Luella Bartley, who took home the Designer of the Year crown at the British Fashion Awards in 2008 and founded her company as a ‘drunken dare’ a decade ago, announced last week that she’s being forced out of business, just a day after she launched a Christmas Grotto at Liberty in London.

Bartley is well known within fashion circles for producing fantastic ‘online only’ exclusives (such as her witchcraft-inspired t-shirts for Tonic). So, while times are tough, is her online shop the route to safety?

Last Tuesday, Luella Bartley Limited said that it would be ceasing trading after its main investor, Club 21, withdrew financial backing. Despite relationships with several top-end British retailers , the company also suffered after the collapse of Carla Carini, an Italian manufacturer that made the Luella ready-to-wear collection.

For the time being, the Luella brand is still alive and kicking in Liberty’s shop windows, and the store’s exterior proclaiming this year a ‘Liberty’s Luella Christmas’, the name lives on for a while to come. More importantly, her online shop is still up and running for the time being. Could this be the channel that saves her? This is a low cost alternative that uses far less resource, she would just need to source a new manufacturer – and for someone with such high fashion credibility – this shouldn’t be hard to find.

The Twitter massive has also launched a Save Luella campaign, which has been taken up with gusto by the art, design and fashion elite – as well as a raft of fans. In fact, it has actually earned her a whole new audience of young fans as people searched for the meaning behind the ‘twibbons’ that appeared on user’s profiles.

Bartley has suffered a dent in her otherwise outstanding reputation as the ‘poster child for London cool’, as she’s been unable to deliver on orders of her 2010 collection – which was shown just a few months ago at London Fashion Week to critical acclaim. But she seems surprisingly upbeat about her losses, saying that “the Luella girl can have an exciting future, whichever incarnation she takes on next. We have a number of options open to us.”

And so, we wonder if this is such bad news for the brand after all? The negative press seems to be focused around Club 21 rather Bartley, and with celebrity friends like designer Giles Deacon and stylist Katie Grand – a private investment seems more than likely to be in the pipeline.