“I’ve been waiting for this moment pretty much since I started this job,” CEO Jenny Galimberti says of JW Anderson’s big rebrand. Galimberti joined the company in 2019 from Louis Vuitton. “It really feels that, despite Jonathan’s growing responsibilities, this new way of working allows him to give a lot more to his own company, in terms of his personal taste.”
By “growing responsibilities”, the exec is referring to Jonathan Anderson’s recent takeover of Dior, where he now has to deliver 10 collections a year across womenswear, menswear, accessories and couture. Presumably as a way of easing that load, this summer the designer announced that his namesake label JW Anderson, which he founded in 2008, would take a more lifestyle approach, selling homeware, collectibles and even tea that tastes like coffee, alongside fashion.
It s a smart pricing play at a time when the number one thing driving luxury consumers away are the price tags. With the aforementioned coffee-flavored tea at £30, a pair of chain-link earrings in 18-karat yellow gold at £6,535 and a myriad of chairs, mugs, jeans, sweaters, coffee table books and accessories in between, there is a way into the brand for every wallet.
“When you work for a brand that carries a name like Jonathan’s, you know you need to have that personality come through in the product, in the stores, in social, in everything,” says Galimberti. “I feel we’re in that place finally. Before, we were maybe a little shy about going all out to represent him, but he’s got such amazing taste. Why not use him to not only design a collection but also curate this world?”
While the relaunch officially began in September, with the refurb of the website and the Soho store, the lifestyle chapter was just showcased properly this past weekend with the opening of the brand’s second London store on 105-107 Pimlico Road— an address famous for its furniture shops. When Galimberti and I meet in early November, the entire London staff are furiously working toward a December opening in order to catch the holiday shoppers.
We conduct this interview in a conference room at the company’s headquarters in Islington, which has been set up to resemble the store that is about to open, so that the teams can try out different layouts. “I feel galvanized,” says Galimberti when I ask. “Doing the CEO job in a small company like this, you pretty much work across everything. When you’re in the big brands, you have your slice of the cake and work on that. Here, I get to get my hands dirty. It’s like doing a mini MBA.”
Her CV is a dream sequence for anyone looking to make a career in fashion: communications and marketing roles at Prada, L’Oréal, Gucci and Dunhill appear on her LinkedIn page in that order, right under LVMH’s crown jewel where she served as SVP of global marketing communications between 2015 and 2019. But the executive says she “sort of fell into fashion”, having started off as an intern at Christie’s auction house in Milan. “My boss at Christie’s went to work for Prada and she asked me to join her.”
Galimberti, who grew up in Milan with an English mother, says she always wanted to live in London but her career kept her in Europe. “In a way, I was more valuable in Italy back then, because I spoke English,” she says. But good things happen when you least expect them: “I’d done almost five years at Louis Vuitton and it was probably time to do something different. I met Jonathan and he was looking for a CEO. I don’t come from finance or merchandising, which is the norm, but from marketing. Jonathan is very creative from a marketing perspective and sometimes you need someone to action the creativity.”
She moved to London and started to get her feet under the table; but a year later, the pandemic hit. “I think a lot of businesses, particularly wholesale ones like ours, grew in a way that wasn’t the standard during that time,” on the brand’s own channels, Galimberti recalls. “We found ourselves in a situation where we wanted to do things differently, and grow our direct-to-consumer [DTC] offer. But we really started thinking about the rebrand about a year and a half ago.”
Before Anderson took on his current role at Dior this last spring, he was creative director of Loewe. And while in the last couple of years the speculation around his next moves within LVMH was wild, the questions regarding the future of his own label were minimal. “I think we were a little under the radar because things were moving along fine,” Galimberti says. “We could have potentially carried on, but it was very important to also have a concept that the team can work on while Jonathan’s focused elsewhere. It works really well.”
Galimberti explains that when she joined six years ago, JW Anderson was a very different company — operating completely wholesale, showing at fashion weeks seasonally, and with just one store on Shoreditch High Street. Now, the brand is pivoting to a DTC model. After successful launches in Milan and London’s Soho over the last two months, and with Pimlico in the works, the plan for next year includes stores in Paris and New York.
She says the brand now sells through roughly a third of the wholesale accounts it used to. “We’ve kept our closer partners and we will keep working with them, but we’re trying to move things toward a ‘store-within-a-store’ concept because we need this type of environment,” she says. “You can’t just have a rack with clothes in fashion and a mug in homeware. It doesn’t make sense. It all has to sit in the same world, this curated JWA cabinet of curiosities.”
Galimberti goes on to describe how creative meetings have changed (or remained the same) since the rebrand. “Much like before, Jonathan will have a first meeting with the creative teams and discuss his ideas and set a direction for the season,” she says. “Sometimes, he will show them things he found and ask for people’s opinions. The teams include the fashion teams, but now also what we call home and garden. They source and develop products, like the Murano glassware or the Nicholas Mosse ceramics.”
Some items in stores might stay beyond a season, another new approach that differs from the wholesale model. “They belong to us, and will stay in the store depending on how well we think the product is doing. The response to it, or if we just feel that it’s a very representative piece,” explains Galimberti.
Besides fashion and homeware, Anderson, Galimberti and co are hoping to develop their art pillar. The teams are currently working with curator Andrew Bonacina on developing a program where they will be showcasing art and selling it. The plan is to include some pieces in the January showrooms, and repeat this every six months. Another category they are trying their hand at is jewelry, approached in two ways: there’s antique jewelry on offer that’s been sourced, but also an in-house team developing high jewelry pieces.
Galimberti is not ruling out the idea of a JWA show taking place again in the future. However, she says the teams for now are focusing on building their dialog with the customer, through community-based events. Back in September, the brand co-hosted the London Fashion Week opening dinner with the British Fashion Council (BFC). More recently, it welcomed Fashion Trust Arabia guests in Doha at a dinner, in partnership with luxury retailer Ounass. Ahead of the event, Anderson and Galimberti spent most of their time speaking to VICs. “I think a brand this size, and with this concept, needs to have a community supporting it,” Galimberti says.
The concept is also so new, she says, they need a few seasons to really settle into it. “At the moment, it’s still season one and we need to give it time to see what works and what doesn t. The nice surprise is that for now, the enthusiasm isn’t just in the press, but also in the customer. It appears we are approaching a new customer as well as doing much better than we expected.”
What’s her first takeaway two months into relaunching a brand? “We’ve had to become an interiors company. We knew how to sell bags and clothes and shoes. We knew how to ship those. But suddenly we are looking at a company that does a lot more than that. We needed to find the right stores to accommodate the product; learn how to sell it online and the logistics of shipping it. So there’s been a lot of practical learning.”
She continues: “But the best thing so far is the feeling that the concept works. We’re selling products, some of which are more expensive and we are also changing the way we’re selling. Before, it was very much about volume. Now, we’ve got a lot more value.”
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