Cecilie Bahnsen burst onto the Copenhagen Fashion Week scene 10 years ago this month. And today, the designer — one of Copenhagen’s biggest fashion exports — is returning to her home city for a one-off archive show, celebrating the brand’s heritage and its long-standing creative community. Ambitiously, this celebratory showcase will not replace the brand’s usual Paris show, which is taking place on 1 October, or show the same pieces. When I visited the brand’s Copenhagen atelier two days before the show, her team were working on both collections at once.
“Right now, we feel very calm and excited at the same time. It’s been truly amazing being with the team, working with the archive, making sense of it all and looking at all the things we have achieved together,” Bahnsen tells me. “I think it’s important to stop and reflect, and sometimes you only do it in these moments.” To create the Copenhagen collection, Bahnsen and her team took out the archives and placed them in the middle of the studio a few months ago, splicing ideas, fabrics and silhouettes from various collections to create an offering based on past hits. For the show, the brand has flown in its entire board, investors and very important clients (VICs) from around the globe.
“It’s been very interesting for me, because it’s almost been educational; it’s been archive madness out here,” says CEO Mie Marie Ejdrup, a former investor and founder who joined Cecilie Bahnsen in September 2024, succeeding former CEO Kristine H Løbner. At this 10-year juncture, Ejdrup has ambitious goals for the label, aiming to triple the business by 2028. The plan is to focus on the direct-to-consumer (DTC) channel, and invest in e-commerce, private sales and bricks-and-mortar retail in the coming years. Bahnsen built her business on the brand’s signature voluminous dresses, which became synonymous with Scandi style over the last decade. But now, the brand is ready to diversify product categories to unlock new opportunities.
“The brand has been on a really impressive journey, especially when you take into consideration that it’s been almost entirely organic growth [without outside investment],” Ejdrup says. “It has predominantly grown wholesale, which I think is very natural for a brand of this size, but it means there is a lot of potential to advance and professionalise our own channels.” The brand declines to share revenues but it has approximately 130 stockists. Revenues grew 33 per cent year-on-year in June, exceeding its 30 per cent target.
Getting closer to the consumer
In the past decade, wholesale has delivered wins and losses for the brand. A career highlight, Bahnsen says, was when Dover Street Market bought her second collection. But she admits the closure of Matches last year was a major blow to business. Wholesale remains important, but as the brand matures, the designer and CEO are keen to become less reliant. So, in line with today’s show, Cecilie Bahnsen is opening its first boutique in Copenhagen, inviting VICs to the store on Thursday to shop one-of-a-kind looks from the archival release.
From next week, the store will be open to the public. Ejdrup hopes it’ll be the first of many physical retail spaces. Since joining, she has spearheaded investments in “less sexy, but necessary” technological advancements when it comes to fulfilment, inventory management, CRM and customer data, to “build a strong foundation” to scale. Ejdrup also built out a team of international hires, across design and marketing from agencies and brands in London and Paris, bringing “world-class talent” to the business with more roles being advertised as we speak.
Showing in Paris is a key part of the vision for Cecilie Bahnsen, the duo agree and today’s homecoming doesn’t signal Bahnsen’s return to her home city. “Our main markets have always been outside of Copenhagen, and I think to get closer to the customer, the buyers and the press, it was important for us to move it to Paris,” Bahnsen says. “I also always like a good challenge, to push myself. And I think it really has done that for the brand.” Paris also helped establish the label as a luxury player, she adds. The Spring/Summer 2026 show is on the same day as Dior, Tom Ford and Balmain.
Marketing is also a focus. Today’s archive show will underline the designer’s rich, decade-long history and strong aesthetic. As arguably the flagship show of Copenhagen Fashion Week this season, it will likely garner a lot of press and social attention, while strengthening relationships with key clients and setting the brand up well for its next phase. “I was quite amazed when I saw how far the brand had come without an actual marketing strategy,” she says. “I thought if we actually develop a cohesive commercial strategy to support our efforts, how far could we take this?”
Surviving the slowdown
The business hasn’t been immune to the macroeconomic challenges plaguing the industry, Ejdrup acknowledges. In terms of sales, the brand delivered a “negative result” in 2023, but it returned to growth in 2024. “My key priority coming in was to stabilise the business financially, right? And we managed to do that last year,” Ejdrup shares. The brand is off to a strong start for 2025, she adds, with revenue ahead of budget. “It’s really exciting to start to see the strategy that we’ve put in place kick in. It’s not a given in the market that we are in; a lot of it has been driven by the dynamics in the wholesale market. It’s really been a matter of finding new ways of doing business, where we are less dependent on these few very big players, and where we can stand more on our own two feet.”
The US is Cecilie Bahnsen’s biggest market, representing 20 per cent of the business, which exposes the brand to Trump’s tariffs. Fortunately, 100 per cent of manufacturing takes place in Europe, mainly across Italy and Portugal, so it’s facing the lower end of tariffs at 15 per cent. Nonetheless, it’s a challenge. “There’s a lot of strategic considerations around: do we take the margin hit on our side, or do we push it towards consumers?” Ejdrup says. “We’ve decided to take the hit on our side and not increase our prices significantly in the US, but obviously it comes at a price.”
Vogue Business breaks down tariffs by country and what the rates mean for fashion.
Japan has been a challenging market for major luxury groups in the last quarter, after a major tourism spike following the crash of the yen last year caused a tough comparison. While tourism has normalised this year, Cecilie Bahnsen didn’t see the initial tourist sales spike, so growth has remained positively stable for the brand. Japan represents 17 per cent of the business, Ejdrup says.
Developing new categories
Bahnsen has started to diversify her assortment via some successful collaborations over the last five years, which the brand uses to test and develop new categories.
Its ongoing Asics sneaker collaboration launched in 2022 has been hugely successful, with every drop selling out across the majority of styles. Ejdrup recalls a recent trip to Tokyo for an Asics x Cecilie Bahnsen pop-up: “Cecilie is like a rockstar there, people queued all night and camped to meet her and get the [product].” Bahnsen has also collaborated with Mackintosh on coats (2020) and The North Face on bags and outerwear (2024). These tie-ups represent 15 per cent of the business, Ejdrup says, and she and Bahnsen want it to stay that way going forward. But they’re keen to develop additional categories in-house based on their learnings, to keep developing the design and offering the Cecilie Bahnsen consumer a fuller wardrobe.
The Danish designer will unveil a tie-up with The North Face during her Paris Fashion Week show on Wednesday, as she continues to experiment with bringing a practical sensibility into her romantic looks.
“It’s an important part of growing up as a more emerging brand,” Ejdrup says. “You’re more dependent on partners for a lot of reasons — for production, for marketing. But as you grow up and mature, and it’s more established and you become more financially independent, I think it’s important to also look at doing some of these category extensions on your own.”
All staff, including Bahnsen and Ejdrup, will do shifts in the store on rotation, to get closer to the customer, Ejdrup says. “I think it’s so important that every single person in this team knows who our consumer is. I think maybe we haven’t been good enough — I think it’s definitely something where we can evolve.”
Both Ejdrup and Bahnsen see the store as a creative studio to test new ideas. “We can learn a lot from it,” Bahnsen says. “I’m excited for the team and I to be closer to the customer, to get their feedback, to understand how they live and what memories they have of the collections. We’ve done so many pop-ups — but now, we have built a universe.” Today’s show is set to be a snapshot of that universe, as Bahnsen embarks on her next decade.
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