The Rundown: The Umbro Collab That Actually Won
A fragrance founder's sampling strategy, Celine's sneaker collab, and the real data on Umbro's mall-brand collabs stacked up.
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In this send: A fragrance founder turned a Hailey Bieber pop-up line into a modern day fragrance counter. I also follow-up on the data on the Umbro mall-brand collabs. The winner isn't who my algorithm told me it would be, but the numbers show exactly who's punching above their weight. Plus: Nour Hammour’s handbags, happy stripes, Celine x Reebok, Jazzercize, Rachel Green, L’epoque, Reformation x Umbro (I know I said I wouldn’t keep writing about it! sorry not sorry), Launchmetrics, Rebecca Hessel Cohen (aka LoveShackFancy), Vans, Exemplar Luxury Group, and yes, even more!!
Fresh Receipts
Nour Hammour Has a New Thing to Carry: Nour Hammour is launching a new category — Handbags and belts! The brand, founded by Nour Hammour and Erin Webb, dominated the leather, suede, and shearling outerwear category this past fall/winter. Repeatedly landing in the ShopMy Top 10 as reported in Puck’s Line Sheet, selling out consistently, and generating real demand. They occupied a sweet spot that's hard to find: an of-the-moment design with a real point-of-view, at a price point that made it actually accessible (below most high-end designer brands). Now they're expanding into handbags, which is about as natural a next step as you can make when leather craftsmanship is already your superpower and likely what their customer was asking for. Three silhouettes, available mid-July on their site, at their Paris showroom, on Mytheresa, and FWRD. The Amal shoulder bag and Lou clutch are already live to shop. I think the absence of a logo is a real plus, many shoppers do not like the gold foil logos or even simple embossed ones. However, the challenge of not making an easily identifiable logo treatment can make it difficult to have brand awareness. Another brand, Liffner, handles this with mis-matched organic shapes at the end of the straps and an easily identifiable button on the clutches. Savette has handled the no logo treatment with their own distinct shapes and clasps.
A Happy Stripe Synergy: The timing of this launch lined up well. Kudos to Gap Studio on this one. Zac Posen helped re-imagine the iconic late ‘90s sweater stripe into mesh for summer. Chase Infiniti wore to the BET Awards this past Sunday evening. Then on Monday Liana Satenstein shared a Substack post about it and that pairing made complete sense since she has written about her love for this exact sweater for Vogue back in 2022. My favorite part is that this was on the runway Sunday evening and by Monday morning it was available for preorder in four wearable silhouettes: a maxi dress, maxi skirt, t-shirt, and tank top. Now we watch to see if the mesh items become as ubiquitous as the sweater. The pre-orders ship in early August, so that timing is still summer appropriate. The stripes are selling, will you wear this summer mesh version?
More stripes!: Comme Si launched new striped silk sets. In four new colorful combos — red, green, mint, and brown. With short sleeve, long sleeve, pants and a boxer. Plenty of options and can wear a head to toe look or mix in with solids. The stripes at Comme Si are custom designed and make for great travel sets, especially for in-between moments when you aren’t ready to get fully dressed yet.
Cou Cou intimates just launched new raglan t-shirts (long and short sleeve) and these pantaloons. I’ve spotted bloomers and capri pants all over, so maybe we’ll see pantaloons as a regular part of our lexicon soon.
Fun discoveries from this week — stripes in all the colors!
Forecasting
Sacai’s Men’s fashion show had two noteworthy collabs. Birkenstock and Brook’s Brothers. [Vogue Runway] Also check out Luke Meagher’s instagram .@hautelemode for a great recap.
Celine made Reebok interesting: Michael Rider’s first standalone menswear show closed Paris Fashion Week last week and while there were a lot of great items, what I kept thinking about wasn’t the skinny versus balloon trousers, but the Reebok sneakers. Rider chose the Reebok Freestyle, an archival silhouette first introduced in the early ‘80s and reworked it in a collab with lambskin leather and completely distressed them before the runway looks. The shoes will come pristine, but it is the worn look that made them look interesting and relaxed. Plus, Reebok Freestyle will always make me think of Jazzersize and that feels so fun.
Miles Socha wrote in WWD that Rider’s Celine is “not quite preppy, not quite bohemian, not quite rocker, not quite nerd” and the Reebok fits that styling and probably 90 percent of people’s style. Most people are more than one thing. It’s not the flat low-profile sneaker we’ve been seeing (the Dries Van Noten sneaker, the Onitsuka Tiger). And it isn’t crossing into full dad-sneaker territory. This collab is not a one-and-done. The first drop lands in September with more coming in 2027. Try finding a used pair now and start wearing so you get them dirty and roughed-up.
Business Stories:
Meet Me at the new Perfume Counter
After seeing L’epoque Parfums’ Instagram post about passing out samples in the Dallas Rhode beauty pop-up line, I had to talk to founder Rachel Green about it. I wanted to know how she came up with the guerrilla marketing campaign and what the experience was like.
She told me she’d done something similar for the Comic Con of fragrance, ScentXplore. She’d recently launched L’epoque just before the consumer-facing fragrance event but didn’t have the time or budget for a booth, so instead she passed out samples and cards to attendees outside and ran out super quickly because everyone was thrilled to try. So when she and her intern realized the Rhode pop-up would be in Dallas, where they’re based, they had a “should we go hand out samples??” conversation.
