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Just over 10 years ago, Martin Gjesing and Frederik Bjerregaard, who played football together as kids, swapped a soccer ball for a satellite and formed creative agency Moon in Copenhagen. While you might not be familiar with their company, you’re likely to be familiar with concepts they helped bring to life.
Working hand in hand with Ganni’s Nicolaj and Ditte Reffstrup, Moon helped kickstart the cut and community of the Ganni Girl, which helped the company go global, become B Corp-certified, and increase revenues from €10 million in 2014 to €121 million in 2024. Their involvement in the Cecilie Bahnsen x The North Face collaboration amped up the “Girly Gorpcore” aesthetic.
One of the factors addicting this new strategy was the supersonic speed at which fashion, and the world, are moving. Without losing sight of the bigger picture and the narrative arcs of their universes, brands need to be able to pivot at a moment’s notice.
“One of the things that became obvious through all of the conversations we had was that brands were either very good at doing business development and commercial strategies, or great at being creative. But we felt that there was this blank space when connecting these two things,” Gjesing says.
“We were thinking about the long game, but also realizing that the short game is the long game,” says Bjerregaard on a call. “From our side, it didn’t make sense for a brand to do a five-year plan because five months later, it would be changed anyway. From our side, we’ve also been thinking about the longer perspective, whether it’s about values or what you stand for, but of course, also how a brand can develop. And our way to look at that was to divide Moon into two. And of course, we have done that all the time, but doing it more intentionally feels right for us and also feels right for how we should work with the creatives going forward.”
Opposites attract
Like its namesake, Moon has many faces. The 360-degree service the company provides is directly related to the different paths the founders pursued before joining forces. Gjesing comes from the commercial, brand-building side of the business, and Bjerregaard, a former sports reporter, from the publishing and editorial side. (He also co-founded the Danish Fashion Institute and Global Fashion Summit.) This gives them an inside-outside perspective that covers brand building from product conception to promotion.
“If we go all the way back, the starting point is what we did before we did Moon. Me coming from a brand background and working with Acne Studios for more than 10 years — with everything — because the business was still small at that time. We started with something that was 3 million, and when I left, we were probably doing €150 million. So I had that journey of seeing the company from the inside and then getting to work with everything from the commercial development to building a business,” Gjesing says.
“In the beginning of Moon, we always talked about the real world and just because both of us — me working as a journalist and Martin as a commercial director — it was about getting out there in the real world, talking to real people,” Bjerregaard adds. “In a lot of growth scenarios, there were a lot of things that were hard for people to check, that were not very tangible. The world suddenly became unreal. I think part of where we are now at Moon, the way we want to operate as a brand office, as a strategic office, but also as a creative office, is that putting that realness back into the picture.”
As the world turns
Change is the modus operandi of fashion, yet the rate of acceleration and nature of these adjustments are constantly being recalibrated. The only way to remain nimble, in Moon’s book, is to keep the team small — it’s never exceeded 10 people — and to be hands-on. One minute you’ll find the pair painting a showroom, the other booking a shoot with a well-known Japanese photographer. While the mechanics of running a brand might not have changed dramatically, the environment in which it operates has never been more volatile, with Covid, market fluctuations, and retail implosions. This makes the global and local ecosystems difficult to navigate, Gjesing says.
“There are so many things that play into it, which have nothing to do with whether the last collection was good or bad. The wholesale scenery has changed, [with events like the Saks bankruptcy]. Should you only focus on DTC? Should you do wholesale? It’s been very popular to say retail is dead, wholesale is dead, move on to something else, but I think it’s evident now that you need to figure out how to work across multiple platforms and in a wider landscape,” Gjesing says, noting there are merits to each: brand awareness in wholesale, better margins in e-commerce, strong customer service in stores.
“From our side, what we believe in is pragmatism,” Bjerregaard says. “The world is a very bad place right now because everything is a divide, everything is in conflict. There are great forces that want to take things apart and to create conflict and polarize the world. From our side, it’s very much been about putting things together, and not in a great compromise, but again, just like whether it’s money and love or whether it’s avant-garde and commercialism . . . . “
Measured success
In terms of experience, Bjerregaard and Gjesing are the “adults in the room”, yet neither has lost their belief in the magic of creativity. As the latter said: “Without fashion, it’s a pretty boring world.” Their end goal isn’t cashing out, yet over the past four years, Moon reports, they’ve “maintained a stable annual turnover of approximately DKK 24–26 million (approximately $4 million)” at a time when endless growth seems to be the predominant model. Gjesing doesn’t see it that way.
”We don’t subscribe to the thought that it can just be an endless growth and not be a strategy, or it’s like becoming as big as possible. I think you need the nuances in all of that. From a personal perspective, it feels a bit greedy when ultimate bigness is the goal; it doesn’t feel like you’re really looking at it the right way, and then also the failure can become so big.” Customers are more educated today, he adds, and look for more nuanced brands. And when growth is your only goal, it leads to burnout.
“The brands we’ve been involved with that are into constant performance and constant growth, it really destroys the employees, it destroys the brands, and it also just ends up damaging their relationship with the consumers,” says Bjerregaard. “Of course, there are a lot of successful growth stories, but from our side, if you look at the last 10 years and look at the next 10 years, it doesn’t make sense.”
Enough has changed, in fact, that Gjesing cautions against looking to other industry success stories — like Acne or Ganni — to try to imitate their paths.
“There is so much that has to do with timing, luck, and a window of opportunity that opens, and then it closes. So it’s so difficult, almost to the level of impossible, to just say, we want to be like them, because you don’t know why they ended up there,” he says. “All of these things, you cannot really track backwards. It’s easier to get bad advice than it is to get good advice. And you can have advisory boards, and you can have all these people, but if they don’t have a hand on the stove when they’re giving you advice, and there’s also a chance that you will go in the wrong direction, and you won’t see it before it’s too late.”
Paying it forward
Giving back is built into Moon’s strategy. One of the ways the partners support young talent is through their magazine, Space. This is also a vehicle for placing the company, as Gjesing says, “somewhere between a brand advisory, a strategic studio, and a cultural partner.”
“I think [about] fashion in its wider sense. Because we’ve been around for so long, I think we feel an obligation to keep pushing it and broadening it,” he says.
At the same time, Moon is expanding geographically. Many Scandi brands, including Sophie Bille Brahe and Magniberg, have grown up with the company; last year, Moon began collaborating with British heritage brand Mulberry and with Dutch designers Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren, who have been in business for over 30 years. Through Moon, Caro Editions did a project with Mulberry for spring 2026; now Gjesing and Bjerregaard are in the process of connecting Viktor Rolf with up-and-comers Benjamin Barron and Bror August Vestbø of August Barron, as they see synergies between the brands’ unorthodox designs.
“There’s such a span [of time] between the two, but they’re actually so connected mindset-wise,” explained Gjesing. “I feel excited about it because I also think what’s interesting right now is breaking a little bit the hierarchy of stuff. Sometimes you have the old guard and the new guard that don’t meet because some of them are too, I don’t know, old school. I think the long game for us is all about opening doors.”
Do what you love, love what you do
At the same time that Gjesing and Bjerregaard have infectious can-do attitudes, they are unflappable. The two also insist on a work-life balance, breaking at a reasonable hour to spend time with their families, even if they return to work later.
“We’re definitely the most unprofessional professional,” says Gjesing. “I think why we want to do this is that we also feel it’s a people thing, and we love working with people. I think the strategy becomes personal, and it becomes part of implementing because we care about the teams and the colleagues and everybody in the companies, because that’s where I come from as well. That’s also the extra mile we want to go because we feel that a lot of strategies are done without thinking about including and inviting the people inside, and they are the ones who are going to pull through.”
The combination of people skills and cultural awareness is part of Moon’s magic. As Bjerregaard puts it, their work is “a reaction to a zeitgeist. There are so many things you cannot control, so we need to focus on something we can control and also give advice and just develop strategies that feel real to us.” Moon, he continues, “is something that has a heart”.
