Laurent Vergne Reepmaker, founder of menswear brand Laurent Vergne, on accessible luxury and starting wholesale

Laurent Vergne Reepmaker is the founder and designer of Laurent Vergne, a Dutch menswear brand with strong French heritage, founded in 2020. It sits in the accessible luxury segment, offering timeless, classic menswear, from blazers and coats to shirts, trousers and knitwear. The promise, in the founder's words, is to make a man “the best dressed in the room, at any time,” without the premium price tag.

Now the brand is starting a new chapter. After building a direct retail business across Belgium and the Netherlands, Vergne Reepmaker has entered wholesale through retail organisation EK Retail and is pitching the brand to retailers ahead of the summer buying season that follows the Pitti Uomo trade fair in Florence. In an interview with FashionUnited, he set out the brand's positioning, its commercial model and its expansion plans with Belgium serving as the first step before expansion into France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

A collection built on timeless essentials

At the core of Laurent Vergne's philosophy is a refined all-season collection, rather than the traditional spring/summer and autumn/winter split, a choice Vergne frames as both a sustainability position and a merchandising one: stock that sells across the year rather than being marked down at season's end. “You build a wardrobe with things you can wear all year,” he says.

Around 90 percent of the range is timeless essentials designed to combine into complete looks, blazers in herringbone and check, cognac and double breasted coats, flannel trousers, linen-cotton shirts and cable knits, with the remaining ten percent reserved for statement pieces such as a perforated, jewel-toned ‘Marrakech’ shirt. A growing accessories offer, from belts and scarves to beanies and wallets, rounds out the complete looks.

Mission and identity: a story to sell

The positioning is deliberate. Vergne Reepmaker built the brand around an old money classic aesthetic and, just as importantly, around a narrative, naming it after himself to bind story to product. His read on the market is that accessible luxury is underserved: too few brands, he argues, pair genuinely good product with a strong brand philosophy. “I truly believe in the trend of affordable luxury,” he says, “but a lot of brands miss a brand story, an identity. People are looking for a narrative, a purpose, a DNA.” For retail partners, that translates into a brand with a clearly defined customer, the man who wants to dress well every day, and a hook to sell against the Ralph Laurens and Hugo Bosses it is often merchandised beside.

Wholesale, marketplaces and new markets

Wholesale marks a strategic shift, and one Vergne Reepmaker approached only once the brand was ready for it. He spent several seasons preparing the ground: establishing a clear brand identity and positioning, refining the collections for consistency, building a proven retail track record and a firm read on customer demand, and developing the operational backbone of production, logistics and inventory planning. Alongside its own stores in Brussels and Bruges, the brand is building a marketplace presence, onboarding the German platforms About You and Galeria and using online as a first step into new markets before a physical push. A proof point sits closer to home: in the south of France, Vergne Reepmaker’s cousin, the fourth generation to run the family menswear store, already stocks the brand alongside houses such as Corneliani.

The story behind the brand

The commercial instinct is hard won. Before launching, Vergne Reepmaker spent more than two decades in retail, starting at 18 on the floor of a womenswear boutique and going on to sell for Hermès on Amsterdam's P.C. Hooftstraat, then Paul Smith and Sandro, where he became area manager for the Benelux. A talent award won him a trip to Rome, where Italian retail concepts pairing classic tailoring with sharp pricing crystallised the idea for his own brand.

He studied business administration at night, then, as he puts it, broke through the “terror barrier” to strike out alone, launching with an Amsterdam pop-up during the 2021 pandemic and later running a 40 square metre concession at department store INNO in Brussels himself, often surprising shoppers by revealing he was the designer. Inside many garments, stitched into the lining, sit quotes from figures such as Churchill and Lincoln, a nod to the self-belief he says dressing well can give a man.