1 Granary Summer School with Cecilie Bahnsen: You decide what goes on sale

By Jorinde Croese

Welcome to the second edition of our four-part Summer School series. Released every Tuesday in August, each piece takes the form of a conversation between 1 Granary and Copenhagen-based designer Cecilie Bahnsen. Our aim is to provide a mini mentorship: unvarnished, hard-won lessons drawn from a decade of trial and error. It’s what you aren’t taught but must learn about building and sustaining a brand.

When Cecilie Bahnsen launched in 2015, wholesale was how you built a brand. Ten years later, her biggest accounts are specialty stores and her own boutique, sales are handled in-house, and private appointments happen over Instagram and WhatsApp. In part two, we talk money and decision-making: why someone who isn’t creative should read your agency contract, when to take ownership back, and what collaborating with ASICS and The North Face taught her about launching new categories. Whatever the setup, she insists on being in the showroom herself: “You are everything you create, that storytelling you can’t take out of it.”

Jorinde Croese: You started in 2015, when the landscape looked quite different. What’s the biggest shift for someone starting a brand today?

Cecilie Bahnsen: Wholesale was such a massive part of how you built your brand back then. That’s a very big shift now: I think you can much more start a brand based on direct-to-consumer – your own boutique, your own webshop – and then add wholesale afterwards. There are more ways of doing it, which is quite exciting.

Let’s move into money and decision-making. We’ve already talked a bit about wholesale struggling and there being a shift. Let’s touch on specialty stores.