Bamford is looking for partners. The British organic luxury brand presenting its spring/summer 2009 women's wear collection in Milan has engaged Blackstone Group to help it field investment offers.

"We've come to the end of phase one, and we need a partner with more expertise in other markets," Carole Bamford says, acknowledging the extraordinary luck she has had with a label she founded from her Gloucestershire farm in 2004 on the "intuition that the timing was right to introduce a brand with a conscious." Bamford includes the eponymous women's ready-to-wear brand as well as the men's wear Bamford & Sons and the food and beauty brand Daylesford Organic (but not JCBs, the Bamford business started by her husband's father), and is characterised by its founder as "a way of life".