Sue Joyce is running a Turkish towel empire.
Before Joyce started Turkish-T, she was a stay-at-home mom to her twin teenage girls, Claire and Susie. She attended charity events with her husband, investment manager Douglas Joyce, and dabbled in the hobbies of the well heeled, like gardening and boutiquing. 'But I was always very interested in textiles,” she says. She sold formal cocktail napkins before discovering the hamam towels online; in 2009, she ordered her first set from Buldan, Turkey (a mountainous region known for its textiles), and started selling them at Green Hills boutique, AshBlue, under the brand Turkish-T.
Joyce's brand of hamam towels exploded in popularity after Gwyneth Paltrow featured them in her weekly newsletter, Goop. The actress discovered the towels in AshBlue while she was filming the 2010 movie Country Strong. Paltrow bought dozens of the towels as holiday gifts for her famous friends and then 'sent them all over the world,” Joyce says. She liked them so much, in fact, that she invited Joyce to produce an exclusive collection with Goop. When the limited-edition set debuted in July 2012, Paltrow wrote on goop.com, 'I'm obsessed with these towels.”
Since the Goop collaboration last year, sales of the towels have tripled. The brand has expanded to include eight different weaves and styles, including the best-selling Beach Candy line (in colors like Lime-aide and SeaBreeze Aqua) and the thicker, more expensive resort towels in the Luxe Spa line.
Turkish-T is a female-driven company. With their cheerful hues and marketing photos of gals swathed and lounging by the pool, the products are undoubtedly geared toward women of a certain ilk (bridal showers instantly come to mind). But the towels aren't limited to being used by women…or even as towels. AshBlue owner Susannah Scott-Barnes explains that, as a boy growing up in South Africa, her husband, Zulu, wrapped a similar type of cloth around his waist before going to bed. 'In [some] cultures, what you own has to have many different uses. The [hamam] towel is very versatile in that way,” she says. The Turkish-T products she sells have been used as tablecloths, scarves, and soft blankets on long flightsversatile indeed.
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