This is an episode of the Glossy Fashion Podcast, which features candid conversations about how today’s trends are shaping the future of the fashion industry. More from the series →
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In December 2020, mid-pandemic, husband-and-wife duo Ricardo and Marina Larroué combined their career experiences — his centered in the financial sector and hers including fashion director roles at Style.com and Barneys — and started the shoe brand Larroudé.
Based on its unique approach to the footwear industry — namely, selling accessibly priced, luxury-quality, “it” girl-perfect shoes — it wasn’t long before consumers and retailers took notice. And it’s safe to say it’s since hit its stride.
“On our own website, we’ve been growing 4-5X, depending on the month,” CEO Ricardo Larroudé said on this week’s episode of the Glossy Podcast. “And the percentage of [repeat customers] buying from our website alone is north of 20%.”
Also on the podcast, Ricardo Larroudé discussed Larroudé’s other differentiators including its vertical production and marketing processes, its rapidly growing online marketplace, and its global workforce, which has grown from five people to 120. Highlights from the conversation, below, have been lightly edited for clarity.
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Affordability as a differentiator
“There are a lot of people between the final customer and whoever makes the shoes. And then, because everything in fashion is so volatile, everyone tends to multiply by two, [in terms of] the steps that they take. So, from the cost of production, people say, ‘You just multiply by seven, and that’s your retail.’ And then you try to sell it for that, and then you run a discount. We thought, ‘What if we just did it all? What if we just decided to cut the middleman and do it ourselves?’ And, when we came out saying, ‘We’re gonna price it this way,’ we’d have even some of our partners say, ‘No, no, no. You should price it at $600 — it’s still a bargain for what you’re doing.’ And I was like, ‘Am I leaving money on the table?’ And I was talking to an advisor of mine, and he said, ‘Listen, maybe you’re gonna have one of the new things — and one of the novelties about what you’re doing is your price point for the quality delivered. Go with it.’ And it’s been proven successful so far.”
Enabling rapid DTC growth
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“Just like the European brands, I think that, ultimately, the majority of your relationships should be direct to the consumer, be it through stores or a website. Ultimately, we’ll be 70-90% direct-to-consumer. … The demand that came from [our retail] partners last year and the year before was faster than we were able to tell our own story on DTC by doing digital ads. But now, we grow so much quicker online. Not only are we vertically integrated, [when it comes to] making the shoes, but we’re also vertically integrated in making the ads that sell the shoes. We have an in-house agency — a whole team of 9-10 people in Brazil — and all they do is treat our images in a photo studio. Even if we take a shot or videos here in the U.S., we’ll ship them to Brazil and they get all treated, edited. All the stuff you see on Larroudé is done in Brazil, and it’s actually done in the same building where we make the shoes. If you think about how connected it is, you can have an idea in the morning, that shoe could be ready in the afternoon, you could take the shot in the afternoon, and by night, it could be on the website and selling by pre-order. And we’ve done things this quickly.”
The department store model, online
“Going back to Marina’s [experience] at Barneys, you should feel that you can go to the second floor or the third floor or the other shoe floor — but you did walk through the first floor where you had jewelry, you had bags, you had other things there. So we launched the Colléct [marketplace], and we think it has a great [product] selection. It’s fun to browse. That represents about 10% of our monthly sales already, and we see enormous potential there. So we’re gonna start doing ads and manage it so that when brands ask, ‘Why should I sell with Larroudé?’ we can say, ‘Because you’re gonna sell a lot more — because we can actually put this whole look together, and then when we place these ads or we run this content, [the shopper] can get the whole thing: the shoes, the jewelry, the dress.’ So it becomes a lot more effective advertising. … When [a customer] goes onto our [e-commerce] page that has the shoe they like, the [product] suggestions at the bottom show the dress and the jewelry [that were styled with it].”
