Hunter rebuilt its 150-year wellington boot brand around fashion.

Hunter had made sturdy rubber boots for British farmers, horse riders and royalty since the nineteenth century, but the brand had gone bankrupt in 2005. In July 2006 Michael Todd, a veteran of Ugg Australia, spotted a paparazzi photograph of Kate Moss trudging through the mud at Glastonbury in a pair of Hunter wellies.

Todd called the newly installed chief executive Peter Mullen and argued the boot was poised to shed its stuffy image. Six months later Mullen hired Todd as chief marketing officer and tasked him with reinventing Hunter, which had just been bought by a consortium including Mullen and a 49% stake held by the Pentland Group.

The rescue was unglamorous first. The consortium cut costs by moving manufacturing from Scotland to China, raised the retail price of a pair of boots by 20% to $115, and began adding new colours, liners and textured versions. Then Todd pushed Hunter toward a younger, fashion-conscious crowd.

In 2007 he persuaded a John Lewis buyer to stock two styles at its Reading store, site of an annual music festival. The boots sold quickly, and Hunter spread to 30 stock keeping units in 25 colours, then into Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdale's and 400 other US outlets.

Hunter went from farm and royalty footwear to a fashion accessory, with US sales reaching 30% of the business and distribution in 400+ outlets.

A celebrity moment gave the brand a chance to escape its dowdy image.

The heritage story gave Hunter authenticity a newer rival could not copy.

Cutting cost and raising price let the brand trade up instead of down.

Starting with music-festival stores seeded the exact cultural audience.

A heritage revival often starts with a cultural moment you don't create; the job is to spot it and scale it deliberately.

Hunter rode the wellington-as-fashion wave through the 2010s, expanding into clothing and accessories and becoming a global lifestyle brand. The luxury positioning eventually left it exposed when the trend cooled and debt rose, leading to a restructuring in 2020.