Fashion Substack can’t stop recommending designer Jamie Haller’s casual California-cool shoes and ready-to-wear, which are classic enough for everyday but with IYKYK details such as the sacchetto glove-like fit of the $595 hero penny loafers, or the perfect grandad slouch on a pair of dark navy trousers that clock in at $550.
“I’ve never felt this way about a sandal before,” writes Magasin’s Laura Reilly. “The shoe MVP of my wardrobe this summer,” says The Cereal Aisle’s Leandra Medine. “This style can be worn three ways, and I do wear them all,” enthuses Hillary Kerr on Hi Everyone.
The collective support has helped fuel the rapid growth of the five-year-old Los Angeles brand, which just opened its first bricks-and-mortar store in Montecito, California.
Haller’s covetable, buttery-soft oxblood penny loafers that have known to sell out within nine minutes on her e-commerce site, the new San Diego slide that is a star in the summer of haute flip flops, and the Everything Pants that can indeed be worn three ways, are all available to try and buy in the designer’s 700-square-foot boutique.
Montecito, the tony suburb of Santa Barbara on the American Riviera, which is home to Harry and Meghan, Oprah and Gwyneth Paltrow, has become a bonafide fashion-retail destination between the Montecito Country Mart, the Rosewood Miramar Beach hotel’s expanding luxury stores and Runyon Group’s new outdoor shopping centre The Post, where Haller’s store sits alongside other indie brands, including The Great, Janessa Leone and Merlette.
“I didn’t go up assuming I’d say yes. But when I got there, it felt like a really special place for retail,” Haller says during an interview at her Downtown LA studio, explaining how the developers pursued her. “I said you don’t even have to sell me, I’m in. It was emotional, and I like to lead business that way.”
The store comes at an auspicious time for the business that started with an Indian jutti slipper, struck gold with a loafer, expanded to ballet flats, boots and sandals, and is now a full accessories brand with the designer’s first handbags arriving in October. A women’s clothing collection launched in autumn 2024, already representing half of overall sales. Haller says the brand saw 450 per cent growth in direct-to-consumer (DTC) sales from 2023 to 2024, and is tracking a 100 per cent year-on-year increase from 2024 to 2025, with wholesale also expanding.
The company, which has nine full-time employees and about a dozen consultants, had its best month ever in May with DTC sales 60 per cent over projections. “People are still finding out about us; we’re new compared to bigger brands,” she says.
Substack has been a key part of the discovery process. When she celebrates the store opening with a dinner party in Montecito on Tuesday, it will be hosted by What I Put On Today’s Megan Strachan, who was transformational to the business back in August 2023 when Haller was still shipping out of her garage. “That was a really authentic moment; she messaged me that she wanted a pair of loafers right away and I said come over,” Haller remembers.
“I didn’t even know what Substack was, to be honest. She [Strachan] came by and I was packing shoes, my kids were running around, and we were just chatting away. Then, she wrote a Substack newsletter about it — I sold 200 pairs that day… It opened my eyes to something new,” she continues. “Now, it’s part of our marketing plan, but we don’t pay influencers. We’re not ‘pay for play’,” she says of the strategy, which involves gifting 20 top Substack content creators monthly.
Marketing is 10 per cent of her total budget, of which 55 per cent goes on PR, including product gifting, product and editorial outreach and management, and 45 per cent paid advertising.
It’s yielded results. One of her biggest challenges is supply and demand, especially when it comes to her e-commerce store, which accounts for 70 per cent of sales, as well as balancing the need for more product with keeping it special. “My customers can’t get it because it sells out,” she says.
Distribution is also expanding through wholesale, with a 350 per cent increase in orders from autumn 2024 to spring 2025, a total of 75 accounts in the US and six internationally, from early adopter boutiques such as Mohawk General in LA, to major players Shopbop and Saks Fifth Avenue, which she started shipping to this spring.
As for her own retail, she doesn’t have a rollout plan just yet, but will let the response to Montecito be her guide. The boutique is an expression of both sides of Haller’s creative brain: the understated, uniform-of-life fashion side, and the more fanciful professional interior designer side. She’s spent years restoring old craftsman houses, including her own 1905 home in Echo Park, which she shares with her real estate agent husband and two kids, landing her work in publications such as Domino and Architectural Digest.
“There’s definitely people who follow me for that and probably have no idea that I have a loafer line. And there’s people who buy my loafers who have no idea that I did interiors. So I wanted the store to be this place where both could coexist,” she says of the layered, Art Deco-meets-minimal modernist space with creamy walls and rich in wood and patina. The centrepiece is a beautifully restored 1952 Paul Tuttle sofa, reupholstered in a rich geometric jacquard, while a 1940s sideboard by Charles Dudouyt displays shoes. Overhead, is a touch of funk in the form of a 1970s bronze and white painted enamel floral chandelier from her grandmother’s house.
Vintage has always informed her aesthetic, she says, from the time she started going to swap meets as a kid growing up in San Diego, to her years in LA’s fashion industry. She had roles at big brands such as Bebe, where she designed sexy suiting, and smaller labels, including Ever Clothing, focusing on fleece sweatshirts and tees, and NSF, where she designed denim, all the while picking up a keen business sense as well as bootstrapping smarts.
“When I was working for small companies that didn’t have big budgets, I would buy vintage shoes and men’s loafers to style with the women’s clothes because I thought it was cool,” she says of collecting the 1970s Pierre Cardin and Gucci shoes that would eventually inspire her own. “Creating this essence of time, making something look like it has a patina, working backwards — my appreciation for this type of beauty is across everything I do.”
Feeling burnt out after nearly two decades, Haller almost gave up fashion completely for interior design, but the spark of an idea for a shoe line changed that. She made that a reality during Covid downtime, working with an Italian factory entirely over Zoom to develop her product in buffalo, lamb, calf and goatskin.
The Jamie Haller brand debuted with a version of the classic Indian jutti slipper, and the slipper ethos has run through all other designs since — from the glove-like loafer to the ballet flat she instructed her factories to make like a dance shoe, to the Kitty heel, which has almost all the interior structure stripped away.
For spring 2026, Haller is experimenting with wedges; in October, she plans to launch her first sneaker.
The designer went back to designing clothes because she needed something to wear. “It’s all very personal; I’ll have a feeling for something,” she says of her process, channelling vintage military influences into a big shirt and barrel-leg, waist-tie fatigue trousers, for example, and bringing in the oversized striped men’s shirts, shrunken Japanese cotton terry sweatshirts and crease-front denim she wears every day.
“I basically always dress like a boy,” she laughs. “But then I’ll wear 1980s high heels and big earrings and a clutch,” she adds, previewing a few upcoming styles, including an oversized rectangular suede and leather clutch in a vivid yellow, and zebra-striped pony hair Kitty heels, all while hinting at the belts and jewelry to come, too.
Now, she’s mostly given up interior design to focus on fashion, to steer the brand through these challenging geopolitical times, where there have been protests just blocks from her studio. On the topic of tariffs, Haller believes herself lucky, with production predominantly based in the US. Eighty per cent of the ready-to-wear is produced in LA, while leather goods are all made in Italy, allowing her to make just small price increases.
It’s not holding back her momentum: “We’re just scratching the surface. I just love that I can chase whatever idea or feeling I want to, and I am in a stable enough place to know that some of this will pay off big, and some will fail, and it’s all fine.”
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