Simon Miller’s CEO on facing economic challenges and expanding beyond the US

A couple weeks ago, we took a look at how CEO Chelsea Hansford transformed Simon Miller from a denim brand into a modern luxury one.

The designer and entrepreneur told Retail Brew she strived to build a lifestyle brand inspired by architecture, furniture, and sculpture, among other things. She also detailed the retailer’s shift of focus to a DTC-driven strategy from a wholesale-only one and how IRL marketing events have helped with consumer engagement.

But that’s not all that has gone into keeping the company profitable—and its consumers coming back.

Its Instagram strategy alone—which Hansford says goes hand in hand with its “visual first” focus—has gone a long way toward strengthening its communications channels. Of course, the brand has also faced challenges, from supply chain-related issues to the shifting economic climate.

Here, the designer, talks more about what has worked for the brand as it addresses those challenges and what’s next as she ponders global expansion.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

On making Instagram Simon Miller’s main focus

Instagram is a curated platform that’s visual first, and it’s definitely got the age demographic and our fashion customer on there. That’s why it works. I’m not saying that TikTok would not either; it’s just kind of finding the formula. It’s a very different platform. It’s not necessarily “curation first.” Instagram really kind of puts us at the forefront of visual curation and mixes playful and luxury and lets you kind of explore. Also, girls that we’ve partnered with always do a lot of ’gram-heavy stuff.

On supply chain and other challenges

There’s so much uncertainty, and taking risks in uncertain times is hard…Wholesale is just such a yo-yo right now. It’s just hard to project, and in a state of expansion, it’s hard to know where you’re going sometimes and be able to make big decisions. But we’ve decided to take a little bit more of a conservative approach, just in case. So I don’t know if that’s necessarily getting ahead as much as just playing it a little safer.

On the brand’s best-selling categories

Ready-to-wear. It was really growing for us, so I project that ready-to-wear is going to become No. 1 soon. Then handbags. We started to delve into jewelry—not in a big way, but touch on that. Swimwear’s still a very, very small capsule for us. I like to think of swimwear as more of a ready-to-wear compliment…I think within ready-to-wear, we’ve seen great success with knitwear. We’ve also seen great success with vegan fur, vegan shearing, faux-fur outerwear, statement pieces, strong price point—we've seen a lot of success with it, so we’re really building out that for fall seasons.

On expanding beyond the US

We’ve been almost entirely—95%—domestic, since we restructured the brand and stopped doing men’s and denim and really focused on building the brand domestically. Our approach has always [been to] become “famous in your homeland,” and then when the demand is there, and the brand awareness is there, then expand, rather than trying to educate 15 countries about who you are. But for the Resort [collection], we’re going back to Paris. For the wholesale market, we are expanding globally on our website, meaning we’ll be offering different currencies, we’ll be shipping worldwide, at an advantageous price. We [also] have a very large marketing advertising strategy, both from in-store [and] outdoor editorial [and] the full omnichannel with that. So we’re going to follow up with Europe, [the] Paris market again, entertaining Asia as well as Europe and the Middle East, and then opening up globally on our site.—JS