When 29-year-old Alice Bugeja quit her job at a global technology company last August to start a women’s-only runwear brand, a lot of people told her that it wasn’t going to work.

‘It was a really bad period of anxiety for me,’ she recalls. ‘You think in your mind that handing your notice in is going to be this amazing moment and it was the complete opposite. There were a few people at my work who said, “businesses fail” or this, that and the other.’

As it turns out, mileoff, which launched on International Women’s Day last month (the date being a happy coincidence rather than ‘an act of marketing genius’, admits Bugeja), has so far proved to be the exact opposite of a failure. Having ordered 1,500 units of stock, the maximum her savings would allow, Bugeja thought that this would be enough to see the company through until the summer. A month on from launch, the collection has all but sold out.