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Global brand development platform Tomorrow London has a new executive to lead its portfolio of hot next-generation brands into their next phase of growth.
Fabien Bonnin joins in the newly created role of chief brands acceleration officer, with immediate effect. Based between London, Paris and the company’s new Milan headquarters, he will work alongside Tomorrow’s co-founder and CEO Stefano Martinetto and the executive board to oversee its six invested brands: Coperni, Martine Rose, A-Cold-Wall*, Charles Jeffrey Loverboy, Objects IV Life and Colville, as well as multi-brand retailer Machine-A. Bonnin’s goal is to define the structure and operation of these brands to accelerate their growth in the mid to long term.
Bonnin joins Tomorrow from Richemont-owned Montblanc, where he was chief merchandising officer over the past year. Prior, he held longstanding senior roles in merchandising and sales at Givenchy, Dior and Lanvin, where he worked under the late Alber Elbaz.
Bonnin “brings a wealth of consumer, merchandising, retail and brand strategy experience to the group and our brands [as they] develop into their next phase of growth”, said Martinetto in a statement. “From the incubation phase to the acceleration of their growth, and Tomorrow’s along with it, I am sure he will have a phenomenal impact on our ambitious plans.”
The appointment signals a new chapter for Tomorrow, which, until recently, has grown through acquisitions. “This phase of growth and development is very much on making sure that we properly execute and accelerate the portfolio brands that we’ve got,” Martinetto tells Vogue Business. “We tend to bring in very young, emerging brands. It feels like those brands have gone through adolescence and all of those growing pains and now it’s about trying to steady [their businesses].” While the group will always have an eye out for disruptive upstarts to add to its arsenal, the current priority is “consolidation and solidification”, he says.
Comparable groups focused on acquiring and scaling brands favoured by millennials and Gen Z consumers have been gaining traction. That includes Farfetch-owned New Guards Group, which has targeted founder-led brands including Off-White, Palm Angels, Heron Preston and Kirin by Peggy Gou. Marco Marchi’s Eccellenze Italiane Holding, a multi-brand company formed in November 2019, aims primarily at consolidating Italian brands in the high-end and premium segment (Blumarine is among its latest success stories). Bart Ramakers’s agency Parrot is a smaller but fast-growing player that also invests in and distributes brands, such as Conner Ives.
A balancing act
Rather than racing to grow the next billion-dollar label, Tomorrow’s view of success is building brands that can sustain stable and replicable growth. Bonnin’s role will require a balancing act between helping designers stay true to their vision while generating enough commercial appeal to resonate with their core customers, says Martinetto. Many of the group’s brands are at a stage where they “really do need to start thinking about the end client and what that client wants”, he explains. “Growth is going to come from being able to move from an incubation phase into an accelerated level. It isn’t just about the dream, the high or the buzz.”
His arrival comes at a crucial junction in fashion when many independent brands are struggling to stay afloat. Several UK-based designers say that the market has become tougher to navigate post-Brexit and that the country lacks the infrastructure to support emerging fashion businesses to scale. Access to finance, longer payment terms and increasing regulation around sustainability were among the challenges also highlighted by the British Fashion Council’s chair David Pemsel at a strategy update in June.
The ramifications have been tough. Last month, Christopher Kane appointed an administrator to save his namesake brand from collapse. Sibling, Nicholas Kirkwood, Peter Pilotto and Meadham Kirchhoff have all paused in recent years, and industry experts have questioned the business strength of several other designers from Kane’s and subsequent generations.
Tomorrow’s brands have largely bucked the trend. Martine Rose recently staged a guest show at Pitti Uomo in Florence, remains the de facto headliner of the June edition of London Fashion Week and has an ongoing partnership with Nike. Charles Jeffrey Loverboy and Andersson Bell (the latter is not an invested brand but works with Tomorrow on distribution) made the leap from their respective home markets and now show at Milan Fashion Week. Coperni is focused on cementing itself as a globally recognised label after a few buzzy seasons. A-Cold-Wall* is opening two new flagship stores in China’s Shanghai and Shenzhen. Molly Molloy and Lucinda Chambers, the duo behind Colville, were the latest guests to design for AZ Factory.
Asked whether independent brands today have enough support, Bonnin says that the crowded and competitive industry is “hard” and designers need to be more effective in developing a brand and in establishing a close relationship with end-customers. “The direct-to-consumer experience is key.”
A rethink of wholesale is needed, says Martinetto. “Wholesalers are not bad, but ‘bad’ wholesale is bad for the growth of brands,” he explains. “It is more important which wholesale partners a brand goes to, and at what stage of their growth and development. Getting addicted to wholesale just as a volume game doesn’t make sense.” By the same token, he doesn’t believe brands can scale through direct-to-consumer sales alone. “They forget that they’re not broad enough and all they’re doing is feeding [Meta platforms] with paid digital marketing by going down that route.”
Bonnin has a similar view. “Success needs to be more than one season,” he says. To grow organically without being too dependent on digital marketing, brands need to be “smart” and “agile” enough to present something interesting or new each season, while also staying “extremely close to the authenticity of their DNA”, he observes.
A strength of Tomorrow’s brands is how they approach collaborations. Martine Rose’s debut at the Women’s World Cup as part of her tie-up with Nike, and Charles Jeffrey Loverboy’s unexpected collaboration on pre-loved, paint-splashed Jasperware pieces with Wedgwood were notable, as the designers amplified their worlds in a way that was true to their DNA. Similarly, Post Archive Faction — which is not an invested brand but works with Tomorrow on sales — unveiled a collaboration with On Running during the latest Paris Fashion Week. More often than not, when smaller designers work with bigger companies, the final result is diluted as they seek to boost mainstream appeal. Tomorrow’s brands, it seemed, leaned in even harder to their core identities while creating something new and fresh.
Bonnin first met with Martinetto about two years ago and they connected over a shared understanding of the fashion landscape and their ambitions to future-proof independent fashion businesses, he says. Bonnin says his past experiences led him to become “extremely product oriented”. He believes the struggle to balance commerciality and creativity is why many brands fail. At Tomorrow London, the goal is “to make sure that the creative point of view is going to the final client, while, at the same time, the [feedback] from the client is also going up to the artistic direction”, he says.
With everything in life, it’s about balance, says Bonnin. “It can be quite easy to please clients in order to make business, but [in] pleasing too much, sometimes we forget about who we are.”
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