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When Lauren Santo Domingo discovered that Moda Operandi is the only e-commerce site to sell all five of the CFDA’s Emerging Designer of the Year nominees for 2019, she sprang into action. Tonight, Emily Adams Bode, Foundrae’s Beth Bugdaycay, Khaite’s Catherine Holstein, Heron Preston, and Sarah Staudinger and George Augusto of Staud will join the Moda Operandi cofounder and chief brand officer at the St. Mark’s Place hot spot Paper Daisy for a pre–CFDA Awards cocktail party. (The ceremony takes place June 3 at the Brooklyn Museum.)
In a phone call earlier this week, Santo Domingo said this isn’t the first time Moda Operandi has scored 100 percent on an emerging talent pool. “We had another year with the BFC [which hosts the British Fashion Awards] where we had a similar situation,” she began. “Discovering and championing new designers is really our DNA.”
Founded in 2010, Moda Operandi’s point of difference is its trunk show model, which allows designers to present their collections in full, rather than the rack of dresses a brick-and-mortar store can offer or the smaller edit that other fashion sites do. “Part of the reason we launched Moda is a lot of my friends were young designers,” Santo Domingo told Vogue. “And they would tell me that department stores would promise them the world, and then at the end of the season ship back racks of merchandise and charge them back for it. They lived at the whim of the buyers of department stores. We wanted to get behind them, give them a platform to say who they were and what they were about. And as the fashion world has become about community and conversation, we were right there.”
Tonight’s event is likely to become part of the storytelling Moda does. It will be shared on the company’s social channels, and the site makes party pictures and street-style snaps shoppable in its Edit section.
Santo Domingo’s advice for this year’s nominees? “Stay true to who you are. Find your people, and design for those customers. It’s OK to grow slowly and build credibility within your own community. There’s enough people like you to build your business, and with the tools available now, you can go out and find them.” One of those tools is Moda’s extensive data—more on that below. Here, Santo Domingo shares what attracted the Moda team to this year’s CFDA emerging talents in the first place.
Bode
There’s a sense of nostalgia about Bode. It brings me back to those exciting days of Imitation of Christ, with its reworked vintage. We launched the collection first on men’s, then double-exposed it on women’s because our data informed us that women were buying these clothes for themselves in small sizes. Knowing that we can play a role in supporting this business, that we can give them important data, is exciting, too. Designers are always being pushed and pulled in different directions. You’ve got department stores telling them when to show, where to show, how many pieces to do, add sleeves, add more length, and it’s usually in the best interest of the retailers, not the designers. I’m proud that Moda can support these designers. Data makes us better and makes our designers better.
Foundrae
Any SEO marketer will tell you “trend” is the word with the biggest click rate. For us it’s “personalize.” With Foundrae there’s a sense of personal jewelry, sentimental jewelry, and gold jewelry, which are three big movements that we were seeing. Foundrae just ticked all the boxes. Our customer is really comfortable buying fine jewelry from us. She trusts our point of view; she knows she’s getting quality.
Khaite
What Catherine Holstein has in common with all of these designers is she is speaking to her community. They all design for themselves and their friend circle. When you’re trying to be everything to everyone, you lose. What we talk about internally is protecting the uniqueness and individuality of each designer and not trying to make them all into one another.
Heron Preston
Heron Preston was a strong focal point when we launched our men’s business in May of last year. We owe a debt of gratitude to him. The amount of buzz and excitement around him was unprecedented, and when we launched our men’s business, being able to do that together with him was extremely exciting.
Staud
We’ve trained our customer to embrace new designers in fashion, but it’s a bit slower getting her in new designers in handbags. The way we do it with a label like Staud is at a price point where a woman feels like it’s part of her outfit. The bags become more like fashion pieces, as opposed to signifiers of luxury.
