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A.F. Vandevorst’s Hard-Earned Happy Birthday

BoF examines the genesis, travails and revival of Belgian label A.F. Vandevorst, which this season marks 15 years in business, and distills down the important lessons that designers An Vandevorst and Filip Arickx have learned along the way.
Filip Arickx and An Vandevorst | Source: Courtesy
By
  • Suleman Anaya

PARIS, France — In the July 2000 issue of American Vogue, fourteen designers appeared in a spread photographed by Steven Meisel for a feature entitled "The New Guard," spotlighting the crop of rising designers the influential publication deemed most promising at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The group included several figures that were already well on their way to becoming luminaries, such as Hedi Slimane, Junya Watanabe and Nicolas Ghesquière. It also included the critically acclaimed Olivier Theyskens and Hussein Chalayan, as well as Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren.

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A spread from "The New Guard," July 2000 | Source: Vogue (US)

Thirteen years later, many of the designers shot by Meisel for this now-landmark feature occupy important positions at the very top of the fashion ecosystem. But the only designers in the image to have continuously focused on building their own label, slowly and steadily, without the support of a group, from that day to the present, are Filip Arickx and An Vandevorst, the married couple behind A.F. Vandevorst, which, this year, celebrates its 15th year in business.

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Despite this, the pair remain very much under-the-radar. Indeed, many people don't even realise that A.F. Vandevorst is, in fact, a duo and not a sole designer. Still, Arickx and Vandevorst have succeeded in attracting a loyal following of die-hard fans, both critics and consumers alike, who swear by the designers' intelligent construction — which mixes soft, feminine touches, often inspired by lingerie, with strong tailoring — and signature, military-inflected jackets and trenchcoats, among the steady standouts in the 30 collections the label has produced.

Finding a match

Arickx and Vandevorst met on their first day as students at Antwerp’s famous Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1987. They knew they were a match right away, both personally and artistically, but initially focused on their own individual projects. After graduating, An worked for Martin Margiela and eventually became the first assistant to Dries van Noten, with whom she worked closely for six and a half years and "learned almost everything." Meanwhile, Filip completed his mandatory military service and worked as a freelance stylist before Dirk Bikkembergs took him under his wing. "Dirk introduced me to the fashion world. When I was 15, he took me to Paris to see the shows of Montana and Mugler," recalled Arickx.

The designers first felt it was time to tell their own story in 1997. “We had studied creation, we were a couple — which meant both a shared vision but also a constant soundboard with which to exchange and fine-tune ideas — and we had a story to tell, which was primarily built around aesthetics, and at a certain moment you feel this strong impulse to materialise it. You have to create it and physically make it. You say to yourself, 'It needs to be out there, Now!'" said Arickx.

Arickx and Vandevorst remember their first collection — shown in Paris for the Fall/Winter 1998 season — as being overflowing, perhaps overly so, with ideas. "Looking back at our first season, I think it had too much going on. But I think every young designer is like that. It's not even that you want to show all that, you just feel there is no other way," said Arickx. "There are so many things in you and you have been waiting for so long to express it, and suddenly you can, and it all comes out. It's only later that things really start to take form in a more focused, mature way."

"I still think the most difficult part in designing is to say ‘stop’ and to concentrate on just one idea," added Vandevorst. "Especially because there [are] two of us and we’re constantly talking about ideas and impulses, eliminating becomes really important, but is also really difficult. It’s the hardest part."

The power of a well-placed mentor

Significantly, when the pair decided to branch out on their own, Van Noten wasn’t just supportive of his protégée — he became something of a godfather to Vandevorst and the nascent label. “I talked to Dries one year before we created our own brand, so he would have enough time to look for my replacement," recalled Vandevorst. "Immediately, he said we could come to him with any questions and to get his advice about the business side of things, distribution and so on. He said 'You can always call, to ask anything you need, or ask my staff anytime you need help.'"

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At the beginning, the duo had an aesthetic point of view and little else. But Dries van Noten’s savvy business partner, the late Christine Mathys, soon set them a simple exercise. “She said, ‘Write down on a sheet what your costs are, what will the fashion show cost, and what will everything cost,’ which we did. Then she said, ‘Ok, now you should sell the double of what you spend and then you’re doing a good job,’” said Vandevorst.

The pair returned to Antwerp after their first season with 28 store accounts. “That had a lot to do with the great support Dries gave us.” Van Noten had offered the pair a showroom next to his and his commercial team helped the rookie duo to secure appointments with clients.

“They also helped us to target the right clients, clients who place orders and actually pay. Buyers probably had more faith in us because we were associated with an established brand.” The connection to Van Noten was also beneficial when it came to manufacturers, with whom Vandevorst had developed personal relationships while working at the label and who agreed to produce samples for A.F. Vandevorst based on good faith and with Van Noten's blessing.

Troubled times

Vandevorst and Arickx founded their label at a propitious moment in the late 1990s, a time when the fashion world was eagerly awaiting a second wave of talent to follow in the footsteps of the famous "Antwerp Six" designers — Ann Demeulemeester, Dries van Noten, Dirk Bikkembergs, Walter van Beirendonck, Dirk Van Saene and Marina Yee — who, in 1986, first put Belgium on the fashion map. Indeed, many almost expected that the assistants of the "Antwerp Six" designers would go on to start similarly successful brands.

In its first few seasons, A.F. Vandevorst managed to build forward momentum, growing its stockists collection after collection, and before long crossed over into profitability. But the couple soon faced serious challenges, which account, in part, for why after 15 years, A.F. Vandevorst remains relatively modest in scale with total sales for 2012 amounting to €3.8 million (about $5.1 million), according to Arickx.

“Like everyone else, we didn’t see 9/11 coming. But even after it had happened, we underestimated the effect it would have on us.” In fact, the economic fallout from the terrorist attacks had a profound impact on the young label. “We lost most of our American clients, because everyone was afraid, and even the clients that we didn’t lose started ordering less.”

Vandevorst admits that one of their biggest mistakes was not responding to the situation fast enough. “We kept on working with too many people, because we didn’t see that we were in trouble, in part because we didn’t have internal bookkeeping at that time. We were often working on three seasons at the same time, creating one collection, producing another one and delivering a third one, so it’s difficult to have a clear overview of where you stand in terms of profit. Therefore we didn’t realise that our overheads were too heavy,” she explained.

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It wasn’t until they hired an in-house bookkeeper that Vandevorst and Arickx understood the severity of their situation. “She said, ‘Guys, you have a serious problem, you have way too much money going out for what your revenues are,’” Vandevorst recalled. The designers realised they would have to implement drastic structural changes to their business and streamline their operations if they wanted to stay afloat.

When the company hit rock bottom in 2003, Vandevorst and Arickx were forced to lay off many of their employees, some of whom had been with them since the start, a painful process for both designers, who went on to indirectly acknowledge that they might have fared better had they been more open to taking on outside investment earlier.

“In the beginning [if you graduated from the Antwerp academy when we did], you were in your own bubble and ‘business’ and ‘commercial’ were bad words,” Vandevorst reflected. “But through the challenges we had to face, we were forced to talk to more people outside of that bubble, including people that knew more about business than we did. As a result, we learned that you have to take certain steps and take on investors, even though in the beginning selling part of your company is really scary. But eventually you think, ‘If this makes us healthy and makes it possible for us to continue, then why not?’”

The crisis led the designers to try new things and, for the first time, the duo looked into producing outside of Belgium — where manufacturing supply was disappearing in any case — in places like Portugal, Romania, India and Italy. The label also lowered its price points across the board, but sales did not pick up, and the couple felt that the quality of the clothing was suffering. Meanwhile, costly fabric development in Italy and Japan prevented them from dropping to a lower-priced category altogether.

Restructuring

Ultimately, the designers found a new, more efficient manufacturing partner and, at the end of 2004, welcomed investment from Mode et Finance, a French venture capital firm managed by CDC Entreprises, which took a 31 percent stake in the label, effectively saving it from going under.

By 2006, A.F. Vandevorst was back on its feet. The label’s shoes, which had garnered a loyal following since the company launched a full footwear collection in 2004, had become one of the driving pillars of the business and, today, accounts for about 40 percent of turnover. In recent years, the label's collections have also become softer and more sophisticated, fluid and feminine, as the designers seems to have found a way to reconcile their more conceptualist creative impulses with the need to produce more commercially viable clothes. “When you start out and you’re fresh from the academy you’re a bit of an idealist. And it was also a different time. [In the late 1990s, early 2000s] people dressed much more conceptually, it was really about making a statement, while now it’s really about under dressing,” said Vandevorst.

As their collections have evolved, so have the duo’s attitudes. “In the beginning all we wanted was to create strong pieces. Now the biggest reward is seeing someone actually wearing your clothes — at the end of the day that’s the biggest reward, and not that it ends up in a museum. A lot of people being able to wear your clothes is not a bad thing, it’s actually a very positive thing. But we didn’t always see it that way.”

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A.F. Vandevorst A/W 2013 | Photo: Sonny Vandevelde

In April of this year, A.F. Vandevorst took on a new financial partner, a family-owned Belgian company with roots in shipping that was looking to diversify its interests. The arrangement brought with it a new chief executive, Pierre Cigrang, whose day-to-day running of business operations has allowed Vandevorst and Arickx to focus more on design and marketing, respectively. “It’s really nice to not have to make all the business decisions, and have to deal with contracts and payments anymore,” said Vandevorst.

Today, the label has built a network of almost 130 stockists, which are especially concentrated in Russia, Eastern Europe, Belgium and the Netherlands. Interestingly, Russia, has been their strongest market since the very beginning and continues to grow swiftly. "I think our aesthetic resonates there because we still have some of that roughness,” mused Vandevorst.

Meanwhile, A Friend, A.F. Vandevorst’s more casual, lower-priced line, seems to finally be hitting its stride. “It took us a long time to get it right; it’s really only now that it’s working,” said Vandevorst, who added that in its first few years, the secondary line faced serious manufacturing problems that led to delivery delays.

As for the future, the brand has set its sights on its very first retail flagship, scheduled to launch in 2014 in Antwerp, and aims to strengthen its relatively weak position in the US market, where it has yet to make in-roads with important department stores.

“The best school to learn from is experience," reflected Arickx, looking back at the last fifteen years and the arc the A.F. Vandevorst business has travelled. "If we were to start over, I think we would put on paper the key points of where we want to end up, and how we want to reach those goals. And then you try to surround [yourself] with all the key people you need to achieve that. You’ll always have your creativity, but the right partners are crucial.”

“Of course, trying to do everything yourself, like we did, had its advantages too," added Vandevorst. "As a result of it, we know every step of our brand: from designing to packaging to the business part… but at a certain point you have to admit that to take things to the next level, you cannot do it on your own, you need a structure behind you, you need investment."

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