Designer Jonathan Cohen and CEO Sarah Leff decided last year — amid the turmoil of changing tariffs and the Saks Global saga — that something needed to change. They couldn’t dwell on everything that was going wrong in retail; they needed to be proactive if they wanted to secure the future of the ready-to-wear label they launched in New York 14 years ago. “Instead of being upset about it, or being like, ‘This isn’t working,’ it was, ‘How can we take control?’” Cohen says.
The solution they came up with is a new operating model for the Jonathan Cohen brand. As of Tuesday, the company is splitting its collections into two tiers: Jonathan Cohen White Label, a seasonless core collection dropping eight times a year, and Jonathan Cohen Black Label, for made-to-order specialty items. The first White Label collection is available now, with pieces like a button-down shirt, a floral wrap dress and a denim mini skirt and matching jacket. The same teams will work across both; the goal is to be more reactive to consumer needs and trends, while taking advantage of both wholesale and direct-to-consumer (DTC) retail channels and offering more newness throughout the year at a price point accessible to the aspirational fashion girl.
Jonathan Cohen and Sarah Leff got together a group of 14 designers for a three-day New York pop-up, in a bid to engage consumers amid tariff chaos. Here, community is key.
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“We realized we were in this pigeonhole of how we were dropping clothes, and we wanted to get beyond that,” says Leff. “We thought it was very necessary to look at the buy-now, wear-now conversations and at how a consumer is shopping. It doesn’t need to be a trend. It doesn t need to be a season. It’s: ‘Right now, I have a void in my wardrobe for X.’” From a design standpoint, Cohen says that the ability to watch what’s selling and react in real time is an advantage. “The whole problem of the model is you’re producing things that you’re not going to get paid for,” he says. “This feels like an answer to that.”
Independent designers have long looked for a way to break out of fashion’s two-season, wholesale-reliant model, which has stopped working for so many in the industry. But bucking long-standing norms isn’t easy. How did Cohen and Leff pull off their pivot?
To unpack the new business model, we’re sitting not in Cohen’s studio, but in the Larroudé offices and showroom on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The footwear brand, founded by former fashion editor Marina Larroudé and her husband Ricardo in 2020, is vertically integrated and owns its factory in Brazil. In May 2025, the Larroudés, Cohen and Leff — longtime industry friends who collaborated on a footwear collection in the past — sat down and discussed a partnership where Cohen and Leff would manufacture Cohen’s collections in Larroudé’s factories. Under a year later, the former were able to localize their supply chain to Brazil, shrink time to market and reconfigure the business with the two labels.
“It’s been extremely empowering — this gives us freedom in our business, and also creative freedom,” Cohen says, as the first collection hangs between two racks in the background. He references a conversation with his mom, who said that in today’s luxury climate, if big businesses get a cold, brands like his have the flu. “If we can get over that flu on our own, and really create a sustainable, healthy way of working, I think we might’ve solved a huge problem,” Cohen says. “And I really have to thank Marina and Ricardo for that.”
Is Larroudé’s business model the answer for independent fashion?
It’s an unusual set-up: two fashion brands sharing resources and joining forces to run independent companies. But it’s one that could become increasingly common as strains of the industry’s traditional model wear on more businesses.
“I have spent over 20 years in the fashion industry, and I always say it’s a very hard ask for a fashion creative to be running a business — to be running operations, to do digital marketing, customer service, all of that,” says Marina. “One of the things that Ricardo has always been keen on is to have other creatives step into the business that we have created. It feels very natural that Jonathan would be the first.”
Larroudé’s vertically integrated manufacturing center in Brazil is now open for more brands to come and use, Ricardo says, and he doesn’t see any limit on how big the model can scale. He sees Larroudé’s potential as that of Zara-parent Inditex: a company that can respond quickly to how pieces are performing to maximize their sell-through rate, but with important differentiators — higher quality, better materials and original designs. “There is a misconception about being slow in fashion and having a high quality and price point, but that has nothing to do with it,” says Marina. “What fast fashion is able to do at the speed that they do things, it’s genius. And that we copied.”
Is fast fashion’s model more sustainable when taken up by a brand like Larroudé? Marina and Ricardo argue that it is. By using customer data to produce volume responsively, they minimize the chance that they’ll create excess goods that have a lower chance of selling. Materials are locally sourced in Brazil, and the Larroudé factory also uses deadstock, which Jonathan Cohen used in his new collection, alongside cotton, denim and satin, all of which will be repurposed across future drops.
On terms of the partnership between the two companies, Larroudé acts as a strategic operating partner, supporting White Label through its vertically integrated manufacturing structure (Black Label sits outside of this partnership). The relationship operates on a revenue-share basis. Cohen’s collections are for sale on Larroudé’s website, while shoes designed in collaboration will be sold on Cohen’s.
Like Cohen, Larroudé wants to take control back from wholesalers. “If we’re doing this for the client, we should actually be listening to the client as much as we can, instead of the buyer from a wholesaler that’s not going to pay you out at the end,” says Ricardo. “Everyone says, ‘Yeah, that makes no sense,’ and I say, ‘Well, why don’t you do something about it?’”
“There’s so much that goes into the creation of a product,” says Cohen. “Sometimes, I think that gets lost when you are just a line or a code in an Excel sheet, versus a personality and an experience.”
How did Larroudé crack a formula that many brands haven’t been able to? Ricardo — who says his lack of fashion experience worked to his advantage in the early days — saw the opportunity to own his production and took it. When the small factories Larroudé worked with couldn’t keep up with orders, he says, he began buying machines. “I tried to look at businesses that not only survived but thrived, even through crisis and war,” Ricardo says. “And if you look at the vertically integrated model, those are the brands that last.” It’s easier, Marina adds, to start a new business model from scratch than to change a business that’s already doing hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales.
As Cohen pivots his business to plug into the platform that Larroudé is building, he’s already seeing new parts of the creative process that weren’t previously possible, when his manufacturing partners and suppliers were based all over the world. One particular detail he’s excited about are the buttons: they’re inscribed with a JC logo that appears on clothing stitches as well; the tail of the J looping up and slicing into the edge of the button. In New York’s Garment District, button orders have a 5,000-piece minimum, and Cohen was never able to get the detail he wanted. Working with Larroudé’s partners changed that. “All of a sudden, we have these dream buttons that we’ve always wanted to create. I remember I got them back and I got a little teary because I’m a sucker like that — just seeing that we could finally do it.”
That level of detail, Cohen believes, will be what makes the difference between brands that customers are eager to return to and spend money on. He wants to dress the woman he says has been overlooked by luxury as prices rise — Cohen’s White Label line falls between $350 and $650 — without compromising quality. In the next five years, he wants to make Jonathan Cohen a household name and scale internationally, with ventures in beauty and fragrance down the line.
“Sarah and I have always had an open-door policy where we’ve always helped young designers. This will hopefully allow us to help them in an even more concrete way,” Cohen says. “It’s creating a system that hopefully can give the designer and their companies the power. I don’t want to say give the power back — it’s not a lack of agency. It’s the flexibility of being able to control the situation and the story that you want to do, versus falling into what we’ve always been told as a formula of how to work.”
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