It’s hard to work out what George Davies’s GIVe venture stands for, and no surprise that the Regent Street store has closed

We’ve just revealed that George Davies’s GIVe has closed its store in Regent Street. It comes as no surprise because everyone knew it has traded really badly and he was trying to offload the lease, but then again most things George has done in his career have gone very right and most people thought he’d succeed with GIVe too.

GIVe launched in a blaze of publicity last year but the problem was it was the wrong sort of publicity, with George being feted in the business pages but not in the womens’ magazines. As someone close to the venture put it to me, the target middle-aged female customer wouldn’t have heard of the brand, but her husband probably had.

It seems to have done OK in concessions in department stores. I saw one of them in Newton Abbot shortly after it launched, and it was one of the more exciting things on the town’s retail scene, which admittedly wasn’t difficult. But its standalone stores are quite drab, almost forbidding, and not the type of places to make a middle-aged, mainstream female shopper feel special.

Another problem was that Regent Street was the wrong location, because it’s not really a destination for that type of shopper, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t do OK in provincial locations. It just needs to be softened a bit, so the stores actually make the customers feel and look good.

The success of Peter Davies and Liz Houghton’s Mint Velvet - which tomorrow’s Retail Week reveals has managed sales of £10m in its first year - shows there is room in market for new brands to excite the more mature woman who still wants to look good. But the image of affordable luxury and sophistication is different to the rather austere look of Give.