Emily is headed back to Paris — Emily Bode, that’s.

Runway Show During Mens Fashion WeekAfter a pandemic-fueled break during which she focused on her domestic business and the opening of a Los Angeles flagship, the founder and designer of the Bode brand is planning to return to the official Paris menswear calendar in January.

Bode, who will have fun the seventh anniversary of her heritage-inspired brand next summer, first made the jump across the pond in June 2019 and held her second show there right before the pandemic hit in February 2020.

“We got here back to Recent York after the show and everybody was sick,” she recalled. It wasn’t long after that offices and stores closed and the world essentially shut down.

“Our plan was never to stop showing,” she said. “It just happened naturally.”

So while shows were canceled and international travel curtailed, Bode as an alternative shifted her focus to the three,200-square-foot flagship she opened on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles in February.

“We decided to place all our energies into the West Coast market versus having a show,” she said.

And it paid off.

Bode said the shop is performing well, as is her original location on Hester Street in Recent York’s Chinatown neighborhood.

“Our growth was really solid last yr,” she said. “So now it’s necessary to grow as now we have for the five years prior. So while we focused on our direct-to-consumer last yr, next yr, we’re going back to Paris.”

She said the European city is “top of mind without delay.” And while the corporate’s largest direct-to-consumer market is in North America, “from a wholesale perspective, our largest volume is in Europe and the U.K.,” with retail customers resembling Matchesfashion, Browns and Liberty in London, together with stores in Japan and Korea.

“Everyone frequents Paris for the shows,” she continued. “And while we’ve had great success with virtual appointments, we felt it was necessary to point out again.” She characterised her line as “narrative-based” and, in consequence, it advantages from a live presentation.

It also helps streamline the selling of the road when retailers and editors can shop and consider the gathering immediately after seeing the runway show in the identical city.

Bode said that while she may determine to do a retail activation in Recent York during fashion week in February, there aren’t any plans now to duplicate the show within the States.

Bode, who won the 2019 award for Best Emerging Menswear Designer and the 2021 Menswear Designer of the 12 months award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America in addition to the 2020 Karl Lagerfeld Award for Innovation from the Woolmark Co., has seen her business grow substantially over the past several years.

The corporate recently relocated from a cramped 2,000-square-foot space in Chinatown to a ten,000-square-foot manufacturing location in Brooklyn, and has been staffing up.

“We have now quite a big in-house studio team now,” she said. That features everyone from specialists in drawing and patternmaking to sewers and cutters who’re working together with her to “scale our one-of-a-kind business alongside the gathering.”

Bode said as much as 40 percent of her business comes from one-offs that she and the team create from vintage quilts and repurposed fabrics. These are sold primarily through her own stores and website and he or she also creates a more-commercial collection with an identical aesthetic that’s wholesaled.

Bode said that although retail is a successful channel for the corporate, there aren’t any immediate plans so as to add more stores. But which will change.

“We’re consistently talking about it,” she said. “The L.A. store opened up the West Coast marketplace for us in a way we didn’t know existed and completely modified our business.”

She said that since the California store is 4 times the dimensions of her Hester Street unit, it’s in a position to carry the whole collection. “Recent York is more of a jewel box of a store,” she said, “and the merchandise is ever evolving because we don’t have the identical space.”

However the success of the West Coast store proved to the corporate that any future stores don’t need to fit into a selected mold.

“We’re now confident that each one the stores can have a unique feel and still be on brand,” she said. “They don’t have to be mirror images of one another.”

Up to now, Bode has said that London is on her wish list for future retail expansion.