A decade ago, the conventional wisdom in fashion entrepreneurship was clear: build a direct-to-consumer brand, raise venture capital, disrupt the incumbents, and grow at all costs. Everlane, Outdoor Voices, and a generation of DTC darlings became the poster children of this model. But as many of those once-celebrated brands have hit turbulence — Everlane’s valuation cratered, Outdoor Voices was acquired at a fraction of its peak — a quieter cohort has been demonstrating that a different path not only works but may be more durable.
Dôen, founded by sisters Margaret and Katherine Kleveland in Los Angeles, built its aesthetic around a romantic, California-inflected take on womenswear that resonated immediately with the contemporary market’s craving for something between mass-market and luxury. Rather than pouring money into digital acquisition, the brand invested in a brick-and-mortar presence through wholesale partners like Net-a-Porter and Nordstrom, building awareness through placement rather than performance marketing.
Brands founded in 2016, including the feminine-ready-to-wear label Dôen, the striped-shirt specialists La Ligne, and the eveningwear house Cinq à Sept, steered clear of the VC-fueled DTC playbook from the start. Instead, they built their businesses around wholesale partnerships with department stores and specialty retailers, cultivating a steady, profitable growth curve that prioritized margin and brand equity over top-line expansion. The results speak for themselves: all three are profitable, all three have maintained their independence, and all three have built loyal customer bases without burning through investor capital.
La Ligne, co-founded by Valerie Macaulay, Meredith Melling, and Molly Howard, took an even more focused approach, building an entire brand around the striped marinière shirt before expanding into dresses, knitwear, and tailoring. The brand’s reliance on wholesale gave it a credibility boost — placement in Barneys and later Bergdorf Goodman signaled quality in a way that Instagram ads could not. The founders have emphasized that the slower, more deliberate approach allowed them to maintain control over their aesthetic and their margins.
The success of these brands offers a counter-narrative to the DTC orthodoxy that dominated fashion startup culture in the mid-2010s. They suggest that for certain categories — particularly apparel, where fit, fabric, and in-person discovery matter — the wholesale model retains advantages that digital-native brands have struggled to replicate. In an era when customer acquisition costs on social platforms have soared and consumer trust in digital advertising has eroded, the department store floor may still be the most valuable real estate in fashion.
