In early 2019, after seven years of growing her independent London-based label Isa Arfen, designer Serafina Sama felt it was time for a break. The brand, which was bringing in £1.3mn in annual sales, had held its first catwalk show at London Fashion Week only a year earlier, gaining accolades from the press. It counted 65 retailers across the world and had just launched its own ecommerce website.
Despite all this, Sama was lost. “From outside, everything looked good, but I didn’t have a clear plan ahead of me,” she tells me over Zoom from her west London home. “Once I got on the hamster wheel I never had the time to take a moment, rethink and make a plan. You finish one season and you are late for the next one . . . the rhythm was faster and faster, and there was no time.”
It’s a feeling shared by many designers, and led to calls for an overhaul of the fashion industry during the first few months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Many lamented the constant churning out of collections required to feed new styles and spectacle to a system that had grown insatiable. There were calls for a slower, more mindful approach.
Post-Covid, the push towards fewer fashion shows and smaller collections subsided, but the pandemic lesson wasn’t completely lost. Several brands that launched last year, including Phoebe Philo’s eponymous label and Angelina Jolie’s Atelier Jolie, are centred on small collections, or “editions”, unveiled outside the fashion calendar and sold directly to consumers.
It’s this model that Sama is betting on for her return. In December, she unveiled a capsule of knitwear pieces, sold exclusively through her rebranded ecommerce site. It includes three capes and a collared scarf in six colourways, from muted greys to vivid reds and greens. The pieces, around 100 in total, are all made in the UK from pure Scottish-spun lambswool and priced between £240 and £852.
The December drop is set to be followed by another one in the summer, but Sama says the number of releases could vary each year to suit her needs. Eventually, she’d like to add objects, such as glassware and ceramics.
“I would love it to become a little world, focused and curated, and be able to add pieces that can come back in different variations,” she says. “It would be something that is small and personal and secret, and gets passed on from customer to customer, creating a little community of people who appreciate the same things and have the same relationship with clothes.”
In an increasingly competitive luxury space where brands vie for attention with conglomerates such as LVMH and Kering, niche labels such as Sama’s can exploit their size and direct-to-consumer model to build a close, personal relationship with customers.
For Javier Seara, global sector leader for fashion and luxury at Boston Consulting Group, this kind of exclusivity, which is based on knowledge rather than scarcity of the product, can be a driver for consumers when engaging with smaller brands. “For these designer brands, it’s more about [creating] a micro-community that differentiates itself by knowing something you don’t know about,” he says.
When Italian-born Sama launched her label in 2012, after graduating from Central Saint Martins art and design school in London and a stint at Richemont-owned Chloé, the path to success for a nascent fashion label was almost set in stone: be featured in the top print publications, be stocked in a certain number of bricks-and-mortar stores and be part of one of the big four fashion weeks.
Isa Arfen’s first stockist was the influential Opening Ceremony, which then attracted others across North America and Europe, as well as Japan and the Middle East. Sama was soon holding presentations in New York and Paris, and then, in 2018, held her first and only catwalk show on schedule at London Fashion Week.
As the wheel started spinning, Sama was asked to add a resort collection to the standard spring/summer and autumn/winter offer, a request she agreed to even though she only had a team of four. Then some retailers started to suggest she could lower some of her prices by using less expensive materials, while others pushed her to adapt her designs to their specific territories’ needs.
“When I started, the fact that the garments were made in the UK or in Italy, that I used luxury fabrics, it was appreciated, it was a good selling point. As the season went on, those things didn’t seem to matter anymore. If I was showing a dress and [the buyers] loved it but the price was too high, I would say it’s [because it is] 100 per cent silk taffeta, and they would say, can you just make it in polyester?” Sama recalls.
“More and more risk was put on the brand in terms of payment terms and returns and sell-through guarantees, with less and less time to sell items at full price. The costs were really high.”
To these challenges, Sama adds her own qualms about producing an increasing number of samples and products that, in some cases, were left unsold at the end of the season. The amount of overproduction and the sight of leftover fabrics, samples, cancelled styles and unsold stock accumulating in the studio was “demoralising”, she says.
“It started to feel a bit disorientating for me, because everything that I valued in clothes and garments wasn’t important anymore.”
She hopes that the new business model will allow her to keep a tighter hold on the number of items produced as well as their costs, facilitating cash flow. End prices, without the need to factor in wholesalers, will also be more palatable to customers without eating into her profit margin.
When we speak a month after the launch, Sama says the response was good, but adds that “it’s going to take a little time to get out there again” after four years. On Instagram, however, the relaunch was welcomed by her followers, including fashion editor Caroline Issa, celebrity stylist Rebecca Corbin-Murray and TV personality Laura Jackson. “Before I relaunched [I got] messages from people saying, ‘We miss your clothes — when are you coming back?’” adds Sama. “I had a little bit of a customer base and they did come back.”
Sama, like Phoebe Philo and Angelina Jolie but on a much smaller scale, has the advantage of being able to tap into an audience that already knows and appreciates her work, making the D2C format a viable option. For other small businesses, though — especially those led by less well-known designers — the model can be challenging. For BCG’s Seara, often wholesale remains the best option.
“It’s difficult to grow and online traffic is very expensive,” he says. “Wholesale can give you access from one day to another to 50 doors . . . there is no better way to create visibility and initial awareness, to be honest.”
Sama decided to take a break from the industry when her business passed the £1mn mark in sales. It’s a point after which many independent brands struggle to sustain growth, according to Seara. Sama herself admits that the business had reached a plateau and the next step would have required a very significant investment, which she wasn’t ready to make or pursue. This time around, she is determined to leave scale behind.
“The goal is not to reach a similar turnover as before, but to have a small business that can sustain itself and grow slowly, organically and on my own terms,” she says. “Something that feels personal, manageable, focusing on nurturing the relationship with my existing loyal customer base and gradually expanding it.”
Find out about our latest stories first — follow @financialtimesfashion on Instagram — and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
