Isabel Marant: How I built a brand that didn't burn out
The Parisian designer patiently built her namesake label over 30 years. Here, she discusses her successes, regrets and advice to young designers.
By Marta Represa
We need new roadmaps in fashion. Leaving school with a mountain of debt and a dream is a strategy few designers can rely upon in 2026. As fees at prestigious design schools continue to climb, we’ve partnered with AZ Academy, a free Milan-based fashion course born out of the late Alber Elbaz’s AZ Factory – his brand turned fashion incubator – and overseen by Richemont, Creative Academy and Accademia Costume & Moda (ACM), to democratise access to fashion business education and a roster of esteemed industry figures.
Isabel Marant has achieved something rare as a designer. She is a fixture of the fashion scene, a respected name mentioned in the same breath as many of the biggest brands, yet she exists outside of industry drama. In an age of chop and change in fashion, such a position becomes an important blueprint for young designers. “There wasn’t really an ‘aha’ moment because growth was so gradual,” she says of her steady success, “It felt like each season we were selling a tiny little bit more than the one before.”
A graduate of Parisian fashion school Studio Berçot, she briefly worked with designer Michel Klein and assisted Art Director Marc Ascoli in his work for Chloé, Martine Sitbon and Yohji Yamamoto, before establishing her brand, which quickly became a favourite amongst fashion tastemakers. “Editors started talking among themselves about this cute brand that had a shop in the Marais,” remembered consultant Paula Reed in a 2013 interview with The Gentlewoman. “We would make a pilgrimage when we were in Paris for the shows. It’s a bit of a relief for a fashion editor to feel they’re getting away from the big brands.”
As part of being an AZ jury member and mentor, we wanted to learn from Marant the wins and regrets of her 30-year career, from staging her first runway show in the mid-90s (“I finally felt I was in a solid enough position to do so”) to releasing logo-ed merch and bags 20 years later (“There was a demand for that kind of thing, but it was a very short-sighted strategy which I think ultimately damaged the brand.”)
Your very first fashion show took place in 1994, but at that point you had been designing for a few years…
Exactly. I started the brand in 1989 and had my first fashion show five years later, and I think the wait was really worth it. To this day, I believe it’s what allowed the brand to thrive in a landscape in which a lot of my emerging designer colleagues unfortunately didn’t, in part because they got financially exhausted after a few years of doing shows before their labels were ready for them. Leaning on shows too early as a designer is generally bound to condition your aesthetics and consequently make you create clothes that are more image-oriented than truly sellable and wearable. I chose the opposite path, making much more “quiet” yet very wearable clothes in my first few years, which brought a certain amount of commercial success that allowed me to little by little put money aside. Then, in 94, I finally felt like I was on solid enough ground to stage a show.
The thing is, a show requires plenty of pieces: shows, accessories… It’s a lot of investment. Having one from the get go is doable if you are independently wealthy, or you have been working for other brands as a freelancer to finance it. Otherwise it is extremely complicated to survive the two or three seasons it takes for a brand to be commercially viable with that kind of expenditure every six months. We have all witnessed – way too often – exciting emerging brands that were press darlings during their first four seasons, only to fizzle out and disappear because the reality was they weren’t selling at all and they spent all their money on shows. So my advice to young designers has been and continues to be to really be weary of that “mandatory show” mindset.
When did you first realise the brand was really growing?
There wasn’t really an “aha” moment because growth was so gradual! It felt like each season we were selling a tiny little bit more than the one before. There were no exponential jump moments, which I think is kind of great because that means there was no drama, no high highs and low lows. Instead, revenue and sales gently augmented with each season, which made the business feel steady and, most importantly, allowed me to finance the brand’s development step by step.
Is there anything you wish you had known in the first few years of developing the brand?
Absolutely. I have always felt like my biggest mistake was starting my own company very soon after finishing my studies, without having had more work experiences at other brands. Looking back at that time, I have often said to myself that I should have taken my time and really gathered experience by working for other designers. To this day, that remains the biggest regret of my career.
How does working for other designers before debuting your own company help?
Mainly, it can help one understand how things happen at different places, how other designers make it work on a day to day basis. I had to invent my own business model, which I guess is also interesting because it really shaped the brand in very particular ways. But I had no examples; no role models. Learning from other people would have been such a time-saver.
Do you have any advice on growing a brand?
My main advice would actually be to curb growth so it feels manageable. It’s always better to refuse orders and grow a little bit slower if that means you can finance orders with ease and you will not find yourself in a compromised position. For me, I worked with the very straightforward idea of investing a euro for each euro I earned. That meant I never had to borrow any money.
Despite everything, at one point my orders grew a bit more than usual. Luckily, I had taken a freelance job designing collections for a German business, which meant I had to ask them for payment in advance so as to fully finance my own brand’s orders. They acquiesced, and it’s thanks to them that I was able to solve that conundrum.
So would you advise freelance work to young designers?
Yes; freelancing for other brands can definitely be a revenue stream for an emerging company. And there are plenty of lesser known brands who are always on the lookout for designers, so I would say it’s a realistic way of making extra money.
When did you first bring outside investment into your company?
Ten years ago, in 2016. That’s when I decided to sell 51% of my shares in the company to an investment fund. Up until then, I didn’t deem it necessary. Plus, no group is ever going to buy a brand that is, so to say, “nonexistent” or not viable. That’s just not good business. Which is why it’s so important to stay independently afloat in the first few years, and then take investment in terms that are advantageous for everyone involved.
What did that investment mostly help with?
At that point the business was really stable, and what we needed was to develop our stores outside of France. That’s where outside investment was really crucial.
Did that change your daily work, and day to day operations?
Oh, it changed everything. You have to always keep in mind that retail is a completely different expertise to design. It requires a whole other kind of know-how, and I really needed the advice of experts to make me feel confident enough to make certain financial decisions. I was not used to that, and it had always scared me. But I started working on it, and those efforts had the effect of making the brand truly international. It was an inevitable next step. I mean, I had an established brand but it was still very French and very niche, only known in other markets to certain people. And, suddenly, we had standalone stores in many of the big capitals of the world. That’s bound to change a business forever.
How did you choose what markets you wanted to develop the most?
The United States was a no-brainer, so the first thing we did was open flagship stores in both New York and Los Angeles. For the other markets, what we did is we looked at the countries where the brand was already performing well. It was the case in Europe, and particularly in Italy, where multi-brand stores were selling very solidly. So we replaced that presence in multi-brand stores with our own stores, because once you are well established somewhere, it’s a savvy business move to depend on your own wholesale rather than on retail. Still, a standalone store demands a big investment, with real estate, employee salaries and so on. As I said, it’s a completely different know-how, one that many of us as designers are completely unready for, and that we are forced to learn as we go along.
What is the hardest business decision you have ever taken, one that your creative instincts rebelled against?
Well… it was not as much a decision I took as a decision that was taken by the company. When, in 2016, the investment fund came in, we engaged a new CEO who had a background at LVMH, and who had a very retail-oriented vision. She was responsible for wonderful things like developing our bag line, but she also pushed to create a whole range of logo-ed products. And that wasn’t at all who I was, so yes, you could say my creative instincts rebelled against it. I cannot deny that those products sold extremely well at first because, at the time, there was a demand for that kind of thing. But it was a very short-sighted strategy which I think ultimately damaged the brand.
Can you tell us about your work with AZ Academy?
AZ Academy contacted me to ask me to be part of their 2025 Jury, and from the start I found their approach extremely unique and interesting. Helping young designers to establish their companies, giving them a structure and pointers along the way, is such a different thing to everything we already have. I mean, we are used to rewarding young designers’ collections, but that kind of reward rarely comes with helping them establish their business.
How have you collaborated with the Academy so far?
Besides being part of their 2025 Jury, I have done a conference basically retracing my own experience in the industry, discussing my failures and successes, while also taking the time to answer the students’ professional questions. It felt like a real exchange of points of view.
What would be your ultimate advice to young designers starting their own company in 2026?
When I started the brand, I was part of a whole generation of young designers who were all at their beginnings. A lot of those designers started out very strongly, with very image-oriented collections that immediately got a lot of press attention but that, unfortunately, didn’t translate to solid sales. That’s why I’ve always thought it’s very important to be aware of the fact that successful communication is one thing, and making wearable, sellable clothes is another. The secret lies in finding the right balance between the two. Never lose sight of the fact that your clothes will be worn by real – not fantasy – women. But also, on the other hand, make clothes that are interesting enough to not just be one more quiet luxury brand. Make your personality show throughout. By all means be bold, but also make space in your collections for some very commercially viable pieces. And remember the term “commercial” doesn’t have to be a dirty word, but it also needs to be led by creativity.
Is it harder to stay afloat as a business nowadays than it was when you started your company?
In a sense it really is, because one thing is really lacking in the industry nowadays: really strong multi-brand stores. Places like L’Éclaireur, Colette, 10 Corso Como… The people in charge of those now-defunct places were trailblazers always on the hunt for little-known, emerging brands and designers. Today we have Dover Street Market, true, but that’s not enough to keep an emerging brand afloat. On the other hand, though, we didn’t have the internet like we do now. No Instagram, which can be a wonderful tool when you really know how to use it. With the internet, you can be noticed even without being sold in stores.
How would you define your relationship to the fashion industry at large?
Honestly, I feel pretty far removed from it. I have always done things in my own way and I feel like I have a more transversal point of view. I have always engaged more with design, the arts and music than with pure fashion. I dislike the fact that it’s dominated by a duopoly, the endless game of musical chairs, the fact that everyone seems a bit lost… I feel like I have been observing that for years from a healthy distance.
Find how to submit your application and receive one of the scholarships offered by the Richemont group to AZ Academy here. The deadline has been extended until the 20th of June 2026.
