The Tamesis
“From our perspective, we believe in pragmatism,” Bjerregaard said. “The world is a very bad place right now because everything is divided, everything is in conflict. There are powerful forces that want to divide things, create conflict, and polarize the world. From our perspective, it’s very much about bringing everything together and not making huge compromises, but again, it’s like money and love, or avant-garde and commercialism…”
Measuring success
Bjerregaard and Gjesing are the “adults in the room” in terms of experience, but neither has lost faith in the magic of creativity. As the latter puts it: “Without fashion, the world would be pretty boring.” Their ultimate goal is not to cash in, but Moon reports that they have “maintained a steady annual turnover of around 24-26 million Danish kroner (~$4 million)” over the past four years, at a time when endless growth seems to be the dominant mode. Gissing doesn’t think so.
“We don’t buy into this idea that it might just be endless growth as opposed to a strategy or like getting as big as possible. I think you need all the nuances of it. From a personal perspective, it feels a little bit greedy when the ultimate big goal is; it feels like you’re not really looking at it in the right way and then failure can be so big.” Today’s consumers are more educated and look for more nuanced brands, he added. When growth is your only goal, it leads to burnout.
“The brands we’re involved with are pursuing sustained performance and continued growth, which is really destroying employees, destroying brands, and ultimately damaging their relationships with consumers,” Bjerregaard said. “Of course, there are a lot of successful growth stories, but from our perspective, if you look at the last 10 years and look at the next 10 years, it doesn’t make sense.”
In fact, enough has changed that Gjesing warns against looking to success stories from other industries, such as Acne or Ganni, to try to copy their path.
“It has a lot to do with timing and luck and windows of opportunity opening and closing. So to say we want to be like them is very difficult, almost to the point of impossible, because you don’t know why they ended up there,” he said. Advertisement
