retailer could sell trend copies quickly and cheaply by keeping a close, fast supplier base. PrettyLittleThing used the same model and pointed it at a slightly more glamorous, nightlife-focused customer.

How Boohoo bought PrettyLittleThing

In January 2017 Boohoo bought a 66% stake in PrettyLittleThing for £3.3 million, a price that looked small against the business it was buying. Sales at the time of the deal were reported at £47.7 million. In 2020 Boohoo acquired the rest of the company. The Financial Times put the price of that final buyout at £324 million, a figure that says more about the growth of the brand in three years than any marketing claim could.

By 2020 PrettyLittleThing's revenue had reached about £516 million. It now has offices in Manchester, London, Paris and Los Angeles and sells into the UK, Ireland, Australia, the US, France and parts of the Middle East and North Africa.

The parent company changed its trading name to Debenhams Group in March 2025, taking the name of the department store brand it now owns. The legal name stayed Boohoo Group plc, following opposition from shareholder Frasers Group. PrettyLittleThing sits inside it alongside boohoo and boohooMAN, which the group calls its youth brands. In November 2024 Dan Finley became chief executive of the group, with Mahmud Kamani as chairman.

Celebrity ranges, year by year

PrettyLittleThing's most visible product has been the celebrity collaboration. The list reads like a timeline of who mattered on Instagram in a given year:

Year	Collaborators
2015	Lucy Mecklenburgh, Kylie Jenner
2016	Sofia Richie, Chantel Jeffries
2017	Olivia Culpo, Kourtney Kardashian, Karl Kani
2018	Maya Jama, Ashley Graham, Hailey Baldwin
2019	Ashanti, Molly-Mae Hague, Little Mix, Saweetie

Saweetie's range was shown at New York Fashion Week in 2019, which was a statement of intent for an online-only label. Naomi Campbell has also worked with the brand. The collaborations were cheap to produce relative to their reach, and they gave a fast-fashion site something it otherwise lacked: a face.

The same logic sits behind the swim and lingerie pages. A celebrity range would typically include a triangle bra and matching briefs, a cut-out swimsuit or a lace bodysuit meant to be worn as a top. These are fashion pieces, not foundation garments. They are sold on look and price, with little of the fit engineering that a specialist like Freya builds into a bra.

Lingerie as fashion, at fast-fashion prices

This encyclopedia holds about 2,875 PrettyLittleThing products, which makes it one of the larger catalogs in the database. Most of them are swimwear and lingerie styled for going out: mesh and lace sets, bralettes, corset-inspired tops and high-leg bikini bottoms.

The garments follow trends closely and briefly. A lace bustier style that looks right on social media in spring can be on the site within weeks and gone by autumn. That pace is the business model, and it is also the main criticism of it.

Pink Friday and other controversies

In November 2021 PrettyLittleThing ran a "Pink Friday" promotion that briefly offered items at 100% off. Critics argued that a sale of free clothes showed how little the garments, and the people who make them, were valued, and raised the question of how much of it would end up in landfill. Umar Kamani was criticized for blocking critics on social media. In 2023 the brand drew complaints over outfits marketed for Ramadan that many Muslim customers considered inappropriate for the occasion.

Those episodes fit into a wider argument about British online fast fashion, its supply chains and its waste, in which the wider Boohoo group has been a frequent subject.

The 2025 burgundy rebrand

In March 2025 PrettyLittleThing dropped its familiar bright identity for burgundy and muted pastel pink, with model Elsa Hosk as the face of the relaunch. Commentators read it as an attempt to borrow the "quiet luxury" mood that had taken over fashion marketing, and some were unconvinced that a brand built on cheap, fast trend copies could wear it. The prices, and the speed, stayed where they were.

Last updated October 7, 2026