subscribe to style file blog via RSSFilippa K On San Fran and Smart Secondhand
December 10, 2008 4:16 pm
Whether they knew it or not, Bay Area residents had one extra thing to be thankful for last month. Filippa K opened its first store in the United States on Black Friday, and San Francisco shoppers are the lucky ones who get to browse the Stockholm-
based company’s stock of oh-so-reasonably priced staples for men and women. If Sweden’s most famous fashion brand, H&M, has exported one template for Scandinavian thrift to the States, Filippa K promotes another. The label is laser-
focused on making the kind of clothes that amortize themselves with constant use. Think perfectly cut jackets and trousers, season
-less shirtdresses, and day-in, day-out denim and tees. This slow-fashion approach feels right for the times, and in a fitting if coincidental bit of fashion allegory, the San Francisco Filippa K store is housed in a former bank. Some investments do hold their value. Here, Filippa K founder Filippa Knutsson talks to Style.com about San Fran’s Scandinavian sensibility, what’s easy and what’s hard about going green, and why she’s perfectly OK not having a corporate strategy.
I know you had already laid much of the groundwork for the San Francisco store by the time Lehman Brothers folded and the economy well and truly tanked, but was there ever a moment when you felt like pulling back? I mean, this isn’t exactly an ideal time for moving into the U.S. market.
A moment? Sure. When a financial crisis hits, you re-evaluate. But we were already pretty close to opening the store when that happened, and anyway, the concept of Filippa K is one that stands up to the times. My key words are style, simplicity, and quality. Basically, we give value for money. Sometimes, the price of fashion is so crazy. I like to think of Filippa K as the intelligent alternative.
Why San Francisco?
Northern California and Scandinavia have a lot of similarities. People in both places are very laid-back, for one thing.
That’s it? That was the whole thought process behind launching in San Francisco rather than, say, Los Angeles or New York?
It was an intuitive choice. We make a lot of our decisions off a feeling—there’s not always an overarching corporate strategy. And that seems to work. We do a pared-back sportswear look, and in the States, San Francisco seemed like the place for that.
If people in the United States know one Swedish fashion brand, they know H&M. But Stockholm is also bursting with edgier—and much costlier—lines like Acne, Hope, Fifth Avenue Shoe Repair. Filippa K seems to sit somewhere in the middle. Is that a niche you’ve consciously carved out for the brand?
Well, when I started Filippa K in 1993, it was only because at the time, there were pieces I wanted to wear that I just couldn’t find. I was working for my dad’s denim company and launched with a pair of stretch jeans that became “the thing” in Sweden. After that we grew quite rapidly. I think there was a void waiting to be filled, and we filled it. The thing about Sweden is, there are maybe five companies like H&M that are all about super-cheap clothes and lots of turnover, and then there have always been a few high-end designers. But we were really the first independent brand that made fashion-conscious clothes at an affordable price. And we inspired a lot of other brands to follow in our footsteps.
I understand you recently opened a secondhand store for Filippa K clothes in Stockholm. What’s that all about?
Yes, we opened the secondhand store in June. The idea came out of an environmental brainstorming session. Like any company that’s concerned about these things, we’ve spent a lot of energy thinking about how we source, how we produce, how we distribute, but it suddenly struck us that we’d given almost no thought to what happens to Filippa K clothes once they’ve sold. Creating our own secondhand market seemed like an easy way to do something green.
I am sincerely impressed: That secondhand Filippa K shop may be the single smartest eco-initiative I’ve encountered, at least in terms of fashion and retail. But do you worry about losing customers who might otherwise have bought new?
No, I don’t worry. I think the secondhand reinforces customers’ relationship with Filippa K. In any case, the shop has done astonishingly well. We don’t take everything people bring in, and if something hasn’t sold in two months, we give it back. In other words, we keep an eye on our selection.
Are you also working on greening the brand from the back end?
The environmental stuff is so complex. In general, we do what we can and try not to talk about it too much. I don’t want to give anyone the idea that we’re a totally eco brand, because we’re not. But we have managed to get our very basic stuff, like our tees, ecologically certified. Because that’s the highest volume part of the Filippa K business, it makes a difference. Then there are small things we do, like separate our trash, provide bikes for people to take to meetings, and if it’s raining, we call an environmentally friendly cab. We pay attention to the human aspect, too, not just the green.
Filippa K is a firmly established brand in Europe. At this point, are you primarily focused on developing the brand in new markets, or are there categories within the line that you’d still like to develop?
We added shoes to the line recently. They’ve been successful in Sweden but it’s just now that the range seems to be coming into its own. I’m not sure what’s next. Even in terms of opening more stores, that’s a question. It’s not like we’re developing plans for a shop in New York. As I said, we don’t rely too much on a corporate strategy. Or, I guess you could say that Filippa K’s corporate strategy is to keep taking one day at a time.
tags: Filippa K, San Francisco, Sweden
Refreshing
By R5T2 on 12/10/08 at 5:26 pm