The woman who brought Vero Moda to Ireland is stepping down after agreeing to sell her 50 per cent Irish stake to Bestseller DK, the Danish company which controls the European group. Geraldine Swarbrigg, the managing director of Vero Moda's Irish operation, is leaving after 10 years of developing and managing the Irish chain, which now has 15 outlets and employs 150 people. She says she recently indicated her intention to leave after a decade of "very hard but enjoyable work". Bestseller DK - which is understood to want greater control over the Irish operation - has 700 stores in Europe, including Vero Moda, Only, Exit and Jack & Jones. Just two are Irish stores.

While the vast proportion of its outlets are in Scandinavia, there are also shops in Austria, Switzerland, Poland and Spain. According to Swarbrigg, the company strategy is to target countries where they can be a "big fish in a small pond. "Whereas 15 stores makes Vero Moda a big name in a small country like Ireland, you'd need to start with about 30 to make any impact in the UK." Swarbrigg first saw Vero Moda in Norway and approached Bestseller with a view to bringing the name to Galway. "The clothes were mid-price, mid-market and I thought there was a gap for something like that." The entrepreneur behind the company, Troels Povlsen, will celebrate 25 years in the fashion business this year. The first Irish shop opened in Galway`s Eyre Square shopping centre in 1991, followed by an outlet in the Omni Park shopping centre in Santry, Dublin, and then Grafton Street. There are now shops in Cork, Waterford, Limerick and Kilkenny. As managing director, Geraldine Swarbrigg developed the business here from scratch. She says her job got a little easier as the years progressed. "Once a few of the shops were set up, it became almost automatic, in the sense that once we got the right location, it could take as little as four to six weeks to fit out and open a shop."

Last summer, the Henry Street store was sold to Eircom, but this was not an indication of the chain's flagging fortunes. "The shop was too big for us and Eircom made an offer for it. We intended to replace it with a smaller store in the city centre but it didn't materialise."

Vero Moda is due to open in The Pavilions shopping centre in Swords in March, bringing the number of shops in Dublin to six.