Nell Diamond, founder of the rapidly growing fashion, home, and lifestyle brand Hill House Home, sat down with Worth to discuss her company’s expansion, including new collections and locations, as well as capitalizing on going viral. Famous for their Nap Dress, which combines comfort with elegance at a fair price-point, Hill House tapped into a coveted market—the intersection of Millennial and Gen-Z fashion. Worn by new moms and cottage-core trend lovers alike, the Nap Dress is a feminine, structured, and flattering piece with universal appeal. After the dress went viral during the pandemic, Diamond adjusted quickly, responding to the demand for a strong social media presence and meeting increased order volumes. The Nap Dress is now offered in 24 different styles and innumerable prints, winning Hill House an avid and loyal customer base and solidifying the brand as a new leader in the luxury space.
When did you know you wanted to be involved in fashion, design, and entrepreneurship?
I knew I loved retail from a very early age. I grew up in London, and I loved shopping. I loved seeing stores. I loved going to little flea markets. I loved seeing the big stores of the era, like Top Shop, and exploring all of the amazing small brands that they had in their space. I didn’t know how to connect the dots on that interest until much later.
I worked in finance right after undergrad, and I loved the experience, but I wanted something more. So I went to business school with the idea of pursuing a future in retail. I didn’t know whether that future in retail was going to be for somebody else or for myself. But I had an inkling that I wanted to at least try the entrepreneurship route.
I only applied to Yale because I loved their entrepreneurship program…I worked for the Louis Vuitton U.S. group, and loved that experience, too. But [I] ended up realizing that if I didn’t try this entrepreneurial thing, I would never do it. So I spent the whole second year at Yale focusing on incubating the business, getting everything from our trademark to our bank account to our operations set up, and then I launched the business about six months after I graduated.
What was the biggest challenge you faced when launching Hill House Home, and how did you deal with it?
I was a solo founder and the only employee for quite a bit. I found the loneliness of launching something really challenging at the beginning. It wasn’t until I started to develop a team of people who were also really excited about the business that I began to feel a little bit more at ease.
At the start, I was sitting in every role, so I had a fake name to do our customer service emails, “Charlie.” I responded to all the emails. I had a fake name to do our finance, a fake name to do our marketing, but it was really just one person sitting in a lonely office on Canal Street. I hadn’t been prepared for just how lonely the beginning stages of entrepreneurship can be. And I think even now, with this scale, entrepreneurship can still be lonely, but significantly less so now that we have a team.
Fast forwarding to now and the enterprise that you’ve created, what are some of the most powerful forces currently shaping your business?
A huge one is global trade routes. We create products all over the world. And since Covid, global trade routes have been massively impacted. So transit times are increasing dramatically. Transit costs are increasing dramatically. In 2020 our big worry all the time was that the given country where some of our manufacturing was located would be shut down from Covid restrictions.
Now, one of our biggest worries is that a global trade route will shut down like it had in the Suez Canal. And I think the one consistency over the past eight years of having this job and running this business has been just how inconsistent and unpredictable transit and manufacturing can be. We’re not a tech business that is creating product that lives in the cloud. We’re creating product that’s built with human hands and has to travel an ocean in order to get to us in certain cases. So that’s definitely top of mind for us. I never expected just how much I would be thinking about shipping and transit.
How do you measure success?
I think we have a varied list of markers of success. There’s no one perfect metric. Some of the metrics that I track are extremely quantitative. We obviously track to a fiscal plan that’s related to gross revenues and net revenues. And then we have margin targets and profit targets, and those are all pretty specific and quantitative. And we have those set out for the year ahead, but and also for the quarter ahead, and also for the month ahead. So those are pretty clear markers of success—if we’re meeting our plan or not.
And then we have more qualitative markers of success. Those really come from things like customer feedback, from things like our retail stores’ teams’ feedback. It can come from sitting next to somebody at a restaurant who’s wearing our clothing and them coming over and sayin g, “Hey, I really love this dress, because it made me feel really confident, and I wore it to XYZ.” Those are also really important markers of success. And I think all together, those tend to paint a picture of the direction the company’s going.
And then we also have various internal markers of success. So retention rate is a big one for our employees. We’re super proud to still have the original five employees that were at the company back in 2017, 2018. For me, that’s a very personal CEO metric of success. Am I able to retain that team that was so important in the beginning years?
What keeps you awake at night? How do you prepare for those possible challenges?
I [used to have] some magical view that a lot of the worries that I had on day one would go away, but they don’t. They just change. They just morph a little bit. So even though we’ve hit every revenue target that I could have imagined, I’m still constantly thinking about things like cash flow and inventory management and how we get to that next revenue hurdle. What keeps me motivated is probably the thing that was most difficult for me in year one, which was one of the reasons I didn’t hire many people right at the start. It felt like a tremendous responsibility to be in charge of other people’s livelihoods. And I’m glad I took that really seriously. It’s one thing to fail for yourself. It’s another thing to fail for other people who are relying on you and whose families are relying on you. And so because of that, I was very slow to hire. I just felt like I couldn’t sleep at night if I didn’t feel like I could offer people true job security. And so now, eight years later, that idea of doing things to ensure my team has job security still keeps me motivated. And then further, I think I’m so lucky to be in a product business and a customer led business because the happiness of our customers, and the way the customers feel when they’re wearing our clothing is incredibly motivating. So wanting to replicate how the first few customers felt in our clothing when we first released it is another really motivational factor for me.
You have been commemorated for your brand’s adaptation to the reception of the nap dress, which went viral. What were some of the key decisions you made to capitalize on the popularity of that style?
I always say, going viral is the easy part in this day and age. What’s difficult is actually taking a minute, and thinking about that virality, and bringing it forward into something that’s meaningful to the original mission of your brand. We’re really lucky that we went viral for a product we feel incredibly passionate about internally, and that we genuinely think deserves to go viral. I’m sure it would be much more difficult if that weren’t the case.
For us, it wasn’t virality by accident. We had all the pieces in place, and it was really product led. People got excited and told their friends about the Nap Dress because they loved it, and they loved to wear it. And I think the reason that happened was because it was really organic virality, right? It wasn’t like we were putting money towards something, making it go viral. I think the important steps to take in in those moments were to really think about, ‘what was it that made this product naturally create a flywheel of excitement?’ And for us, it was this combination of style, comfort and price. Our nap dresses are incredibly comfortable. They make you feel really put together. And the price point makes sense. It’s a really, thoughtful price point. And so now, when we try to think about new products, we want them to fit those three categories as well.
[And beyond that,] one of the reasons we’ve been able to capitalize on the virality of that first moment is that we have amazing, amazing partners. So, when we started suddenly selling out of shipments that we thought would last us a year in a day, we were able to call up our factories and say, ‘Hey, we’re so excited. Can you believe this?’ And because they’ve been working with us for a while, trusted us and knew us, they were like, ‘Oh my god, we can’t believe it either. What can we do to help?’ Having that relationship with our partners, our manufacturing partners, that allowed us to put fuel on the fire and continue to provide that experience at the scale that the demand was hitting has taught me the importance of relationships and nurturing relationships when you don’t necessarily “need them”—just because it’s the right thing to do and it feels natural. Randomly calling up factories when something goes viral, and being like, ‘Make this for us’? That’s never gonna happen.
Can you tell me more about the creative process behind your seasonal collections? How do you stay inspired? What is your personal favorite print + style?
The business started as a home business. So, bedding and home products were our first foray into the world of retail, and that’s been a guiding inspiration for us in fashion. We’re super inspired by interiors, everything from iconic [architecture] to paintings that we love. The world of interiors continues to inspire us. And thinking about how you can dress your house is always a place I get inspiration, and I get inspiration from customers. So I still love to work retail. I’m in Nantucket right now. I work the store when I have availability to do so, and I’m always like, my notes app on my phone after I work retail is like crazy, because I’m just like so inspired by somebody saying the the their background item or what they’re shopping for, it just helps me, like, clarify the use case that Hill House has for for our customers.
Do you have a particular favorite print and or style?
It changes constantly. I would say, right now, my favorite is our Margot dress in Swedish Floral that we just launched. I just really love it. I’ve been wearing it nonstop. But, yeah, it changes. Every season I have a new one.
Looking ahead, what are your goals and vision for the future of Hill House Home?
I’m super excited about retail. Our stores have been performing so well. We opened a store in Charleston a couple of months ago, and that’s become one of our top-performing stores. We’re also opening in Dallas in a few months. Bringing it back to basics and back to that retail experience that I grew up loving is just really exciting for me and continues to be a primary goal for the brand.
If you could ask our readers at Worth to do one thing to make the world a better place, what would you ask of them?
Such a good question. One of my guiding principles is to not assume anything. It seems so simple, but I think too often, we lead our interactions with an assumption about somebody’s intentions. We always say internally at Hill House, “Assume good intent.” Assume it’s a misunderstanding or that there’s a good intention behind something rather than automatically assuming a bad intention.
Our motto at Worth is “worth beyond wealth.” Does that motto resonate with you, and if so, in what capacity?
Absolutely. I like that that can be taken in a million different ways. I’m a mom to three young kids, and I think one of the greatest parts of having kids has been the perspective it’s offered me at the end of every day. No matter how big or exciting or monumental a sales day we have, at the end of the day, I come home to my role as a mother. And that really gives me perspective and grounds me in a really beautiful way. It reminds me of my worth outside of work.
