How to Grow a $100 Million Brand: Building Buzz on a Budget | BoF Insights

BoF Insights is The Business of Fashion’s in-house consultancy. We partner with leading fashion and beauty brands and investors to help them sustainably grow for the long term. Get in touch to find out how we can support your business.

The Vampire’s Wife had all the makings of the next big indie label.

Founded in 2016 by model-turned-designer Susie Cave, the brand found its niche in romantic, gothic glam apparel with a celebrity following. Commercially, it appeared to be on the upswing too, with revenue growing 38 percent in 2022. But in May of this year, the brand announced it was shutting down.

The Vampire’s Wife is one of several once-hot independent brands that has closed in recent months, including Calvin Luo’s namesake label. CFDA Award-nominated New York cult brand Puppets and Puppets closed its ready-to-wear line earlier this year, though it continues to produce accessories out of London.

The string of failures is a clear signal that cultural relevance can only take a brand so far. It’s a lesson many in the industry forgot during the years of cheap digital ads and free-flowing funding that followed the Great Recession, when many brands turned a little heat into a massive audience, though not always massive sales.

“[Previously,] you had the chance to just ride the waves,” said Nanushka chief executive Péter Baldaszti, reflecting on the Budapest-based contemporary brand’s early growth journey. “I’m not saying [it was] easy because, of course, scaling up a company from one million to 20 to 30 million in four years is obviously not easy, but not necessarily difficult either when you have the right … circumstances.”

Many of the last decade’s launchpads for emerging brands have become less accessible — marketing on Instagram is more expensive, and by some measures less effective, than it was in the 2010s, and few venture funds are lining up to back unknown fashion labels these days. Or in the case of specialty retailers such as Opening Ceremony and Totokaelo, or luxury e-commerce players like Matchesfashion, they’ve disappeared entirely.

In this environment, even indie labels that have established wide-ranging cultural influence and racked up accolades are struggling to turn that buzz into sales. A-Cold-Wall, the British luxury streetwear brand founded by former Virgil Abloh mentee Samuel Ross, generates around $10 million in revenue or less per year.

In conversations with BoF Insights, The Business of Fashion’s in-house consultancy, indie brand leaders and investors today spoke of a new growth framework, one with a focus on achieving sustained business performance to generate meaningful scale. Even if a brand has cultivated heat, its leaders need to pay attention to core growth levers, because the market today will not be so forgiving of buzzy brands that are not underpinned by solid fundamentals.

“A brand can be fuelled by hype,” said Stefano Martinetto, chief executive and co-founder of Tomorrow, a growth and development platform for fashion brands which acquired A-Cold-Wall in October 2023. “[But] the trajectory between hype and consolidation is more expensive than the [initial cost to start up the business]. It requires a lot of care and a lot of attention and a lot of execution.”

In part one of this series, BoF Insights breaks down the formula for capitalising on early brand buzz with effective customer acquisition and marketing to grow into a $100 million brand.

British luxury streetwear brand Represent started as a college project of co-founder George Heaton, who began screen printing t-shirts in his back garden in the northwest of England. Today, it generates over $100 million in annual revenue, with a flagship store in Los Angeles and partnerships with leading wholesalers such as Selfridges, Saks and Neiman Marcus.

Represent grew mostly by making good use of grassroots marketing methods. It regularly opens pop-ups in cities from London and New York to Berlin and Glasgow. Fans queued up for nine hours outside one temporary store in Manchester last year, Heaton said.

“For us, [pop-ups are] just about the community. . . it’s more of how we can connect with our consumer,” said Heaton. “We’d bring a load of samples that never made it to the market, and it caused a little bit of a heat. And consumers just love that.”

Fans connect on Instagram to listen to Q&As hosted by Represent, tune into bi-weekly Day In A Life episodes hosted by co-founders George and Mike Heaton, and gather on fan-led Facebook groups to chat about the brand as well as sell and trade. The Represent Talk Worldwide Facebook group boasts over 16,000 members. In turn, Represent integrates customer feedback into its product development, merchandising and marketing strategies.

Represent’s marketing tactics demonstrate a pendulum swing away from increasingly expensive performance marketing.

The prevailing wisdom for scaling brands was once to buy cheap digital ads and partner with trending influencers on sponsored posts to fuel direct sales. Today, the days of social media as a cost-effective way to drive revenue are long gone.

Social media algorithms have changed, making it difficult for organic content to thrive and leaving indie brands unable to compete with major conglomerates’ sizeable ad spend. Customers aren’t converting via social channels like they used to, meaning brands are spending more than three times the amount to acquire each customer than they did a decade ago.

A wave of indie brands is finding a new route to customer expansion by bucking the trend for traditional advertising. They’re taking the harder route by marketing themselves organically. They are creating rich online community spaces and they’re going offline to orchestrate valuable in-person customer touchpoints, where brand pop-ups and community meet-ups like running clubs have emerged as key avenues for reinforcing ties with existing customer bases and making connections with new ones.

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Antoine Mothay, co-founder and president of French leather goods brand Polène, says that the primary way new clients discover the company is through word of mouth. In 2023, the brand’s handbags took over TikTok with countless user-generated unboxing and review videos, with TikTokers commenting on Polène’s affordability relative to heritage luxury brands.

Instead of investing heavily in paid media, Mothay says that Polène leans into an organic influencer strategy and gifts Polène products, prioritising investment in the product itself over visibility. The brand works closely with creators, “maintaining a relationship with them, explaining our bags, explaining why we are different, trying to see which kind of designs they prefer,” says Mothay. “When we [gift] our bags, they post [about them] even … two, three years after.”

For some brands, this organic strategy can help instil discipline into marketing spend. Mothay estimates that in its eight years of operation, the brand has never spent more than 10 percent of total sales on marketing. A more modest marketing budget will likely result in a steadier pace of revenue growth, but may be better suited to today’s tough climate.

Scaling brands are also placing less emphasis on costly activations like fashion month as a core avenue for exposure and visibility.

Emily Adams Bode Aujla, founder of the American luxury brand Bode, has shown at fashion weeks in New York and Paris off and on since 2017, most recently a co-ed show in Paris in January 2023, a signal that the brand had made it into fashion’s highest ranks.

Today, however, runways are not at the centre of Bode’s engagement approach. Now, the brand is leaning into activations such as in-store talks to engage customers and buyers in carefully designed spaces that speak to the Bode narrative.

“It goes back to what your mission is. If your mission is to engage with brands and sit amongst brands that also show in that way, [then] you can make that part of your . . . seasonal exploration,” said Bode. “For us, I know that we can engage with our clients and engage with our buyers in a million different ways . . . that’s just as valuable or sometimes even more valuable than a seven-minute runway show.”

This article is part one of a series by BoF Insights that outlines today’s playbook to translate cultural heat into commercial success. Subsequent articles will further explore the levers and enablers introduced in BoF Insights’ growth framework in this article.

BoF Insights is The Business of Fashion’s in-house consultancy. We partner with leading fashion and beauty brands and investors to help them sustainably grow for the long term. Get in touch to find out how we can support your business.

Editor’s Note: This article was amended on 2 August 2024. An earlier version incorrectly stated that Puppets and Puppets had shut down. It has not. The brand closed its ready-to-wear line but continues to design accessories.