Kitsuné: Double Trouble
Kitsuné is the music-slash-clothing label that started up by breaking the rules in both sectors. For many, it’s the template for the modern multi-functioning lifestyle brand.
It’s business school 101: focus. Do one thing really well. It’s a mug’s game to try to do several things at once.
Nevertheless, over a decade ago, Kitsuné started up as a fashion label and a music label simultaneously. And it achieved, in two completely separate industries, commercial and critical success.
Kitsuné’s co-founder Gildas Loaëc is unapologetic for starting out with one foot in each sector, insisting that, despite appearances, there is tremendous focus in the company — it’s just focus of a different order. ‘We’re ruthless about quality,’ he says. ‘Honest, genuine products: an album, a pair of jeans, or a cup of coffee. It must be quality.’
With this strategy, the company’s income has grown 50% annually, and it is now preparing to make two new jumps: one into the adjacent world of bags and footwear; another into cosmetics.
Since its inception, Loaëc has looked after the music, while co-founder Masaya Kuroki has attended to the clothes. It has proven to be a winning combination — Kitsuné racked up over £10m in sales last year (80% from clothes, 20% from music) and has built a unifying lifestyle brand with a growing valuation in the process.
Label devotees
Back when they started, Kitsuné benefited from the symbiosis of music and fashion, with the clothing business, which is notoriously fragile in terms of cash-flow, supported by money from the music label. Over the years, the music arm has proved to be a powerful marketing function, building fans and funnelling them towards the label’s expensive clothing lines through compilation mixes, parties and Spotify subscriptions.
Kitsuné has also become a credible and commercial music business in its own right, earning something that many mainstream labels struggle to generate: fans whose interest is not just in artists signed to the label, but in the label itself. Compilation CDs under the Kitsuné banner have attracted a cult following, hitting the top of the iTunes chart in Japan recently.
This status — of a label with its own following — has become highly coveted in a music industry that is still recovering from the now decade-long period of concussion after being thumped by illegal downloads.
Distraction charge
But wasn’t starting a music business an enormous risk back in 2002? And surely the precious time, energy and cash available were doubly limited when starting up two separate enterprises rather than one? Loaëc rejects the notion, emphasising that the vision was always to create a singular, rich and fresh brand that would power both business units.
Starting ‘just another clothing label’ was never part of the plan, he says. ‘It was always about doing things our way and bringing some love to the name.’
There are plenty of examples of successful fusions of music and clothing. A long line of hip-hop labels have mobilised their fans to buy clothes: Mo’ Wax, Wu-Tang, Roc-A-Fella, Puff Daddy, Pharrell Williams, and most recently the LA outfit Odd Future.
But in these examples, clothing had been added to longer-established music enterprises; conjoining the two fields from the start is a far riskier play. But Loaëc says his rich and multi-faceted brand stood out when it launched, capturing the imagination of many jaded consumers. ‘We wouldn’t have the options we have today if we listened to people who said you can’t do clothing and music at once.’
The genesis of Kitsuné and the ‘genius’ of Daft Punk.
If it wasn’t for Daft Punk, Kitsuné wouldn’t have ever happened, says Gildas Loaëc. He was one of the five people in the original inner circle of the helmet-faced French keyboard bashers; a small group that worked intensely on everything from remixes and album covers to the conception of the stages for the live sets.
Loaëc had also set up a record store called ‘Street Sounds’ in his 20s, and continued to work there while in the employ of Daft Punk. The store was Paris’ answer to Rough Trade, and together with the nearby skate shop, ‘Street Machine’, attracted the likes of Sofia Coppola, Spike Jonze and Masaya Kuroki, then a young architecture graduate.
In 2002, Loaëc and the rest of the Daft Punk team were embarking on their first trip to Japan (to produce Daft Punk’s animated film Interstella 5555). Loaëc thought it remarkably good fortune that he had recently got to know a hip Franco-Japanese-speaker with a penchant for American house music. Loaëc suggested that Kuroki tag along. Kuroki instantly agreed, and a few months later Kitsuné was born.
During the Japan trip, Loaëc and Kuroki found that they had a lot in common. While walking the streets of the Aoyama and Harajuku districts in Tokyo, they conceived a fresh brand aesthetic, something that would marry classic French style with the Japanese street culture they saw around them.
As well as envisioning the look of their clothing and the sound of their music, Loaëc and Kuroki spent a lot of time talking business. Kuroki’s training as an architect made him especially sensitive to design, structure and the execution of a project. For Loaëc, almost everything came from his schooling in the company of Daft Punk. He describes Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter, the duo behind the masks, as ‘total geniuses’.
‘Daft was an incredible creative-commercial project in the very broadest meaning. They push absolutely every aspect, and drive curiosity,’ he says. ‘For them, it was about the quality and originality, the story they were telling, how people discovered them, talking to a mainstream audience while creating things that were sometimes edgy, new and complicated. They pushed and pushed for quality. I really learned about what a finished thing looks like and what you need to make it possible.’
