To receive the Vogue Business newsletter, sign up here.
Ukrainian label Cultnaked’s founder Mary Furtas is a self-confessed party girl. While working as a fashion photographer and influencer five years ago, Furtas would upcycle high street pieces for the club and sew cycling shorts into miniskirts, so she could “jump on stage or dance on a table”, she says, without worrying about showing her underwear. People kept asking where the pieces were from, so she started selling a small selection of the skorts on Instagram.
In 2018, prompted by the success of her Instagram store, Furtas flew to Italy with her best friend to source a roll of pink deadstock fabric to make a batch of her signature skorts. This time, she set up an e-commerce site, Cultnaked.com. “We started the brand with €35,000 investment from friends and family,” she says. “Within eight months, we’d made it all back and then some.”
Five years after its launch, Cultnaked has become an established premium partywear brand, known for its signature faux leather matching sets, barely there tops, mini skorts and sparkly dresses. Cultnaked is stocked at Revolve, Moda Operandi and nine smaller concept stores including A’Favor (Sydney, Australia), Exhibit (Bangkok, Thailand) and Di Vincenzo (Naples, Italy) as well as UK-based multi-brand e-tailer Ayam Set. Furtas is also eyeing Selfridges, which she feels aligns well with Cultnaked’s customer.
Revenues are expected to hit $2.1 million this year, up 200 per cent from 2022, as the brand builds out its wholesale business with key stockist US e-tailer Revolve. Furtas plans to launch new categories this year, while taking aim at select luxury wholesale partners and investing further in the direct-to-consumer business. However, as war wages on in Ukraine, she remains cautious about further challenges ahead. Cultnaked’s headquarters and team are still in Lviv, Ukraine, but Furtas currently lives in Warsaw with her husband and baby, making regular visits to London and Paris and running the business remotely.
With pieces priced from around £70-800, Cultnaked is positioned between the high street and high-end luxury, with a focus on stretch fit, comfort and convenience, from the skort to its figure-hugging faux leather. The brand is a celebrity and influencer favourite, worn by stars including Ariana Grande, Megan Fox and Kendall Jenner, who frequently wears the brand’s signature leather pants after Furtas caught the attention of stylist Dani Michelle. The celebrity following was by design. Shortly after launching Cultnaked, Furtas flew to Paris Fashion Week, gifting pieces to friends she made in fashion week hotspots like Hotel Costes, including fellow It-girls Caroline Vreeland and Bella Hadid.
Experts agree, Cultnaked’s success is in part due to Furtas’s tenacity and influence. A social media personality in her own right, she frequently posts wearing the label, and still conducts a lot of influencer reach outs via DM. “I’m business savvy, I can sell stuff,” she says. “I know that selling takes emotion. And, after working as a photographer, I know that you can put any price tag on something, as long as you can justify it.”
Surviving war
In the brand’s early years, Furtas worked with a team of seamstresses who produced Cultnaked pieces made-to-order in the Lviv atelier, shipping them all over the world within 1-3 days of purchase. In 2021, Cultnaked’s sales hit $700,000 and were expected to grow further the following year, as DTC demand continued to grow. Then, in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. “When the war started I was like, OK, this is over,” Furtas says, “I fled the country with my newborn baby and texted my employees saying ‘we’re going to pay you as long as we can.’”
To Furtas’s surprise, Cultnaked production was back up and running within two weeks. “The team texted me and said they wanted to get back to work,” she said, “I couldn’t believe it, but Ukrainians are tough.” Production resumed, but shipping was near-impossible in the early days. Even when logistics firms reopened, it took 20 days for products to get to America, one of the brand’s key markets. “We were writing to our clients saying, ‘We’re sorry, we’re going to build a stockroom in America right now, but you’ll have to wait.’”
Cultnaked saw record sales on the day it reopened the webstore, weeks after the invasion. But, even still, the delays hurt sales long term in 2022, as long waits alienated many customers who wanted a party outfit quickly. Growth was flat for 2022 as Furtas grappled with the ongoing challenges. When the war started and the DTC sales were challenged by long delivery times, she decided to approach wholesale partners via her Ukrainian agency.
Within a week, the agency sent the line sheets to Revolve, she says. “At first I was like, I’m not ready for that! I cannot produce that much.” Revolve placed an order in 2022 but the partnership took a year to come to fruition, as Furtas struggled to find a delivery partner to export the goods. Then, just as the drop was ready, the factory producing Cultnaked’s care labels was destroyed in the war, causing further delays. For Furtas, it was worth the wait: when it eventually launched earlier this year, the drop sold out overnight and the retailer re-ordered straight away.
Cultnaked captures the Gen Z consumer through its on trend, premium-priced assortment; its ability to mould to different body types; and the versatility of products, says Rebecca Pomerantz, buyer at Revolve. “The response so far has been great. We sold out of our first launch in Spring and continue to expand the offering into Fall ’23 by doubling our investment. You’ll see fun new colourways in their faux leather ‘Killa’ series, statement outerwear and on-trend skirts and trousers.”
Cultnaked has maintained its made-to-order business, but now produces wholesale orders in local Ukrainian factories, while making batches in advance of bestselling items like the leather pants and bandeau, to drop on the DTC site. There’s now three Lviv factories that exclusively produce Cultnaked, Furtas says, but her goal is to avoid overproduction where she can.
“No brand is sustainable, that’s bullshit if they produce stuff. But we do what we can to avoid overproduction,” she says, “Our HQ is 150m2, we actually don’t have the space to hold stock, so we only produce batches of items we know we can sell out of quickly, like the Killa set, which typically sells out in a week,” she says. Furtas doesn’t allow for discounts on Cultnaked pieces. If ever there’s leftover samples or wholesale partners don’t sell through product, she buys it back and resells locally in Ukraine on a Depop under her name.
But as demand continues to rise, Furtas does worry for the future of the business, particularly if the war worsens and threatens more factories or territories. “Sometimes I do think about the fact the other brands we’re in competition with don’t have the war,” she muses, “– it’s not fair.”
Looking ahead, Furtas is keen to launch new categories to accompany her party looks. During the Spring/Summer 2024 edition of Paris Fashion Week men’s, she took a prototype of Cultnaked’s new colourful fluffy shoulder bag for a test drive (it’s launching later this year). “Everyone kept asking who made it,” she says, “I like to wear things and test them for months. Then we drop them on the DTC site to see if they work for our customer. My retail partners shouldn’t have to take the risk.” Shoes are in the pipeline for later this year, produced in Italy by a factory that’s worked with Nicholas Kirkwood and Alexander McQueen.
Now, she’s moved on from gifting in Paris restaurants and bars to holding a showroom during fashion week each season, for celebrity dressing, press and buyer appointments. The latest took place in a studio space on rue Saint Honoré, just down the street from Hotel Costes. Sadly, the timing was slightly off. While the space attracted a lot of buyer attention, a lot of press and celebrities had returned home between Louis Vuitton men’s and Jacquemus shows, over the showroom dates, so it wasn’t as packed out as Furtas had hoped. “We’re always learning,” she says with a smile, “but I’m not sure if we’ll do fashion week next season. Although I always say this and then somehow we are always there.”
Cultnaked events are also on the horizon, as well as a potential IRL store, which she’s considering more and more as customers “go offline”. “I wanna do parties,” she says, “we’re a party brand and we haven’t had a single good party yet. We have to fix that.”
Key takeaway: Mary Furtas built partywear label Cultnaked via tenacious networking and celebrity gifting, producing made-to-order on the backend to avoid overproduction for her DTC business. After war struck Cultnaked’s native Ukraine, delaying DTC delivery, Furtas built out wholesale to continue to capitalise on demand in key markets like the US. Now, she’s eyeing new categories and further growth.
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
Correction: The story was updated to reflect that Cultnaked’s first drop on Revolve sold out overnight.
More from this author:
How Represent went from a garden shed to £50 million in sales
Meet the young entrepreneurs making thousands from archival luxury
All killer, no filler: Menswear star Martine Rose is ready for growth
