Jed Coleman and Will Coulton pride themselves on being fashion industry outsiders. Coleman made his name as the co-founder of London’s Caravan restaurants and coffee roasters, and Coulton’s roots are in management consultancy. Neither of the London-based New Zealanders knew how a fashion business was “supposed” to operate. Yet they are the brains behind Rise & Fall, one of the UK’s fastest-growing brands, often dubbed the fashion insider’s best-kept secret.
“We found the whole high fashion thing a bit ridiculous,” says Coleman. “We didn’t get the prices or the pretentiousness of it. We found it bizarre that so few people who work in the industry can afford to buy the clothes. And we didn’t like how the industry hijacked human weakness around desirability and made you feel like you need these products to be better in some way. We just want to make hard-working products you could use every day and strip away all that other stuff.”
That naivety — and lack of sentimentality — has mostly worked in their favor. “It’s a blessing and a curse,” says Coleman. “You come at things with fresh eyes, but you also don’t know a lot of stuff, so you can step in potholes.”
To make their hardworking products, Rise & Fall has cherry-picked the best bits of wildly different fashion supply chains — borrowing Shein’s on-demand production system, going direct to luxury factories, chasing price-conscious consumers like mass-market brands, and putting quality materials above all else. In some cases, Coleman and Coulton have had to concede to the status quo: hiring a creative director to turn their no-nonsense approach into something luxury consumers would find compelling, and balancing the fine line between trends and timelessness. Eight years in, and with sales tracking between $10-20 million annually, mainstream customers are finally catching on.
Can the Shein model ever be sustainable?
Much like the ultra-fast fashion giant Shein, Rise & Fall operates a just-in-time model, using an AI-powered prediction engine to test the demand for small quantities of new products before committing to larger orders. In some cases, factories can turn around repeat orders within 48 hours. This works well for slower-moving categories like knitwear and bedding, says Coleman, but is harder to execute with wovens. Likewise, it’s easier if a factory is vertically integrated, otherwise fabric orders can drive up lead times.
A good example was the knitted hood that went viral a few years ago, says Coulton. “When we brought that product out, we were right at the start of the trend. We ordered maybe a hundred to begin with, across a few colors. That was in November. By the time we closed orders for Christmas, we had sold a few thousand, at least half of which were on pre-order. Every time we ordered, we would sell out immediately. So an accessory that started as an afterthought built up to 40% of our orders in the last few weeks before Christmas, because we were able to access that production in a more agile way.”
