A week ahead of her London Fashion Week show, Pauline Dujancourt is juggling two things at once: the adrenaline of presenting her brand on the runway, and the reality of growing the business behind it.
Dujancourt is fresh off delivering a much bigger collection to a bigger selection of retailers. Between FW25 and SS26, the business saw approximately 140% growth in its seasonal turnover (annual turnover is six figures). She landed Net-a-Porter as a stockist for SS26, while Dover Street Market has expanded its range of the brand across global markets including Singapore, LA, Tokyo, London and Paris, after seeing strong sell-through and demand.
Now, the designer is scaling up manufacturing and adapting the merchandising of her collections, which have been centered on hand-crafted knitwear since she founded the brand in 2022 — all without losing that human touch that makes the brand special.
“It’s been a bit of a roller coaster for the past few months, because we’re increasing production,” Dujancourt says, speaking from a temporary studio in Vauxhall, South London. She moved here after graduating from Paul Smith’s Foundation’s talent incubation program, which offers studio space in Farringdon. While planning the show, the team is also prepping for the move to its new Liverpool Street studio. “We’ve had to squeeze in a lot of things, but I’m really proud of the team that we’ve managed to deliver the production and the collection.”
Dujancourt founded her eponymous label after graduating with a master’s from Central Saint Martins (CSM), specializing in knitwear (the French designer completed her bachelor’s at Paris’s École Duperré). Just two years after launching, she was named a finalist of the LVMH Prize, for its 2024 edition. This season marks her fourth on the London Fashion Week (LFW) schedule.
The fashion show has become central to how Dujancourt communicates her brand, which she describes as celebrating womanhood and bringing ancestral craft into a contemporary context. Bestsellers include hand-knitted jumpers, dresses and lingerie-inspired layering pieces; prices typically range from around £300 to £1,700, with special handcrafted dresses rising above £3,000.
“Fashion week has been an opportunity for us to introduce our creative language through the collection, but also through the set, the music, the atmosphere that you create,” she says, describing a theme anchored in craft, community, and shared knowledge (the full narrative will be revealed during the show). “I feel like now it’s more about establishing this and building trust, getting closer and closer to our audience and to the press and buyers as well.”
While many new designers on the London schedule are prioritizing direct-to-consumer (DTC) growth, Dujancourt is using the LFW platform to expand wholesale. “Wholesale is about building trust, visibility and showing our international presence. It’s also reassuring for the customer to find us in stores they recognize,” she says, noting that wholesale makes up around three-quarters of the business. “I’m very aware of the [challenges with wholesale] and that you might get different results from one season to another, but I’ve been lucky to work with partners who are supportive and used to working with emerging brands.” She’s also building her direct channels, and is working to improve her e-commerce site.
Dujancourt says London has offered unusually tangible support for an emerging label — from the British Fashion Council ecosystem to mentorship through Paul Smith’s Foundation. “It’s been really surprising to see how we’ve managed to build so much momentum — I didn’t expect it,” she says. “Even the fact that our collection for SS26 was our bestselling collection was a surprise, given that I’m a knitwear designer. But maybe it’s the fact that people are starting to understand more and more what I’m trying to express through the brand.”
The challenge is to scale at a pace that feels sustainable, without sacrificing quality, speed, or craftsmanship. “It is difficult for a young brand to take new [wholesale doors] sometimes, because I’m very conscious that I want to grow the brand, but I want to do it sustainably. I would hate to disappoint anyone in terms of quality, or not delivering on time,” she says. “It’s really important to me that the business remains stable.”
Scaling up
While the term ‘commercial’ may seem like a nightmare for a designer who’s known for handcrafted pieces, Dujancourt doesn’t shy away from it. “As I was launching the brand and working on it, I’ve always had the thought in mind — what if it all goes well?” she says. “It’s always been a question of how you scale those intricate, time-consuming pieces. Do you want to stay small and stick to that, or is there something else to bring to the brand? It was clear to me that I would have to evolve the idea and make more production-friendly pieces.”
In preparation to scale, Dujancourt needed to get comfortable with some trade-offs: between craft purity versus production-friendly design, and production control versus outsourcing. “I think sometimes limitations [of designing in a more commercially-friendly way] are actually inspiring,” she says. One production-friendly piece for SS26 is a sheer long-sleeve top that’s great for layering, particularly under some of the more intricate hand-knitted pieces that are harder — both technically and financially — to produce at scale, she explains.
What Dujancourt is less comfortable with is the potential that outsourcing could lead to ethical misdemeanors. That’s why she’s kept production within a network she knows intimately. At one point, she was considering expanding beyond Peru — where hand-knits and crochets are made — and developing a network of knitters across the world, but she decided it would be too hard to maintain a close relationship and to audit ethical standards.
In Peru, the designer works with a community model centered around a training office in Lima, which makes the bulk of her crochet and hand-knits. “They have different groups of women who work from home, so they can take care of their children. But they can also gain their own independence,” she says. Dujancourt has been working with this community since she was a student. As demand increases, more knitters have been trained to take on the additional workload. Dujancourt hopes to visit Peru later this year, and is keen for that intimacy to carry through to her newer suppliers: in London, she visits knitters in-person and knows them all by name, and she regularly FaceTimes makers in France when they encounter difficulties with the making.
She’s brought that personal touch to her sales strategy, too. Rather than joining a multi-brand showroom early on, Dujancourt began hosting her own appointments in Paris at her father’s office, contacting buyers and press directly. “It’s taught me so much, because I was directly talking to buyers and understanding what worked or didn’t work in the collection range, the pricing, and used that feedback to develop,” she says.
She traces that ability to communicate the brand back to the LVMH Prize process, which came relatively early in her career. “It really pushed me to articulate the core of the brand in a short time frame, and to make sure I was clear about the design process and my creative language,” Dujancourt says. The industry connections she made through the prize still visit her showroom in Paris.
Long term, Dujancourt wants to grow without giving up independence, and without losing sight of the hands behind the work. “I would love to remain independent and keep growing, and bring the business to a place where it’s stable,” she says. She wants to expand categories — potentially accessories — and eventually create a documentary about her maker network. “I want to celebrate these women who have incredible skills, but they’re so humble about it. They deserve to be celebrated, because there would be no brand without them.”
