London-based label Lestrange opened its first international store on Amsterdam’s busy Neunergasse – or “de Negen Straatjes” – in early May. Founded by William Green and Tom Horne, the menswear brand focuses on non-seasonal garments that are stylish, versatile and durable.
FashionUnited visited the new store and spoke to Green and Horne about choosing Amsterdam as their first location outside of their traditional London area, their plans for future growth and why circular economy alone won’t solve the fashion industry’s sustainability problem.
Lestrange dates back to 2013 when it launched a single product – a hoodie aptly named “The Hood”. However, the founders soon noticed a difficult contradiction between the company’s ethos and the wholesale sector in which it operated.
“We found the fashion industry to be overly confusing. There were so many fashion cycles each year and it felt like not only was there a lack of innovation but a huge amount of consumption was being encouraged,” Horne tells FashionUnited at his Amsterdam store, which features natural textures and generative materials such as FSC-certified spruce plywood and pine.
“We worked for the retailers,” adds Green. “The buyers always wanted something new. They couldn’t put up with us coming back with the same products season after season.”
Buy less, buy better
It was an “old system” that the two couldn’t identify with – their ethos is that consumers should buy fewer but higher quality, timeless garments that they can mix and match and wear again and again.
While the two agree that circular fashion is an important step in the right direction, they don’t think it’s the be-all and end-all. “We don’t believe that the circular economy is the panacea that many think it is,” says Green, pointing to the fact that less than 1 percent of the material used to make clothes is used, according to a 2017 report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation recycled for new clothes.
“We need to reduce fashion’s footprint by 50 percent by the end of the decade,” he explains. “The kind of impact reduction we are seeing from circular approaches is not fast enough to meet these goals. We believe that it is much more important to extend the lifespan of clothes.”
Accordingly, in 2017 the brand decided to exit the wholesale business, which it saw as inextricably linked to overproduction, and switched to a D2C business model thanks to the investments of its customer base. “We crowdfunded in 2018, but then realized that 90 percent of the participation came from our existing clients,” says Green. “We thought, ‘why pay 5 percent to the platform when we can cut out the middleman’?”
Since then, the company has invited its top clients to invest in growing the brand, which has proven to be a success. The latest round of funding, closed within a month, raised £1 million, bringing the total to date to £3 million.
increase during the pandemic
Since moving to a D2C model, the company has improved year on year and even grown during the pandemic, which the founders attribute to a number of factors. “We saw this sudden spike in demand during lockdown and I don’t think it was a coincidence,” says Green. “We have adapted our communication accordingly to underscore the fact that our wardrobe is just as suitable for working from home as it is for the office. That versatility really resonated with people.”
Horne points to the company’s most popular product, “The 24 Trouser,” which is made from comfortable stretch cotton so the product looks like formal pants but feels more like sweatpants. Lestrange has sold over a hundred thousand pairs of these pants to date.
The brand also used the lockdown to strategize and formalize its physical store strategy, which included hiring a new retail boss and signing new leases. “We’ve been a little smart because we got some pretty cheap deals during lockdown,” Green said. One of those deals was for the first flagship store, which opened in May 2021 on London’s Earlham Street in Seven Dials.
The company takes an approach it calls “hospitality-centric,” which “is about making people feel comfortable in the store to generate curiosity about the brand and our mission,” explains Horne.
And this retail strategy seems to be paying off: The company saw a 100 percent year-on-year increase in like-for-like sales between 2021 and 2022, while the customer conversion rate during this period was around 50 percent, well above the previous target of 30 percent.
And the label is now pursuing this strategy abroad as well. Earlier this month, just days before opening his newest London store in Coal Drops Yard, Lestrange opened the doors of his first international store in Amsterdam.
So why the Netherlands? Well, despite being a British brand, only about 50 percent of Lestrange’s customer base is from the UK. About half of the rest is split between the US and Europe, with the two most important European markets being the Netherlands and Germany.
“It’s the customer base here that we really relate to,” Green said. “We seem to resonate really well with Dutch consumers, they have a progressive mindset about what we do,” he said, referring to both the company’s ethos and products.
Brexit also had an impact on the decision. “From the start, our clothes have been mostly made in Italy and Portugal,” says Green. “Brexit has obviously been a huge nightmare for the entire industry. Even now we don’t see any particular benefits, to be honest, but the consequence was that we opened a Dutch branch.”
Technically it is not a subsidiary, but it allows the company to operate from the Netherlands without having to deal with the bureaucratic hurdles of Brexit. “That has now changed, we now have a fully-fledged Dutch subsidiary and that has made it easier to do business here.” Although it was “far from a simple process,” Horne said it was “a less costly and more streamlined process” than in the German market, “so there was certainly some commercial appeal.”
Lestrange wants to open up other markets
The company, which is currently about 30 percent offline, is also eyeing other markets and plans to open a new location or two every year for the next five years. When asked about possible locations, the founders named additional Dutch stores as hypothetical possibilities, but also other key markets for the brand, such as Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Paris, Stockholm and Zurich.
A branch on the other side of the pond is also planned, with a provisional opening date of April 2025. However, it has not yet been decided where that will be. “It’s always been a dream to open anywhere in New York,” said Horne. “So I think that’s probably going to happen. It’s just a matter of timing.”
The Brooklyn borough is particularly popular with the brand. Even if it were considered a city in its own right and not New York City more broadly, it would be Lestrange’s second largest city after London. But the sky-high rents could deter the company from opening there.
“The most important thing is that the stores remain profitable for the company,” says Horne, who notes that pre-tax income adjusted for expenses is profitable in all current units. “It’s a huge advantage for us and we want it to stay that way.” He adds that a new London location could also follow, most likely in west London, “but we’re in no rush”.
outlook
What does the future hold for Lestrange? The vision of the founders is to slowly but steadily add more lines and possibly even move into completely different categories. “We see ourselves being able to transfer the values of our design principles to many other areas,” explains Green, citing women’s fashion, housewares and accessories as possible examples.
In keeping with the company ethos of “buy less and wear more”, Lestrange also recently launched a new non-garment product called Re_Fresh – an enzyme-powered laundry tablet that helps rejuvenate garments.
“Cotton is a very durable, strong fabric, but it doesn’t retain its color over its lifetime,” says Green. “So we created a tablet that acts like a gentle scrub on the fabric, removing any slightly faded hair that is just on the top to reveal the richer color underneath. It’s really amazing.”
Lestrange has teamed up with a Dutch scientist to work on the technology, which has been used in commercial textile production for decades but, according to the brand, is making its debut as a consumer product.
“Just like bringing a pair of shoes back to have them resoled, we want to refresh products to give them a new life,” says Green. The company has already been approached by a number of retailers and even other brands interested in this technology.
“Ultimately, we’re much more interested in bringing these technologies and innovations to the public eye than being the sole vendor,” concludes Green. “We believe this is a great opportunity to create new revenue streams for the company that don’t just depend on manufacturing new products.”
This article originally appeared on FashionUnited.uk. Translated and edited by Simone Preuss.