“Building this house was a deeply personal moment for us — a testament to this big project in our lives, the greatest success we’ve achieved,” says Rains co-founder Daniel Brix Hesselager while showing me around the company’s new headquarters in the outskirts of Aarhus, Denmark. The ‘house’ is an 11,000-square-metre state-of-the-art brutalist construction made of concrete, steel and Scandinavian pine.
On the trip from London to Aarhus, while googling Brix Hesselager and his co-founder Philip Lotko, I couldn’t stop thinking about my age and generation; how millennials are the new grown-ups. We have children, senior jobs and mortgages. Some, like Brix Hesselager and Lotko, are seeing their businesses take off. “There’s an alignment with growing up in that for sure,” Brix Hesselager says as I draw the parallel with their new HQ. “All we are missing is a kindergarten.”
It has everything else. Stretching out over four floors, beyond space for the company’s head office functions, this HQ includes a photo studio, a gym, a 6,000-square-metre warehouse that you can look into from pretty much anywhere in the building, and a cafeteria where chefs daily prepare a lunch menu that includes the best salad I’ve ever had. It’s huge and it feels empty, even though about 150 people (out of a 228-strong global team) work in it. Which makes sense, as Rains only moved in last November. I tell Brix Hesselager and Lotko that I’d like to come back in a couple of years and see the space lived in.
“I have found it a bit difficult to fit into this new environment, even though it’s very cool,” Brix Hesselager admits. “We were just talking about it today; we enjoy coming here, but it’s a different company overnight. There’s been a lot of change.”
Previously, the team was based in an old logistics building a few kilometres away. But they grew out of it faster than planned. Lotko chimes in: “I remember standing in the middle of the old office with you Daniel, when we moved in [in 2016] saying, ‘How on earth are we going to fill this house with people?’ It seemed like an impossible task. But then, a couple of years later, we were ready to leave.”
Launched in 2012, Rains has grown quickly — especially since 2020, when its messaging of exploring the urban outdoors aligned seamlessly with our post-pandemic urges. The brand’s conceptual-yet-functional rainwear is the perfect expression of pretty much every trend that arrived with this era, from gorpcore and athleisure to quiet luxury. From the artsy types of Stoke Newington to the cool dads of North London and the Vogue office, London is covered in Rains.
In October 2024, the company reported that it was on track to double its annual revenue from €50 million three years ago to €100 million by the end of 2024. While they are still finalising the 2024 earnings when I visit in very early January, Brix Hesselager and Lotko tell me Rains is operating off a solid 15 per cent EBITDA margin, which is what allowed them to fund the building of its new headquarters.
Getting things done
The two met at Teko Design School in Herning, where Lotko also grew up. Their first endeavour was now-defunct streetwear brand Brix + Lotko. Some years passed, during which Lotko moved to Copenhagen to study brand-building, but they kept in touch and eventually reconnected to create Rains. “The idea for rainwear came from another project back at design school,” says Brix Hesselager. “There was this concept that included one-time-use ponchos. The design was cool but not executed properly. So we put together something based on that design and then we went to a local manufacturer and made, like, 50 ponchos and tried to sell them.”
Based on their experience with Brix + Lotko, they realised they needed a third partner — someone versed in organisation and structures. “Kenneth Davids was 15 years older than us and more experienced in business. I think we spoke to him on Sunday and we were all starting the company together on Wednesday. He left in 2020 but has been a very important part of building Rains,” says Brix Hesselager. “I did the design and the sourcing. Kenneth took care of the operational part, and Philip built our PR and marketing as he was based in Copenhagen. So the tasks have been very clear from the beginning and I think that’s been part of our success.” Davids remains a shareholder alongside Brix Hesselager and Lotko (they have no external investors).
“The funny thing is, we weren’t thinking of Rains as a fashion company at the beginning,” muses Lotko. “It was very much product-driven. Initially, we made a small collection — just three versions of the same rain jacket. And then we added three bags, which were meant to underline that this was a product universe. But they picked up by themselves and today bags are 50 per cent of the business and our fastest-growing category. We have huge ambitions of extending categories, whether that’s growing existing ones or adding new ones.” The brand has just launched a luggage range; footwear will follow in 2026.
Category expansion is one of the three key priorities in Rains’s three-year plan. Internally, they call these priorities the three Es: extend the wardrobe, expand North America and excel in 100 brand stores. CEO Steen Borgholm, who joined the company just over a year ago from Ecco, maintains that three years is the optimum time frame if you want to stay focused. “One thing Rains has done really well is execution. They have been getting things done,” Borgholm explains. “My own challenge at Rains is aiding this culture of execution by avoiding ‘the squirrel effect’, where you try to chase everything shiny because there are so many opportunities. From just a product strategy viewpoint, the risk is that you go too broad, too fast, and you lose your relevance.”
There are currently 30 Rains stores worldwide. “It’s a big leap [to 100]. And there is definitely a metamorphosis that we have to go through to do this — it requires something from every part of the company,” Borgholm says. Direct-to-consumer (DTC) currently accounts for a little over a third of sales, with wholesale making up the rest. There are 2,200 stockists worldwide, including Selfridges, Galeries Lafayette and 10 Corso Como. The ambition is to control more than 50 per cent of sales in the future for all of the well-known reasons — to make sure the product and experience is right. E-commerce currently stands at 23 per cent of the business.
“It’s not that we want to be a DTC business,” Brix Hesselager says. “This year, we want to combine our different channels and have them be more connected. It takes time to be good at operating DTC. It’s also the most costly exercise and takes the heaviest investment. That’s most often when investors come into the company, which we would like to avoid.”
Rains currently has seven stores in North America and a distribution centre in Clifton, New Jersey. Borgholm says the brand needs to adjust its positioning to reach its full potential in the region. “We can’t just replicate what we do in Europe. I feel we actually need to introduce the brand and underline the functionality. Americans may not even know we’re a waterproof company,” he explains.
Fashion or function?
After a few years of running with the fashion crowd, Lotko and Brix Hesselager also seem eager to go back to the more functional origins of the brand. “We’re also getting older, right?” says Lotko. “Right now in my life, it makes sense to have something that I can live in, whether it’s a pair of boots, a jacket or a cardigan.”
Rains is also notably absent from the Paris Men’s Week calendar this season, where it had been showing since Autumn/Winter 2022. The brand’s first runway show was in Copenhagen in February 2020, just before lockdown. “At that point, we were trying to show that our products could also be worn as fashion pieces. We did a big redesign of our visual identity and we also changed the logo,” Lotko recalls.
“We learnt so much from showing at fashion weeks and Paris in particular. It gave us a whole new understanding of all the directions we could stretch the brand in. It changed the way we did campaigns, and we progressed in product innovation overnight,” he continues. “We developed comprehensive outerwear concepts, where the rainjacket and the puffer were transformed into dresses, trousers and skirts. We were so grateful to have been accepted to show on the calendar and felt we had to overdeliver. But when it comes to the long-term vision, Rains has never been a traditional ready-to-wear runway brand. Owning our own destiny is where we’re heading.” They tell me they are working on a new, more intimate show concept to be announced in spring.
What do they see as their next big challenge? “The next phase is very operational, it’s very corporate and it’s very business,” says Brix Hesselager. “So, what we need to find — or I should say, I need to find — is my motivation for what is going to happen next, because it’s not going to be as involving and crazy and creative as it has been.”
“I do believe our commercial success will continue,” adds Lotko. “We have the best conditions for that. But I agree that progressing creatively will be our biggest challenge. How do we actually grow as a universe and concept, not only as a business and an organisation? I think we will have to be very surprising if we want to move the company ahead.”
What have they done well? “We’ve created a culture that makes people want to be and stay part of,” says Brix Hesselager. “We do that by having a clear vision of where we want to go and sharing it with the whole company. This new HQ is built on that theme of transparency; you can see all parts of the building from all parts of the building.” From the gym to the salads and the music seeping in from the warehouse, working at Rains does indeed seem like a vibe.
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
More from this author:
‘The era of desire is over’: CEO Silvio Campara on making Golden Goose stand out in a slow market
‘Made in Corridonia’: How Santoni grew from shoe manufacturer to luxury brand
.jpg)
