George Davies looks to leave Bluewater and Regent Street flagship fashion stores

George Davies, the clothing entrepreneur behind Next, George at Asda and Per Una, is looking to exit two of his flagship GIVe stores just eight months after his highly-anticipated new chain opened.

GIVe outlets on London's Regent Street and in the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent are being discreetly marketed to other retailers so that Mr Davies can vacate the shops.

The move is a blow to Mr Davies, who opened six stand-alone GIVe stores and 16 department store concessions on the same day last October. The launch was one of the most ambitious UK retail launches in recent history.

But despite the likely exits, observers close to the company said that GIVe is trading well as a brand. Sales in the department stores and some of the stand-alone shops away from London are thought to be particularly strong.

But the Regent Street and Bluewater stores are understood to be in the wrong locations for the kind of shopper that GIVe is trying to attract.

The brand is aimed at women aged 30-plus and has been described by Mr Davies as offering "affordable luxury". However the Bluewater store is wedged between younger brands such as Office and Zara and the Regent Street store is located between TM Lewin, the shirt retailer, and a Scottish cashmere shop.

Mr Davies is one of the UK's best-known fashion retailers and designers. He learnt his trade buying socks for Littlewoods and in 1982 he turned the struggling Hepworth menswear chain into Next, which went on to become one of the retail sensations of the 1980s.

He then created George at Asda for the supermarket chain. The low-price clothing line now has global sales of around £2bn. After he left Asda he went on to design the highly-successful Per Una range for Marks & Spencer.

Mr Davies is by his own admission not a corporate man.

He famously quit Per Una in 2005 after a "lovers' tiff'' with Sir Stuart Rose, then chief executive of M&S. They two men patched things up and Mr Davies eventually returned to M&S, but left a few years later. He called his test brand, GIVe, as a play on his name mixed with Roman numerals for the number four – as the chain was his fourth major launch.

The entrepreneur, who has invested his own money in GIVe, has notoriously high standards for his stores. "I find that retail today is not very inspirational. If you go into a Zara store, that Zara store could be anywhere,'' he told The Sunday Telegraph in 2008. He is also known for being mercurial. "Fifty per cent of people love me, fifty per cent can't bloody stand me," he admitted.

However he also said: "I am a fighter. If someone tries to beat me, I beat them. It's my Liverpool thing.''