To receive the Vogue Business newsletter, sign up here.
Her vision is to challenge the fashion system by proving that reused and deadstock materials have a place in luxury. To get there, Marine Serre has hired a group of new executives to flesh out her all-female executive team.
Across the 67-person company, women account for 81 per cent of managers and 100 per cent of the core executive leaders. “When I worked at other brands, most of the time it was men at the executive level. I just wanted to create some equilibrium,” she says. “Sometimes when I tell people I run the brand, I can see they are like ‘oh, you don’t have a guy doing that?’”
One of Paris’s most exciting young talents, Serre is hitting reset in order to grow sustainably. Her brand’s star has burned brightly and risen quickly after launching in 2016 when Serre won the LVMH Prize. Her shows attract crowds: showing in Paris this week, her 2,000-person open-access show quickly sold out. Expect deadstock, upcycled and recycled pieces at the forefront.
Now, as a €15 million business (sales have spiked from €1.9 million revenue in 2018) with 225 points of sale, the brand is grappling with balancing explosive growth with a desire for responsible and sustainable development. Serre says the brand’s trajectory is not the product of a growth strategy, sales targets or a five-year plan.
“We are constantly questioning ourselves. Asking if things make sense and not just doing things without thinking, without questioning the system,” she says. “It can be exhausting to do that because the world itself wants you to produce more, publish more. Sometimes doing less is better.”
The restructuring was meant to reaffirm that ethos. She’s honing in on sustainable design. Last season, 92 per cent of Serre’s Autumn 2022 collection “Hard Drive” was made from either regenerated — upcycled, deadstock and recycled fabrics — (70 per cent) or certified sustainable materials such as organic cotton (22 per cent), a proportion that’s climbing as the designer continues to invest in in-house processing for deadstock and vintage goods. She’s developed her own supply chain in her Paris studio to disassemble garments and ready the upcycled materials for manufacturing.
Showing just twice a year, Serre has shifted to the January/June fashion calendar to coincide with its anniversary and also as a nod to its growing menswear business, which launched three seasons ago. She also bulked up her leadership team to guide the company forward: Serre hired 29 people in new positions since 2020, with six additions to the core team (the company’s answer to a C-suite), including a new chief operating officer and digital and marketing director to work alongside Serre's sister Justine, who is finance director. The organisation was also transitioned into a matrix structure, meaning employees don’t report up to a single manager but report into various leaders across the business to promote collaboration and ideas sharing, Serre says.
Now at the forefront of a growing upcycling movement that also includes emerging designers like Connor Ives and Bethany Williams, Serre operates a new type of business while adhering to some of the luxury brand traditions, to transform the industry from within, says Serge Carreira, head of emerging brands initiatives at Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode. Can she stick to it as the business grows?
“Marine has questioned how things are done in luxury while embracing some of the rules of the industry, particularly fashion shows that have been a really strong and bold way for her to share a message,” he says. “She demonstrates how a business can be done nowadays, in the frame of the industry, but being able to express herself on something she feels strongly about, without compromising.”
Grappling with big growth
Before the pandemic, Serre met critical acclaim and high volumes of orders for her Autumn 2020 collection “Marée Noire”. It was a double-edged sword. “The brand was growing and growing because it was so well received, but it was really alarming. I was kind of angry,” Serre says. “I wanted things to change.”
Consumers weren’t aware that Serre’s bestselling items like the moon top and printed jeans were recycled. Then the pandemic hit, and suddenly the designer began connecting with and learning more about her brand community online.
“As strange as it is, we had more and more people liking our videos, sending messages to us saying, ‘it’s so nice what you are doing with upcycling!’ or ‘I love this video that you made about fabrication’,” Serre says. “I never communicated on sustainability before because it just wasn’t the point. But after Covid, it’s become something I need to talk about as someone living in this world. I really felt a shift in our community that was really growing and being really supportive.”
As the brand began communicating more about its sustainable processes, the community continued to grow. And while many independents faltered, Marine Serre sales grew 95 per cent from 2019-2020. That same year, Marine Serre launched its e-commerce site, which has in-depth product information and archive pieces searchable by material. The DTC business grew 30 per cent in 2021.
Accepting lower margins to make upcycling more accessible
Upcycling is an expensive process by nature. Instead of sending fabrics to a factory with the pattern, Serre has developed an in-house production, which can disassemble pieces and ready them for manufacturers to create from a pattern.
Serre’s business is divided into four lines: Red (made-to-order), Gold (high-fashion), Borderline (underwear) and White (elevated basics). The White Line, in particular, is key to Serre’s future plans for the label. With a series of upcycled everyday tops and skirts or trousers that retail for around €300, she hopes to broaden the reach of sustainable luxury beyond high-ticket, one-of-a-kind pieces.
“We know how to make €3,000 dresses that are fully upcycled, but if you really want to change the system, you need to change everyday garments. I want upcycling to be seen in the street!” To achieve this, Serre accepts lower margins on upcycled pieces in order to keep them the same price as the garments made from recycled fibres, with much shorter supply chains.
“The industry is refusing to accept upcycling as a technique that can be industrialised,” says Orsola de Castro, co-founder of Fashion Revolution. “Therefore, we're only really seeing upcycling as a new form of craft that implies long working methods, training people in this assembly and reassembly in very small batches — making it very costly.” To scale upcycling, you need enough demand to be able to produce the kind of numbers with your design signature that adopts that technique, she adds. As a medium-sized brand now with healthy enough sales, Serre wants to show other brands the possibility of her methods.
The process might be complex, “but in the end, you don't feel that it is upcycled”. Serre says. “That was really a goal for me.”
So many times, you see designers that start with a strong statement and the statement suddenly fades or seems to be diluted, says FHCM’s Carreira. “In a way, season after season, Marine has been bolder and stronger in her message and even more consistent. The main challenge for Marine is to keep this consistency while continuing to grow.”
How does Serre reconcile putting out collections, launching new categories and scaling her business when a lot of sustainable conversation is centred on reducing growth?
“I’ve always said I'm at the service of people. I design collections in response to the past season, as a reflection of what has happened, how people are dressing,” she says. “We let it grow organically. And we always have the power of saying, OK, we sold too much of that product. We have to tell retailers we can only make certain quantities based on what we can produce.”
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
Correction: This story was updated to correct the percentage of regenerative and sustainable materials in Marine Serre's Autumn 2022“Hard Drive” collection in the sixth par. (24/6/2022)
Clarification: This article was updated to include Marine's sister as finance director in seventh par. The quote in the final par has also been clarified.
More from this author:
Bluemarble: Meet the brand reshaping menswear in Paris
Dickies is turning 100 years old. It’s gone viral with Gen Z