Selected engagements across fashion, luxury and creative industries
This practice communicates its work in two registers. Public mandates carry their real names; private work is anonymised by policy, never by vagueness. What follows is a small selection from two decades of engagements, chosen for the range of situations they represent. Every detail is real; only the names have been withheld.
Saudi 100 Brands, Fashion Commission, Saudi Arabia Ministry of Culture
In brief. A kingdom set out to build a national designer pipeline from zero → 100 brands selected from 1,300+ applicants; now the Fashion Commission’s flagship platform, in its fifth season.
The Kingdom's national fashion designer development programme: 100 brands in eight categories, selected from more than 1,300 applicants, with monthly mentoring and international showcases in Paris and New York. The programme continues today as the Fashion Commission's flagship platform, now in its fifth season. Described in full under Government & Institutions.
Bogotá Fashion Week, Cámara de Comercio de Bogotá, Colombia
In brief. A city trade platform needed commercial architecture → buyer delegations from 22 countries and over USD 4 million in business per edition; the model still runs today.
The strategic architecture behind Colombia's fashion business platform: international curation standards, buyer-readiness mentoring and a structured B2B marketplace. The programme has since scaled to buyer delegations from 22 countries and over USD 4 million in immediate business per edition. Described in full under Government & Institutions.
A European luxury group: Realigning Creative and Commercial Leadership
In brief. Strong studios and strong commercial teams were reading different maps → one shared map, corrections moved upstream, and senior decisions that held.
The situation. A group operating several heritage maisons was losing time and margin to a familiar pattern: strong studios and strong commercial teams reading different maps. Collections were being corrected late in the calendar, merchandising decisions contradicted creative intent, and senior meetings produced agreement in the room and divergence outside it. None of the individual leaders was the problem; the way their decisions met was.
What we did. We began where we always do, with a diagnostic: structured interviews across studio, merchandising and commercial leadership, and a mapping of where the two readings of the brand actually diverged, decision by decision. From there, we redesigned the points in the calendar where creative and commercial choices meet, so that corrections happened early and once. The final phase was working with the senior team itself, in the room, on the discipline of deciding together and not revisiting.
What changed. The group recovered a single map. Corrections moved upstream, where they cost little; senior meetings began producing decisions that held; and the maisons kept their creative identities intact, which was the constraint the whole engagement was built around. The structures we left behind belonged to the group, not to us.
A global premium retailer: Brand Clarity after a period of drift
In brief. Growth had outrun identity → a rebuilt positioning, fewer and stronger stories per season, and explicit criteria for saying no.
The situation. An international premium retailer had grown faster than its identity. Assortments had widened season after season, the brand's point of view had thinned as it stretched to cover them, and the creative organisation was executing seasons rather than directing them. Revenue was holding; relevance was not. The leadership sensed the drift but had no shared language for what exactly had been lost.
What we did. We rebuilt the positioning from the ground the brand actually stood on: its real customer, not its aspirational one, and the categories where it still had authority. With that foundation agreed, we reconnected the brand narrative to the seasonal product direction, so that each season argued something rather than covering everything, and restructured the working relationship between design and merchandising around that argument. The last piece was the hardest and the most valuable: aligning the leadership team on what the brand would no longer do.
What changed. A sharper offer built on fewer, stronger stories per season; a creative organisation directing again instead of producing; and a leadership team with explicit criteria for saying no, which is where premium brands are actually made. The clarity outlived the engagement because it was written into how the teams work, not into a document.
An Italian family-owned luxury house: a fast, operational diagnostic
In brief. A family-led couture house needed clarity without a heavy engagement → a fast, fixed-scope diagnostic separating what to decide now from what could wait.
The situation. A heritage couture house, family-owned and family-led, needed clarity without the weight of a long consulting engagement: which commercial and organisational moves would matter in the next two seasons, which could wait, and which of its traditions were assets to protect rather than constraints to remove. Founder-led companies buy consulting differently, and they are right to: what they need is judgement delivered quickly, in their language, at a cost proportionate to their scale.
What we did. A short, fixed-scope diagnostic designed for exactly that kind of company. We worked directly with the family and the handful of people who actually run the house, looked at the commercial reality season by season, and separated what needed to be decided now from what merely generated anxiety. No frameworks imported from group-level consulting, no hundred-page deliverable: findings, a sequence, and a recommendation, in plain operational terms.
What changed. The family left the engagement with a short, ordered list of moves it could execute itself, without a consultant attached, and with explicit permission to protect the traditions that were, in fact, the business. The engagement was priced and paced for decision speed, a model this practice now applies to every founder-led client.
A Latin American brand: from Domestic Success to Export Readiness
In brief. A domestic success not yet legible to international buyers → coherent wholesale pricing, a story that travelled, and readiness before exposure.
The situation. A high-potential brand with a strong domestic following wanted to enter Europe and Japan. The product had merit; the company was not yet legible to international buyers. Pricing did not translate to wholesale; the story was told in domestic terms, and the operation behind the brand had never been tested against export timelines. The risk was the classic one: arriving early instead of arriving ready, and burning the first impression that emerging brands only get once.
What we did. A full diagnostic of product, pricing and operations against the standards international buyers actually apply. We rebuilt the wholesale pricing architecture from the cost base up, reframed the brand's story for audiences with no context for its domestic success, prepared the founder and team for buyer conversations, and sequenced the market entry so that each step funded and justified the next. The method was the same one we apply in our national programmes: readiness first, exposure second.
What changed. The brand went into its first international conversations prepared rather than hopeful: coherent pricing, a story that travelled, and an operation that could deliver what a buyer would order. Just as importantly, the founder now owns the export logic itself and can apply it to every subsequent market.
Beyond these, two decades of engagements have spanned repositionings for heritage maisons, market entries across Asia and the Gulf, creative and commercial realignments at group level, export programmes for emerging brands in Latin America, and executive education with fashion councils and institutions in London and Milan. The pattern across all of them is the same: judgement applied at the moment a decision becomes expensive.