If you’re in Milan right now, you may have seen posters from local fashion label Sunnei around the city, with various “reviews” from spoof titles including The New Work Times and Vague. “The store you didn’t really need,” reads one. “A concept store with no concept,” reads another. Well, the ‘headlines’ are true, Sunnei is opening “a concept store with no concept” inside its Milan HQ, Palazzina Sunnei, on Friday, founders Simone Rizzo and Loris Messina tell Vogue Business. They’re tight-lipped on the details, but in classic Sunnei style, the opening will be unconventional and will take place during the brand’s Autumn/Winter 2025 show.
The minimalist store space on Via Privata Pietro Cironi is intended to be a new community hub, complete with a café and a gallery, without the gimmicks and overdone architecture the founders feel is symptomatic of traditional retail. “We are over the over-designed concept,” Rizzo says. “We just want it to be very functional and easy to understand, and actually the opposite of everything that is happening here in Milan. People build a lot of storytelling around we don’t know what in the end. We want to focus on real experiences.” These experiences will include lectures, exhibitions, listening sessions and live performances, linked to the brand’s radio station, Radio Sunnei.
As fans know, Sunnei loves some fashion industry satire, pulling it off via innovative runway shows. At the SS24 show, the audience rated looks with numerical paddles from zero to 10, only to be outed on social media if they gave low scores, satirising the state of fashion criticism. The following season (AW24), an audio played of what was on each model’s mind as they walked the runway (including one who really needed to pee). While founders Rizzo and Messina are sharing lesser details this time around, the satire for AW25 and their new store centres on the state of fashion retail.
“If you’ve been to our shows, you know we’re very strong with our ideas,” Rizzo smiles. “So this idea that a store needs to have a concept or a certain experience — it doesn’t. In the end, it’s just a special place where you need to understand and enjoy the brand you are choosing to visit.”
With this store, Sunnei wants to get closer to its customers and focus on its direct-to-consumer (DTC) business, amid continued challenges in wholesale. “We postponed the opening a couple of times,” Rizzo says. ”But now is a good moment, because a lot of things are changing here in Milan. A lot of businesses are down. So it’s a moment for everyone to [focus]. We are shifting from solely digital communication, to more realistic and more tangible things. That’s how we imagine Sunnei in the future. We want this space to feel like a fresh start for Milan.”
Rizzo and Messina founded Sunnei as a DTC menswear business, sold online and in a small store-cum-headquarters in Via Vela, close to Milan’s iconic Bar Basso. As the wholesale business began to scale, the brand shifted its headquarters out of the store space. Via Vela shuttered last autumn to prepare for the new store. After years of healthy growth, in 2020, Sunnei was acquired by Vanguards Group (which also owns Nanushka and Aeron) for a €6 million majority stake investment.
“Since we’re not independent anymore, we sometimes need to make decisions that are safe,” says Rizzo. “But we also feel sometimes the best way to have a sustainable business is by taking some risks and changing models that are very obsolete.” One of these models is wholesale: even in the current challenging climate, as wholesale struggles, Sunnei is seeing growth in its DTC channels, particularly via collaborations with brands like Camper, which was released in February and is selling very well. “Our business is flat now, which is good, because DTC is covering wholesale losses,” Messina adds.
Focusing on its roots
Sunnei tested pop-ups in key cities like Milan and Paris over the last couple of years. And while they were largely successful, nothing replicated the energy of Sunnei’s Milan HQ and its employees, which sparked the idea to bring consumers in and open the store there (like the first store on Via Vela with an office in the back). “We want customers to feel the energy around the brand and the company and the people that work here,” Messina says. “Even our suppliers visit HQ often, so customers can meet them. The intention is to bring together everyone related to the brand.”
“If you come to the store and want to know more about the bag, we’ll call the bag designer, who can come downstairs and explain how it’s made,” Rizzo adds. “Our focus will be a lot on our — I don’t like the words but — VICs or community.”
Sunnei has never felt like a Milanese brand to the founders, but they feel they have a place in the city, nonetheless, for those who also don’t feel aligned with traditional Milan fashion. “We are not [Milanese] glamour, and we’re not part of a fashion family here,” Rizzo says. “We are outsiders, but we always choose Milano as our city because we want to connect people here that are similar to us.”
The café is curated by friends of the founders Tommaso Vergano (from co-founder of low-alcohol beverage distributor Amore Liquido Chinati Vergano) and Anastasia Posca (from Turin restaurants Isola and Dolphin Market), who will collaborate with local artists to evolve the space over time.
The café and the events are to complement the retail, and provide a more engaging space to shop versus wholesale stockists. The duo feels stores are all buying into the same products, which consumers ultimately can find cheaper online. “We see a real disconnect today between stores and customers,” Messina says. “And while nobody has the answer, we see that we sell completely different items than the stores do, direct customers are buying differently, so something is not working.”
Sunnei has a strong DTC business in the US and Europe, which could be an opportunity for further monobrand stores. “It would be hard to [expand this idea],” Messina says. “For now, it’s better to focus here rather than everywhere at the same time.”
“There are some theories in our mind, but I mean, let’s take it step by step,” Rizzo says. “We are finally doing what we really want. So I think that for the short term, we just want to see how the store and our [immediate] plans will work. But in general, we have everything we want at the moment. We feel free, and we are enjoying it.”
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