When Madeline Duneier launched her jewellery brand State Fair in September, she was entering a booming — and increasingly crowded — lab-grown diamond market. That meant she couldn’t just rely on the standard line-up of stud earrings and tennis bracelets that her competitors were already selling (and others imitate with less expensive stones).
So for State Fair’s inaugural collection, she created a selection of 65 studs in five shapes — including oval, pear, emerald, heart and round — wrapped in hand-painted borders in bright colours like hot pink and canary yellow.
The idea was to give customers “a moment of self-expression,” Duneier said. “It’s still a luxury, but it’s playful,” she added.
But they also ticked a very important box — the earrings would be harder to copy.
Dupe culture is just one of several obstacles founders are facing today: In the last three years, venture capital investors have retreated from fashion in favour of AI-powered tech startups, while the multi-brand retailers brands could once count on for exposure are facing bankruptcies and costly restructurings. Plus, post-pandemic supply chain disruptions persist, including higher tariffs in manufacturing hubs like China and India.
For the generation of startups launching amid the chaos, the key to success has come from identifying white spaces in obscure niches. The one-year-old womenswear line The Park, for instance, is making sleek basics to be worn under luxury labels like The Row, and three-year-old Le Alfré is applying a streetwear ethos to classic menswear.
Moving beyond those niches, however, will require more creative thinking. With funding harder to come by, businesses will be able to grow at a slower pace without investor pressure, but could struggle to raise money for retail and international expansions when they eventually look to scale.
The brands best positioned to succeed will be those who find ways to stand out. In practice, that means blending traditional tactics like brick-and-mortar shopping and glossy brand marketing with modern strategies like drop-shipping through online marketplaces, creating an easily identifiable, hard-to-replicate product and live streaming to reach new shoppers.
“A lot of these traditional pathways are broken or not as effective anymore,” said Tony Wang, founder of luxury brand consultancy Office of Applied Strategy. “It then just underscores the potential opportunity for brands to chart new paths forward.”
Developing an Identity
At a time when there are millions of brands that appeal to every kind of person, new labels are justifying their existence by fulfilling specific needs for subsets of highly engaged consumers.
The Park’s founder Sarah Bonello, for instance, zeroed in on creating basics for luxury customers — think $405 elasticised velvet leggings and $435 scoop-neck bodysuits in non-synthetic fabrics — that felt upscale enough to be styled underneath a Dior bar jacket or Chanel tweeds.
“Skims is incredible, but a lot of the people that I was talking to just wouldn’t wear that with what they were [wearing],” Bonello said.
Sometimes that means embracing marketing tactics not typically associated with a particular category. Brandon Snower started Le Alfré to reach Gen Z men who grew up loving the marketing prowess of streetwear brands like Stüssy and Supreme but preferred to wear button-ups and trousers. His solution has been to market his signature contrast-collar oxford shirts through a fictional character — named Alfré — who embodies the lifestyle of a high-flying Wall Street executive, living in a Manhattan penthouse and vacationing at a Mexican beach house.
“I enjoyed everything about streetwear … the marketing, the branding, the emotional connection,” Snower said. “I felt like that was missing in the more classic, timeless space of menswear.”
And in the age of dupe culture, crafting products with design details that are harder to replicate is also essential for standing out. Barcelona-based María Sancho started her womenswear label Señorita in 2023 in the hopes of cornering a Spanish market with a contemporary spin on traditional Spanish garments. Her best-selling styles include a $600 embroidered bolero jacket named after singer Rosalía and a $500 flamenco-styled ruffled mini-dress named after actress Penélope Cruz.
Señorita’s clothes are “reimagined in a way that a 30-plus-year-old would wear nowadays to go to the office,” Sancho said. “In the same way Burberry has the trench coat or Dior has the bar jacket, for me it was that element where the whole universe of Señorita will develop from … because that’s something that is identifiable.”
Building a Following
Brands can’t just craft a distinct identity, they also must find clever ways to connect with overstimulated shoppers.
After years of false starts, live streaming is finally picking up steam in the West. In March, The Park’s Bonello started doing Instagram live streams with Christos Garkinos — who co-owned the popular Los Angeles vintage shop Decades — through which she’s been able to reach new customers “in the middle of the country,” she said. She sold over $18,000 worth of goods in two hours during one live show in September, added Bonello, who sees live streaming as a way to create “one-on-one relationships with your consumer.”
“Your story really can’t be told by a bunch of other influencers,” she said.
Creating appealing retail stores, too, plays a role. In October, Le Alfré opened a penthouse showroom in New York where clients can reserve private appointments, receive complimentary drinks and are never rushed out the door, Snower said. The showroom helped double traffic on the brand’s online store in November and double sales growth for the overall business this year, he added.
“Instead of courting the retailers and editors, [brands are] building direct relationships with their customers,” Wang said. “That might have started out as a survival strategy for a lot of young designers, but it’s actually one of the most effective strategies.”
With wholesale, startups are side-stepping department stores for independent retailers that appeal to their target audience and can give their assortment the attention it needs. The one-year-old womenswear label Arlo Mott, co-founded by Alex Drexler of Alex Mill, is expanding its footprint through specialty boutiques like Tenet in the Hamptons in New York and Hampden in South Carolina, where “the owners are the buyers and some of them are also on the sales floor with the customers,” Drexler said.
These strategies may be helping early-stage fashion brands gain traction, but many are still struggling to find financial backers. Sancho, who funded Señorita with a small loan and personal savings, hasn’t been able to secure angel investors to fund an expansion, despite the brand’s sales increasing 50 percent this year, and being on track to double next year, she said.
But once investors are ready to take more of a risk, this playbook — including creating distinct products, methodical retail expansion and driving sales growth from repeat customers — will likely make them attractive to the right partners.
“What makes investors really interested in apparel is a differentiated point of view, a highly engaged community and a product offering that feels more timeless,” said Marissa Lepor, a managing director at investment bank The Sage Group. “Sophisticated investors who have a lot of consumer expertise have arguably a better sense of what brands have a bigger opportunity than others, especially at the early stage when perhaps there’s less data.”
