Welcome to the Executive Focus Group, a Glossy+ member-exclusive series driven by monthly focus groups with subject matter experts. The bi-weekly series offers actionable takeaways for business leaders navigating the rapidly evolving beauty and fashion industries.
This month, Glossy brought together a group of fashion brand founders and leaders to discuss the state of the wholesale market. With tariffs having shaken the retail market, more brands have turned to retail partners to help shore up their business. But wholesale comes with its own host of challenges. Below is a recap of the segments of the discussion related to the state of the wholesale industry, and the pros and cons of big department stores and smaller specialty retailers.
Focus group members:
Devon Grief, the CEO of Montce Swim, a Miami-based swimwear brand with a wholesale business that makes up 30% of revenue. Montce Swim is carried at several big retailers including Nordstrom and Revolve.
Devyani Ramani, the COO of the fashion brand Rebecca Taylor and its parent company, The Ramani Group. Ramani and her husband, Deepak Ramani, bought Rebecca Taylor from Vince in 2022 and have established a strong network of wholesale partnerships in the years since.
Kris Avakian, the founder and CEO of the Canadian designer footwear brand Black Suede Studio. In 2017, Avakian launched the business with big department store accounts before branching out into specialty retail.
The state of wholesale, and working with retailers big and small
Ramani: “Wholesale can be such an incredible business model. I think most brands today are trying to do a combination of both a DTC business while doing a B2B business. Both have different margins. Both give you the opportunity to leverage one another. Historically, Rebecca Taylor was heavily focused on a department store-led business. When we acquired the brand, our strategy was to try and change that distribution model a little bit, which I am pleased and happy that we did.
We have been highly focused for the past two years on independent stores nationwide and focused on building back that business, which was the strength of the business 20 years ago. Building out strong partnerships with sales teams in different territories within the nation has helped us reconnect with our customer base and reconnect with some of these independent stores that give you phenomenal feedback because they’re family-owned businesses. And it has helped us resonate again with our customer and also drive the new storytelling and product assortment for us.”
Avakian: “When I launched the brand, whereas a lot of brands start by building into specialty retail, I did the opposite. I come from a private-label background, [working for] my family business. So, we actually got into all the major retailers first, which gave the brand a lot of credibility and gave us the volume we needed to produce the type of footwear we wanted to. It helped us build commerce organically by leveraging the retailers’ traffic. And then, only in the last few years, we started really focusing on specialty. I also find specialty tough; it’s a lot of chasing people down. It’s a bit harder to manage. It’s a lot more work for a lot less dollars.
So, we kind of did the reverse in building our business. It doesn’t work for everyone, but it worked out for us.
Working with specialty stores, you have to be open to accommodating the [company] if something’s not working — to swap out the product. You definitely have to be ready to give them extended payment terms, because they’re mom-and-pop shops and sometimes — most of the time — they’re paying late.”
Grief: “I see a lot of brands moving to wholesale because they see the cost of ads going up when they sell direct. They see a lot of privacy law changes. Wholesale is definitely a growing channel, and everyone sees the importance of it.
For us, marketplace drop-shipping definitely adds some revenue. We actually drop-ship on our website some other brands, as well. So, it’s a cool new [strategy] that makes sense, and you don’t have to invest in the inventory. You can drop-ship brands on your website that you think are aligned with your values, and then you also, kind of, elevate each other and lend each other credibility.”
Ramani: “A big part of our company, The Ramani Group, is mass-volume apparel, and we’ve been doing it for quite some time. So, to go from that to the independent retailers for Rebecca Taylor was challenging. The only reason it is working is because we work with showrooms within a territory, and they go on the road a lot to meet with specialty retailers. Their relationship with those independent mom-and-pops is quite strong. If we did not have that, it would be extremely challenging for us to do.”
Grief: “As a smaller brand working with large retailers, you sometimes have to accept terms that you don’t like and maybe renegotiate them down the line. Whatever you get up front, be prepared to live with that and be prepared also to sometimes say no. You have to stand your ground. We were actually dropped by a big retailer four years ago because we said no to an ask, and now we’re back with them and doing great business with them.”
