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 trackings 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.”
At first, Coleman and Coulton found factories supplying luxury brands by paying for access to shipping databases, later expanding their network through personal recommendations. Convincing those factories to work with such small orders was another hurdle. “We’re selling them the dream of where we expect this business to be in five years, not the first purchase order,” says Coleman. “Plus, our price points are very good for the quality, so the promise of high volumes is there. If you sell a jumper for £1,000, you’re going to sell far fewer than if you price it at £150.”
The ideal for Rise & Fall is that factories supply the stock for free, and the brand pays after it has sold. Whether this is fair to suppliers depends on your perspective, says Coleman. “If a supplier has agreed to it, I think it’s fine. A lot of suppliers are willing to grow a business by funding it this way because they’re much bigger and they can do it. Also, a lot of them have insurance. So if we don’t pay, they still get paid. Or they factor, which is where they pass the invoice to a third party and get paid 97 cents on the dollar on the spot. It’s an interesting shuffling of risk. We also place small orders, so the risk is minimal compared to the size of their business. There will be a discussion at some point when the tables turn, and we get bigger, and then we’ll need to be more responsible about how hard we push them.”
Rise & Fall has a few more tricks up its sleeve to keep prices down without compromising on quality, says Coleman. Firstly, the brand works with a limited material mix and often keeps greige or undyed fabric in stock to move faster without betting on which particular colors will sell in advance. It has also side-stepped wholesale, which can easily double retail prices and undermine a brand’s long-term value by slashing prices during seasonal sales.
Quality starts with materials
Working with the same factories as luxury brands doesn’t guarantee luxury quality. Most factories vary the quality of their output depending on the price demands of the brand they’re working with. This is where the original vision for Rise & Fall separates from the lived reality.
“We thought we would be buying more products off the shelf, so we could operate more like a marketplace, but we realized pretty quickly that’s not the way it works. The quality wasn’t good enough, and the shapes and colors weren’t right,” says Coleman. “Manufacturers want to be told exactly what they need to make and how, so around half our team are now product developers, designers, and compliance specialists. It’s a huge part of the business.”
It all starts with materials. Rise & Fall operates with a streamlined fiber basket: cashmere, merino wool, a cashmere-merino blend, cotton, silk, leather, linen, and organic denim. “I hate polyester, and microplastics are a real problem, so we stick to natural fibers,” says Coleman. “Of course, there are always better options like baby cashmere and vicuña, but they are crazy expensive, so we’re not touching those. With each material, we specify the micron count and fiber length, and build full tech-packs so everything is made to our exact specifications. Everything is either Oeko-Tex or organic certified.”
“The whole point of this business is that we are the same quality but half the price,” adds Coulton. “If we fail on the product promise, there’s nothing left.”
The quality-signaling conundrum
Rise & Fall is built on the promise of luxury products without the luxury price tag, but how do you convince consumers of that in a crowded e-commerce landscape where they can’t feel the quality for themselves?
It starts with pricing, says Coleman. The brand’s product pages are populated with comparisons, likening the quality of Rise & Fall products to higher-priced brands. Take this season’s hero product, the suede trench coat. The Rise & Fall version retails at £325, which the brand compares to Zadig & Voltaire (£750), Nour Hammour (£1,120), and Frame (£1,450). Likewise, a cashmere polo priced at £165 is compared to a £525 version from Johnstons of Elgin; an £80 merino wool vest is compared to a £195 version from Theory; and a £250 silk dress to a £600 version from Toteme.
This approach has earned Rise & Fall a few “angry letters” from other brands, says Coleman, but it’s a risk he’s willing to take. “If we’ve made a mistake or there’s an inaccuracy, we’re happy to correct it. But imagine them taking us to the advertising standard and losing. Imagine if they proved our point, that the products are comparable in quality for half the price. That would be like Christmas for us.”
Direct comparisons don’t always sit well with customers, though, says Coulton. “We get a lot of trolls commenting that it’s low-level marketing, but our position is that the customer we’re going after wants to know how these products compare to other brands. Traditionally, price has been a proxy for quality, and we’re saying that isn’t necessarily true.” In 2022, Rise & Fall actually raised its prices, he adds, to make the quality more “believable”. A king-size cotton duvet set, previously priced at £125, was raised to £170, which better matched customer expectations for the cost and quality. Conversion jumped 20% in tandem.
Beyond pricing, there are visual cues a brand can use to suggest higher quality, says creative director Natalie Hasseck, who joined the brand in 2022. “I realized early on that quiet luxury would become really mass market, so we would need to make subtle style choices to prevent us from going in that direction,” she explains, nodding to the way even fast fashion brands have adopted the aesthetic. This started with the logo, which features an elaborate ampersand that incorporates the infinity sign, and extends to the products themselves, meticulously designed in-house. “The brand needed to have a personality. That’s luxury to me — having a discerning opinion.”
What lies beyond quiet luxury?
Hasseck was hired to inject a sense of aspiration and emotion into the otherwise functional product offering. When she joined the company, she had just shuttered her fashion rental business, On Loan, and the “blank slate” of a brand whose total offering was “two sets of white bed sheets” was irresistible, she says. She describes the process of building Rise & Fall’s brand identity like a sculptor chiselling away at a lump of stone. “It took me a long time to wrap my head around the proposition and translate that factory-direct model into something customers would actually have an appetite for,” she says.
Hasseck has a nose for trend forecasting, which she boils down to “obsessive observance”. Her strength is color. Early on, she added the shade “buttermilk” to Rise & Fall’s palette — a warm white with a sniff of yellow, which has since become one of the brand’s signatures across both bedding and apparel. “I could see that interior designers had stopped using cool whites and were leaning more into limewashed warm whites, and there was no bedding to match,” she explains. “I just regret calling it buttermilk because I’ve said it so many times now that it nauseates me, and if I change it, we won’t be able to track sales.” Her latest obsession is kelp green — nearly black, but really the deepest teal. “It’s going to be massive. I can feel it.”
For the most part, Rise & Fall plays it pretty safe on the design front. While intentional and design-forward, its offering is meant to be timeless, which is why it has done so well out of the quiet luxury trend. But sensibilities are shifting, says Hasseck, and Rise & Fall is having to reckon with what comes next. “The next phase is texture and print. There has been an absence of feeling, and people are seeking out the feeling of things again,” she explains. “But print doesn’t lend itself particularly well to longevity, which is the heart of the brand.” Accessories have proven to be a less risky playground for both trends and print — the printed silk bandana, for example, is consistently sold out.
An uncomfortable truth
Rise & Fall is not shy about its ambitions. With more than £7 million in venture capital behind it, Rise & Fall is “comfortably” garnering eight figures in revenue, says Coleman, with plans to hit nine figures by 2029. Since its foundation, the brand has been averaging over 100% growth every year, but runaway growth has limits. “It’s too difficult to keep growing at that rate if you’re working with physical products,” says Coleman. “Especially in apparel, which is faster growing than homeware, but messier and with worse margins.” Now, the company is targeting 50% growth this year and going forward, which the brand says is easier to manage.
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This is also why the company has dialed down its sustainability messaging. “We don’t want to be inauthentic,” says Coleman. “We are a business that relies on consumption. We need people to buy more things for us to be successful. So we’re going to offer you a better version of the products you need, but it doesn’t feel true to push sustainability to the forefront.”
Rather than pushing continuous overconsumption or resorting to planned obsolescence to fuel growth, Rise & Fall is expanding sideways, hoping to leverage the same consumer as they make investment purchases across categories. Alongside homeware and apparel, Rise & Fall recently added extra virgin olive oil to its offering. “It costs a lot to acquire a customer, and they aren’t very loyal. That’s why we’re going broad,” says Coleman. “It’s all about those little luxuries that people use every day.”
