Lola701
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- Oct 27, 2014
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Im sorry but your comment doesn’t make sense from a business standpoint.Not so long ago, we had a fashion industry with a lively independent designer scene that actually spawned promising talent of which unfortunately a lot of businesses did not survive the Covid years and financial crisis that has dominated the past 10 years.
So from that perspective I can only find it saddening when people consider Phoebe Philo’s decision to launch her own brand daring when in fact she has an established name already and a minority investment from LVMH as well as production through the facilities she worked with at Celine sorted out.
All these factors put her in a much more favorable position than other emerging designers and it’s safe to say she could have been where the J.W. Anderson brand is at right now, had she gone for a different distribution strategy with her brand and put the gambles that high.
So yeah, not much pity for Phoebe from my side if she has to learn it the hard way now that being this super secretive and highly pretentious insider brand that she wants to be is perhaps not the right way to success.
Brands have strategies and positioning. You can’t expect one brand to follow a supposed strategy just because of the status and the glorious past of a designer.
Clearly she doesn’t want to be a contemporary designer. There are compromises that she probably don’t want to have at this stage of her career.
And again, we are talking about a brand that has been operating for a year. We can give someone grace over 1 year of operation…
Yes, she has the unfair advantage to have access to the facilities she had at Celine. But, as an independent brand, she won’t be able to afford the same number of orders they did at Celine.
Celine was already a fully operating brand when she took over.
There’s a reality of the industry, the reality of the current climate in terms of economy, the aspiration of a designer.
Choices have to be made and we cannot expect anyone to come with the fully « set up 1 decade looking brand » just because they are established.
We can say, ok Tom Ford did it but Tom Ford had a different plan and choose a different path. And even with that path and immediate success he had to compromise at the end.
And of course that launching your own brand as an established designer who had the opportunity to express yourself for years in other brands and with a lot of success is daring.
That’s why there are so few examples of designers who did it. Except for YSL, Karl, Lacroix, Tom and Phoebe, I can’t name others. I could almost add Herve Léger to the list…
And those brands have had different trajectories, different milestones, some different outcomes and example of success.