The rise of Victoria Feldman and Tomas Berzins in fashion is a story not unlike that of other rising talents. The designers met in 2009 at the French fashion school Esmod. During his studies, Berzins worked for Alexander Wang, while Feldman gained experience at the LVMH-owned department store Le Bon Marché. When they graduated in 2011, they invested €10,000 in savings to launch their eponymous brand Victoria/Tomas.
“We had no business experience or connections,” Feldman recalls. “We were just two young designers with a passion to show our vision.” The turning point came in 2013 when Victoria/Tomas was selected as a finalist – the youngest ever – at the Hyères International Festival of Fashion, Photography and Accessories. Luxury retailers including Neiman Marcus, Harvey Nichols and Colette then came knocking and sales soared.
In 2017, the brand held its first fashion show in Paris. A year later, it made about €1 million in sales – not an unusual number for a small brand. The business continued to grow, giving the duo the confidence to manage their own distribution (until then, the brand worked with the Riccardo Grassi sales showroom, which handles sales for Erdem, Holzweiler and Farm Rio, among others). “We thought, OK, we’re on the right track,” says Feldman.
Still, in June, Feldman and Berzins announced the brand would no longer operate after years of struggling to deal with challenges, including a shrinking wholesale market — its primary distribution channel — brought on by Covid. At the beginning of the pandemic, the brand lost 70 percent of its turnover, Feldman says. “Every day we received cancellations of existing orders. And while some clients were still placing orders, factories were closing and we couldn’t finish production.”
Even after the blocking was lifted, business never fully recovered, Feldman says. In an effort to excite buyers, designers experimented with new concepts such as double-sided clothing. But selling virtually was a difficult idea, he recalls. Even though buyers could travel again, many still preferred online meetings to in-person meetings due to busy calendars. It was also difficult to get new clients because “they wouldn’t place an order for designs they had never seen [in person] and touched”.
Limited distribution channels were the death knell for Victoria/Tomas, which joins a growing list of independent fashion brands that have closed their doors this year. American designer Mara Hoffman ended her eponymous label in May after 24 years. The same month, British womenswear brand The Vampire’s Wife announced it would cease trading; Australian brand Dion Lee goes into voluntary administration; and Chinese designer Calvin Luo said he called it his namesake.
Others had to make the necessary switch: in February, ahead of New York Fashion Week, Puppets and Puppets founder Carly Mark announced that she was shutting down the fashion brand in its current iteration and relocating from New York to London, where it would have a second life as an accessories brand. London-based womenswear designer Roksanda narrowly escaped administration by selling its company to The Brand Group in May.
Business is tough for independent brand founders, who often struggle to maintain a healthy cash flow while depending on wholesale partners for distribution and other marketing support. This in itself is nothing new. However, the fashion landscape has become more tense and volatile due to the luxury slowdown, with the wealthiest shoppers favoring investment purchases from high-end companies.
“The economy is under pressure, and one of the byproducts is that the fashion business has suffered,” says Mark A Cohen, a consultant who retired this month from an 18-year tenure as director of retail studies at Columbia Business School.
“It’s a very difficult environment for emerging brands that are in the $200 million to $450 million range or less,” says Gary Wassner, CEO of Hilldun Corp, a New York-based group that finances and funds more than 400 brands, including Isabel Marant. , Golden Goose and Andam 2024 Grand Prix winner Christopher Esber. Against the backdrop of market volatility, funding is drying up. For private equity firms, “fashion has become a ‘don’t invest in’ category,” he says. “Generally speaking, they don’t want brands that people haven’t heard of.”
Brands big and small were also hit by the closure of luxury multi-brand store Matchesfashion (creditors from Prada to Totem are still owed millions of pounds) and the steep sale of luxury marketplace Farfetch to Korea’s Coupang (Farfetch owes long-term bondholders more than $400 million). Even smaller independent boutiques reached the end of their lives. In June, Alyssa Lau announced that she was shutting down New Classics, the multi-brand e-commerce store she founded in 2014. In November 2023, the specialty LCD retailer announced that it was going out of business after 11 years.
“We started with $15,000 and slowly raised it, investing all the profit back into the company,” says Lau. At its peak, New Classics brought in $400,000 in annual sales. But it’s been hard to keep up with the pace of fast fashion and the discounts increasingly offered by luxury retailers, he says. “Growth has really started to take things over. To transport more collections, you need to have a bigger budget. We needed to make money from our margins and we couldn’t keep up with the sharp discounting. Considering how much [the business] generated, it just wasn’t really worth it.’
The implications of the luxury retail upheaval are far-reaching. One London-based designer, who was not receiving timely payments from his wholesale partners, had to ask his parents for additional funds and also take out a loan to pay his suppliers, they told the Financial Times. condition of anonymity. With many independent brands hanging in the balance, the fashion week landscape could look very different come September.
Meanwhile, the businesses that survive are riskier than ever. “They’re not adventurous because they don’t have that space,” says Hilldun Corp.’s Wassner. “They buy items that have great sales and are loyal repeat consumers. So many brands that are emerging don’t have a significant following yet. In the past, [stores] he may have raised them, but right now they’re not taking those chances.”
As the industry evolved, so did the requirements for a successful operation. “Spending a lot of money on flagship stores and luxury fashion shows and marketing campaigns is a treat. That’s not wise unless you have so much money that it doesn’t matter,” says Cohen.
“Young brands need to look at all of these things and create efficiencies in their businesses that allow them to keep enough cash to keep going,” agrees Wassner.
Feldman and Berzins now see fashion as an outlet that has allowed them to express their creativity. Since closing their studio, they have begun to devote themselves to collaboration and other creative endeavors. “The store gave us the opportunity to make ourselves more known because people who are interested in fashion are interested in or come from other fields such as music, art and other creative fields,” says Berzins.
“We have received requests since we took this decision [from other brands and collaborators] and they didn’t stop working,” says Feldman. “We have a lot of projects ahead of us. So for today the Victoria/Tomas brand has ceased to exist, but Victoria and Tomas as individuals? We’re moving on.”
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