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France’s First Online Fashion Brand

Scaling Sézane, France’s First Online Fashion Brand

In 2004, when Morgane Sézalory began selling her sister’s cast-off vintage clothes on eBay, “No one was confident that it could be a business, more than a hobby,” she says.

This didn’t dissuade Sézalory. Having quit high school in her final year, she flogged vintage fashion on eBay for four years, before, with no business training or design experience, she launched her own website, Les Composantes, where she uploaded and sold 100 vintage finds a month.

In 2013, Sézalory challenged conventional wisdom again. By this time, fashion retail had moved online — Net-a-Porter and Yoox had been in business for over a decade, MatchesFashion had gone online in 2006, Farfetch launched in 2007, and most large fashion labels had launched e-commerce in some form. In the US, start-ups like Warby Parker, Bonobos and Everlane were also pioneering a new model — the online-only fashion brand — while Nasty Gal had grown out of founder Sophia Amoruso's eBay store to become a standalone website and brand.

But France was lagging behind. “It was [believed that] a brand has to have a shop,” says Sézalory. “No one could believe that I was starting a brand online.” Undeterred, she relaunched Les Composantes under the name Sézane — a contraction of her first and last name — and made the pivot from e-tailer to brand, working with a few European factories to produce feminine, French-inspired designs — easy day-to-night dresses, loose chic trousers and subtle blouses with details like a button-down back or sailor-esque buttons on the shoulders.

Corentin Petit, co-founder of French men’s label Balibaris, joined the venture as Sézalory’s business partner a few months before the relaunch, and the two managed everything together — including packaging and shipping everything out of Sézalory’s apartment. France’s first online-only fashion brand was born.

“It was obvious,” says Sézalory, who is now 31. “I didn’t have the cost of a retailer and there was no one between me and the consumer. It was great quality and I don’t think we had any competition for product at that price.”

Indeed, this business model has become tried and tested. Warby Parker and Bonobos have both hit $100 million in revenues — a figure that Everlane expects to reach this year, according to market sources. Like Sézane, these businesses work closely with their factories and sell direct-to-consumer, cutting out the middleman and the overheads of operating physical stores. They pass on this saving to the consumer and sell their goods with lesser mark-ups, to hit low prices for high-quality fashion.

“We had no experience making clothes so we had to find really good quality factories where we could visit them quickly. The most important thing for us is for us to go there, to have a very strong relationship with the factory,” says Sézalory. “We make shoes in factories who work with luxury brands but because of our business model we can have a different price.” Shoes — which include wear-anywhere sandals, espadrilles and heels in natural tones, as well as sneakers — are Sézane’s top-selling category.

More than two-thirds of Sézane’s collections are manufactured in Europe, in factories who also work for brands including Chloe, Lanvin and Vetements (the rest is made in locations including China and India). “It’s not cheap, but we basically have lower gross margins than anyone in our range of prices,” explains Petit. Heeled leather sandals cost around €150 (about $165), while dresses range from €85 ($94) to €230 ($253). If you add the cost of operating a physical store, he says, “you get very high prices and then you have to discount or do promotions. We don’t do that.”

However, Sézalory rejects the comparison with brands like Everlane, which focus on basics like t-shirts. “For each collection, there are 200 fabrics that we use. It’s not plain, it’s fashion,” she says. Transparent pricing — a point of differentiation for Everlane, which reveals its mark-ups to consumers — is also not part of Sézane’s approach. “We never explain the price — when the consumer goes to Isabel Marant, Carven, she doesn’t think about the price, it’s about desire,” says Sézalory.

Sézane produces two seasonal collections a year, as well as smaller monthly capsule collections. This short product cycle generates newness for consumers and avoids leftover stock (Sézane does not discount, and items on the site regularly sell out). “That helps us where a lot of clothing companies have a cash problem,” says Petit. “We don’t wait for payment from anyone.”

Sézalory declined to provide current revenues, but says Sézane has no outside investors and has always been profitable — a fact she puts down to control. The company manages its shipping and logistics in-house, from a warehouse in West France, and doesn’t sell anywhere except Sézane.com, despite “lot of requests from department stores,” says Petit.

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Kirjoitettu Thursday 21.07.2016

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