The Secret of Sézane’s Success

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Morgane Sézalory has no intention of keeping shoppers waiting. She’s the founder of contemporary brand Sézane, a purveyor of French-girl style with seasonal offerings that regularly sell out. Waiting lists for some items, like the $350 Clyde trench coat, are reportedly in the tens of thousands. Presumably, Kate Middleton and Taylor Swift fans aren’t on those lists.

“It’s not intentional,” Sézalory says. “We want people to buy every product, but at the end of the day we can never expect how great something is going to be.”

This explanation will sound familiar to anyone who has spent time in a Parisian boutique, coveting a particular piece of clothing, only to be rejected with a terse “It is impossible” but the 38-year-old knows that scarcity fuels desire, especially online. In fact, it’s her savvy understanding of digital shopping that may be the secret to her 11-year-old company’s success. “People know that when an item is popular, you have to get it and you have to get it fast.”

Sézalory was no early adopter of e-commerce. She was just another blogger when e-commerce was just taking off in the French fashion industry. At 18, she scoured garage sales and Paris’s famed flea markets, buying up vintage Courrège, Hermès, and Saint Laurent to sell first on Facebook, then on eBay, and then, in 2008, on her own site, Les Composantes. On the first Tuesday of every month, she would post 100 of her assorted finds from Vanves, Clignancourt, and elsewhere, and watch them take off.

Limited supply wasn’t a strategy at the time. Shopify, the sales platform Sézalory was using to transact at the time, limited the number of SKUs that could be exchanged at any given time. The drop, born out of necessity, became a calling card. Sensing an opportunity, she eventually began adding one element that had been her original design to a monthly meetup, testing the market for what would become her own business.

“It was just the limitations of available technology and my desire to make my life easier,” she says when we meet one afternoon during Paris Fashion Week at Sézane’s offices in the 7th arrondissement, just around the corner from the temple of French retail, Le Bon Marché, Sézane’s only Parisian department store partner. Suffice it to say she’s come a long way from selling second-hand clothes from her bedroom.

Sézalory formally launched Sézane in 2013 with her husband Thibault Lougnon (and another co-founder who has since departed) and rode the first wave of the direct-to-consumer boom. A decade later, she’s the CEO and creative director of the independent, B-corp-certified women’s and men’s ready-to-wear brand, with 11 brick-and-mortar stores, or “apartements” in company jargon, including five in Paris alone and two in the United States.

Annual sales are not publicly disclosed, making it difficult to confirm the company’s exact size, but Sézane’s revenue in 2018 was about $100 million, according to an industry trade outlet WWDFor more evidence of Sézane’s sales strength, browse the site and count the “out of stock” tags.

In person, Sézalory still maintains the sincerity of a self-taught entrepreneur, evangelizing the value and quality of her products over the competition. “Once you get to know Sézane, you realize, OK, what I was buying is too expensive. It’s the same quality, so why would I buy anywhere but Sézane,” she tells me. The quality of the material and the cost are undoubtedly part of Sézane’s Dutch wine, but so is the direct relationship that Sézalory has cultivated with her customers since her earliest days in the blogosphere. They came for the vintage and stayed for her own vintage goods. “We checked, and a lot of those people are still with us today.”

When Sézalory opened its first store in Paris in 2015, its database had grown from 10,000 at the brand’s inception to around 300,000, according to New York Times. It suddenly had a head start in France, where designer brands were slow to embrace e-commerce, handing over multibillion-dollar runway to mass-market retailers like Amazon and Shein. Sézane, meanwhile, operated with Amazon-like agility in customer service while bridging the gap between fast fashion and luxury, expanding its product range, including handbags and semiprecious jewelry.

“For a long time, most brands, even inexpensive ones, thought, OK, the Internet is not cool,” Sézalory says. “It took them so many years to get online and they wasted so much time.”

Like other startups, Sézalory was a slow burner, and within a year of launching, it set its sights on the U.S., agreeing to a partnership with Madewell that sold out. A sequel followed, and the Nolita boutique opened in 2017. The following year, investment firm General Atlantic, a backer of Zimmerman and Etsy, acquired a minority stake. The U.S. is now Sézane’s second-largest market.

Social media has undoubtedly helped expand Sézalory’s reach beyond France, and she has wisely adopted her eBay best practices on Instagram, where the brand has 4.2 million followers; Sézalory herself has more than 300,000. Photography was a key ingredient then, as it is now, both on and off-site. Among Sézane’s best unpaid ambassadors are celebrities who are happy to be photographed in inexpensive pieces to show off their recognizable personalities, such as Middleton, Swift, and Selena Gomez. The Duchess of Cambridge, for example, has often been spotted wearing Sézane earrings, which retail for less than $200.

When it comes to her five-year plan, Sézalory says she’s not being all that strategic. When I ask her if she aspires to be the French Ralph Lauren, she modestly tells me that her hope is to grow her business organically, “to teach people that maybe they can buy less often but with better quality.”

In other words, she’s taking things one step at a time. The latest is a limited-edition collaboration with Italian brand Momonì to promote Sézane’s first pop-up in Milan (open until July 20), a hint that the future may be looking increasingly international. And her advice to Swifts and Middletons who want to get their hands on one of those sold-out Clydes? “Show me your DMs,” she says.

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