Exactly one year ago I committed as the lead designer of Ricano. The brand and I share a long history – and I had to tackle the organisational culture that only revolves around leather jackets from the inside. 35 years of only developing and selling genuine leather garments.
The product of an organisation is a medium for its culture. And Ricano is all about leather. Hence convincing all stakeholders to embrace a future as a holistic fashion brand took considerable effort and consistency.
But at some point, we committed. We traveled to China and searched for production partners that would meet our standards.
Ricano is highly product focused. And as you cannot do everything right if you try everything at once, we fully focused on artificial fur as our first material of choice.
And it was exiting. We learned about what this material is about, how to determine quality, and which designs it can deliver. China is an amazing place for that – the standards for production, quality of labor and approaches to sustainable materials we found at the high-end range of manufactures blew our minds. I’m confident that they are only a few production places in Europe that could compete with that modernity.
Today I returned from Berlin fashion week and all the samples we ordered for our partner fashion agencies were waiting for me. Ten series of our collection: hundreds of jackets.
Vision to reality
And while I worked through them and prepared one set of our collection for each of our ten agencies, I reflected. This was only a vision in my mind one year ago – and by next week, ten different showrooms will release and introduce more than twenty carefully developed art fur styles accompanying more than thirty leather jacket designs.
One year ago, we worked with a handful of sales agents scattered over Europe. Now, we are engaged in fashion. We partnered with impressively reputable, good agencies – with our first season already being a blasting success. And I just closed two additional partnerships just this week; covering my goal of ten agencies introducing our first structured jacket collection in 2020.
Further, the GDFO delivered a sophisticated B2B-store and agency support system that will go with our new collection in the showrooms. It’s superb.
And it’s addictive
The entire hall was forsaken, the lights were dimmed, but still there I was working over piles and piles of colorful jackets. Checking on the details of the garments, working through all the styles’ information – from special wind-proofed linings to the colour swatches -, and how to design our communication about that.
It was after nine, already, being 13 hours on fire. And I could have easily spend the entire night. Fueled by the sheer excitement that comes with a project you fostered from the first thought to reality.
But that’s enough for today. I met our neighbor on my way out – a guy so authentic in his craftsmanship and arts that he is my personal embodiment of how Berlin folks want to be -, and we spend some time chatting in his workshop. Maybe we’ll develop a jacket style together. He’s a big fan of the coat in the comic Corto Maltese. I like it, too – so let’s get on it, soon.