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“The Frankie Shop goes to Hollywood — I’ve been waiting years to say this,” says founder and CEO Gaëlle Drevet.
At the end of February, The Frankie Shop opened its first LA outpost: a metallic space spanning a stretch of Sunset Boulevard, in collaboration with Crosby Studios. Launched during the Frieze art fair, the plan is to be open for a month — but Drevet doesn’t rule out a longer stay, circumstances permitting.
It’s a reflection of her broader approach to The Frankie Shop, the brand she founded nine years ago in 2014. What began as a singular boutique in New York’s Lower East Side is now a growing online store with two New York and two Paris locations. The brand is expecting net sales to grow by 45 per cent in 2024. Drevet declined to share The Frankie Shop’s current annual revenue, but the last publicly shared figure was $40 million at the end of 2022.
The Frankie Shop has an ultra-defined aesthetic: sleek, oversized silhouettes; a largely neutral colour palette; good basics. The most recognisable Frankie item is the blazer: boyfriend blazers, suit blazers, leather blazers, all of which are consistently among its bestseller list. Other popular products include padded muscle tees, pleated trousers, oxford shirts and big coats. A mix of trend items and pared-back basics, they’re just as pairable with non-Frankie products as they are the brand’s own.
Drevet decided to branch out into wholesale in 2019 to keep up with demand. Now, it’s stocked at retailers including Net-a-Porter, Mytheresa and Ssense. “The brand stays ahead of the curve by consistently offering staple pieces that align with current trends. Whether it’s a fashionable suit or a timeless coat, they ensure their collections resonate with the zeitgeist,” says Katie Rowland, director of womenswear at Mytheresa, which has stocked the brand since AW20.
For luxury multi-brand retailers, The Frankie Shop fills a niche of affordable pieces to cater to the aspirational luxury consumer, while doubling as items higher spending customers can purchase alongside their pricier buys. “[The Frankie Shop’s] pieces can be seamlessly integrated with high-end items, creating a luxurious yet accessible style,” Rowland says. “It’s all about striking that perfect balance between high and low fashion.”
The brand, like many of its contemporaries, credits Instagram with its rise to fame. Now, it is transcending the status of an “Instagram brand”, establishing itself as part of the capital-F fashion scene. Drevet’s bread and butter is user-generated content (UGC). The brand’s Instagram feed consists of customers and influencers wearing and styling its pieces.
Fashion insiders, from Instagram’s Eva Chen to Mytheresa’s Tiffany Hsu, often feature, reflecting the brand’s ins with the fashion crowd. It’s a carefully curated appeal. The Frankie Shop doesn’t show on schedule during fashion week. What the brand does do, however, is make its clothing available to fashion week attendees. “For some reason, I became the go-to place for influencers and creators. The girls — and the boys — come [to fashion week] twice, three times a year, and they need to create content. I was able to align myself with this.”
The brand also hosts an annual pop-up showroom in Paris during fashion week, filled with pieces from upcoming collections and sweet treats (think Frankie-branded black coffee cups and logoed macaroons, ripe for content creation). This approach reflects The Frankie Shop’s ethos: cater to content creators, but do so in a way that departs from a lo-fi, Instagram feel while still securing some of the glow from the Paris halo.
Fashion week may be a key period for The Frankie Shop, but the founder has been looking for other spaces to crop up — which is where the Frieze pop-up fits in. “I’ve always wanted to step out of the fashion circuit,” Drevet says. “I think there’s a lot more that the world has to offer that is not always connected to fashion week, and Los Angeles was on my map as a domain to where I’d like to expand.” Los Angeles is The Frankie Shop’s second top market in the US (second to its home base, New York). “I knew California girls were waiting for us.”
Social first
The Frankie Shop has managed to strike the fine balance between all-inclusive Instagram brand (all posts feature the hashtags #FrankieForAll and #FrankieGirl) and go-to fashion destination, for industry insiders and influencers alike. This is down to Drevet’s bridging of social media and fashion week. It’s a crossover she saw coming — and played into — even before fashion week players clocked onto the significance of media impact value.
The Frankie Shop’s status as a fashion week go-to works well, Drevet says that three to four days before the shows (be it in New York or Paris) kick off, she starts receiving messages via The Frankie Shop’s Instagram with requests to wear the clothes throughout the week. “It’s an easy way to be in the fashion business. If you go to the store during fashion week, it’s like a show — this is my show. My fashion show is inside the store.”
Today, 30 per cent of The Frankie Shop’s traffic comes from social networks, and 70 per cent of business is online. The reach, Drevet says, is down to social media, and the brand clicking with the influencer crowd. Frankie’s Instagram isn’t made up of commercial photos, but the brand’s community. The brand’s embrace of UGC has been key to its success, according to recent research from Gen Z agency Archrival.
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The brand hired its first CMO just one year ago. “Before that, there was no Google ad spend or anything,” the founder says. They had a UK company helping out with SEO, and that was the extent of it.
Ten years in, Frankie now invests more heavily. “We have proper numbers every month that we put towards marketing,” Drevet says. But even now, when high-profile influencers wear their clothes, there isn’t money exchanged. “Some of those girls, as we started growing up, they blew up as well.” And they stayed loyal.
Price and product
What sets The Frankie Shop’s stores apart is their curation — another way to get that halo effect. Shoppers will find pieces from JW Anderson and Proenza Schouler alongside The Frankie Shop. Curating this in-store selection — of Frankie and non-Frankie products — is Drevet’s biggest job, she says. “I don’t make everything, and I don’t believe in making everything,” she adds. “Sometimes you need a really strong accessory, like a Coperni Swipe bag, to jazz up the look.”
It’s a trying time for multi-brand retailers — the most recent casualty being London’s Matches entering administration. Matches, too, built its brand on curation, though lost its way as it grew. The Frankie Shop is able to avoid these pitfalls by virtue of how few wholesale items it stocks, relative to owned-brand pieces. External brand pieces are there to augment the label’s own offering without impacting the bottom line.
Drevet never buys a collection, and doesn’t want to know what a brand’s bestsellers are. “I wanna know what’s gonna work in the environment for the Frankie girl,” she says. She also has to be careful that offerings don’t compete with her own products, or go too high out of the average Frankie shopper’s budget. “I would love to carry Loewe, don’t get me wrong,” she says. “But I don’t know if I have the customer.” Met with the choice between one high-end designer item and three lower priced, still-quality items, most people would opt for the latter. “It would be a silly game to play.”
It’s a process of trial and error, Drevet says. “I make mistakes too. All of a sudden I have a blazer that’s like $600, next to mine that costs $250.”
But Drevet won’t budge on price. Alongside the aesthetic, Frankie’s mid-range price point has made the brand a hit in a market where it’s increasingly difficult to find quality for a somewhat affordable price. Prices range from $65 to $750. “It’s very intentional,” she says. “I’m squeezing every single dime.”
It’s tough, she says. “Especially these days, with inflation, fabric is way more expensive. The shipping is more expensive. It’s definitely a challenge. Even my prices have gone up a little bit, which I really wish they didn’t have to — but I’ve also upgraded a lot of the fabric.” The Frankie Shop now offers coats made of cashmere for $495. Real leather pieces are available DTC.
The pricier items, though, Drevet doesn’t wholesale. “That’s the difference,” she says. “If I were to wholesale it, it would be three times the price. And I don’t want that. I cut a lot of stuff from my wholesale business because of that, to keep the price point.”
Striking the balance
This balance — between quality and price; between Instagram brand and fashion mainstay — is the reason Drevet believes The Frankie Shop has been so successful. “I cater to this girl or boy who loves fashion, but also has rent to pay. It’s not the Park Avenue ladies. Some of them are and that’s great, because a goal of mine is for Frankie to feel elevated and luxurious. But my main squeeze is the girl who loves to mix and match and work with her wallet.”
In catering to the aspirational luxury consumer, though, Drevet is careful not to become another Topshop, as she puts it. “I don’t want to be the biggest brand that exists. I don’t want to be everywhere. I want people to come to me. By keeping things on a tight leash, you bring more excitement to the table.”
To this end, Drevet wants bigger stores — but not too many. “For me, the store is a temporary thing,” she says, acknowledging that some of her current spaces are too small.
But expansion can’t happen overnight. Last year, publications reported that the brand’s next outpost would be London. “That’s on hold for now,” Drevet says when asked about the timeline. Rents were high.
“The business around this company is very much centred around: how much are we spending on this? Then what do we have left? And what about the manpower? I don’t have several teams for different places. We have one department for all countries.”
It’s this malleability that underlies the success, she suggests. Frankie, she says, has grown to date based on how much she could spend on a given project, at a given time. She smiles: “At least in LA, the groundwork is done.”
Will Drevet take on help to pursue growth, with balance in mind? She’ll never say never. The brand doesn’t have investors to date, but Drevet is open to it. “The way business is going, I can’t do this alone,” she says. “We’ll see if I find the right partner. The doors are definitely open.”
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