The Structure Behind 17 Years of Creative Freedom

An interview with côte&ciel

There is a version of the creative brand story that gets told over and over. A designer with a vision, a workshop, a refusal to compromise. The narrative always ends the same way: purity wins. The market comes around. The brand survives on the strength of the idea alone.

I do not believe that story. I have never believed it. And after spending an hour with the people behind côte&ciel , I believe it even less.

côte&ciel  has been around since 2008. Seventeen years. That is not a creative miracle. That is a structural achievement. The bags are sculptural, the design process is essentially abstract, and the designer, Émilie, will tell you she stopped making sketches years ago and now draws directly in fabric. None of that should produce a business with multiple stores, a growing e-commerce channel, and the cultural credibility to collaborate with anyone they want. And yet it does. Because behind the creative freedom is a machine designed specifically to push back against it.

What this conversation revealed is something most founders resist accepting. Creativity does not need protection from commerce. It needs opposition from it. The brands that collapse are not the ones that sold out. They are the ones that never built anything to push against.

Esteban: Before we get into the brand itself, I want to understand how this team came together. Joe, how did you get connected to côte&ciel?

Joe: I started at Sabukaru. I came in as a writer and editor, but it was a small team, maybe six people, so I quickly got pulled into production as well. That's actually how I first met the côte&ciel  team, doing editorials for them in Tokyo. Met Florian, the CEO. Met Graeme. Then I moved back to London and started working with them more directly.

Esteban: Émilie, you've been there the longest. How did you come in?

Émilie: I was hired. A headhunter approached me, almost twenty years ago now. And it's been fantastic since.

Esteban: Graeme, what about you?

Graeme: My involvement started around 2011, 2012. I was working for a distributor handling European distribution for côte&ciel  and a few other brands, and I was focused on PR at that point. Then years later, côte&ciel approached me again when I was co-running another agency. We started working together from around 2019, moved into more of a consultancy role, and then I introduced the brand to Sabukaru in Tokyo, which is how Joe eventually got involved.

Esteban: The brand has been around since 2008. Seventeen years. Most creatively driven brands don't survive four. What has actually kept côte&ciel  relevant across that many economic cycles, trend cycles, industry disruptions?

Graeme: I'll say this because Émilie won't say it herself. It's the quality of the design and a particular point of view that is genuinely unique. That's the only real answer. Covid was a serious storm for a brand built around bags, because nobody was going anywhere. But the brand rebooted during that period. Not from a design perspective. The designs didn't change dramatically. They just got better and more interesting. But the core of what Émilie does has always been there.

Esteban: Émilie, how would you describe what côte&ciel  actually is?

Émilie: It's hard to summarize. The first bag I designed for the brand, I designed for my husband. He's a designer. It was about carrying a computer and carrying his things. It was built out of love, not out of a brief. No commercial pressure. Just knowledge of design and intuition. That's really how it started. Design by creatives, for creatives.

Esteban: And the process behind it? How does a product actually get made?

Graeme: There's something Émilie has talked about with the Isar, which is one of the core products, that I think explains everything. One section of that bag was designed for disorder, just throwing things in. Gym kit, whatever. And one section was meant to be organized. That tension between the two is not accidental. It is the design logic.

Émilie: One side is rational and organized. The other side is wild. And that's also related to the name of the brand. Two opposites. That's how I process things and how I create. Ideas, then improvisation with fabric to turn the ideas into reality. Sometimes it starts with a movement. A movement of fabric to create a shape. Sometimes it starts with a brief. Just a volume that I try to place on a shoulder.

Esteban: So there are no mood boards. No structured references.

Émilie: No. It approaches design more as sculpture. There is an anti-process almost. An idea that in itself has no structure. It can come from anywhere. And once that spark strikes, the process follows it one step at a time.

Esteban: I understand the creative process. But multiple stores around the world do not happen because you are undisciplined and chasing interesting ideas. So what or who brings the structure that turns this into a functioning business?

Joe: As well as being culturally tuned into your audience, you need a very strong performance marketing team. Right now wholesale is becoming increasingly difficult across the industry. Building a strong direct-to-consumer business matters, not only because the markups are better, but because it gives you the freedom to do more creative things. Special projects, collaborations. The margin is there to support the creative risk. But you need a real performance marketing and retail structure for any of that to be possible.

Graeme: And you need balance between commerce and creativity. A CEO and finance director who are cautious but open. Who trust the creative side, but also look at the potential pitfalls. If you tip too far toward creativity, the business collapses. If you tip too far toward commerce, the brand becomes stagnant and no one takes a risk. I think it was the former Gucci CEO who said balancing creative and commerce is the ultimate formula for a successful brand. That is not a cliché. It is a structural truth.

Esteban: So you need something, or someone, that specifically counterbalances each side.

Graeme: Exactly. And that is not common. Most brands go far in one direction or the other. That is why so many people really struggle to build something that is both creatively driven and commercially functional.

Joe: A lot of designers come out of school with no counterbalance. They endorse themselves completely and just do what they want. That doesn't always mean you're going to be successful. You need the tension.

Esteban: That tension is interesting because it mirrors the design philosophy itself.

Graeme: It does. Two opposites. Held together.

Esteban: When did the gradual shift from wholesale become a real strategic decision, and what did the first steps look like?

Graeme: Around five years ago, after Covid. I started looking at the industry and felt genuinely excited about what I was seeing. The brands that had built a direct relationship with their customer were pulling ahead, and it was becoming obvious that owning that connection was going to be the defining advantage of the next decade. There was a conversation between me and Florian where we said, this is our moment. Let's build something that is fully ours.

Esteban: And from an execution perspective, what did that actually mean?

Graeme: Every store is an experiment. Florian is a pragmatic CEO. He's not going to go and get a huge flagship with no financial logic behind it. The stores need to sustain themselves. The Japan stores have been running the longest, through a collaboration with a local distributor. That has allowed us to build presence in what has traditionally been our biggest market. Everywhere else, it has been a slow and deliberate process.

Joe: And the stores need to be more than retail now. It's not enough to put product on a rack. You need a reason for someone to walk in. We've been focusing on community events, activations, bringing in local DJs, artists doing installations. The store becomes a hub. A place for creatives to gather. That is always going to be more resilient than a standard retail experience, because you simply cannot replicate it online.

Esteban: What are the real differences between e-commerce and retail as distribution channels?

Joe: Returns are a significant cost in e-commerce that I didn't think much about before getting deeper into performance marketing. People buy online the way they used to shop in a store, try things on, and then send them back. That cost adds up. The flip side of retail is that the customer gets to experience the product physically, and you can sell the brand much more easily in that environment. The staff become brand representatives. That matters.

Émilie: When I design, I always imagine someone using the bag in real life. I think our bags are designed to be worn, not just carried. The first experience of a bag should ideally happen in a physical space.

Esteban: Where is the business strongest right now from a distribution standpoint?

Joe: E-commerce. It has grown rapidly over the past year and a half. I believe it surpassed wholesale this year, which may be the first time that's happened.

Esteban: What drove that?

Joe: Multiple factors. Good design that is digestible online. Clear visual communication. Also, a large shift could be attributed to bringing in a specialist performance marketing team. It is algorithm-based, and it genuinely needs someone who understands both the technical mechanics and the brand. That is a constant tension for me personally. Performance marketers will run ads that sell. But sometimes at the cost of brand integrity, positioning, and how things look. My job is to make sure the brand stays refined and on-brand, even inside that machine. And it all works so well because we provide great visuals, culturally and artistically intelligent narratives, and authentic community clippings to support them. You have to feed the machine.

Graeme: And the decline of wholesale has helped. As we've pulled back from certain wholesale accounts, those customers have followed us to our own channels instead. So the direct business has grown partly because we built it, and partly because we closed other doors.

Joe: And the brand journey has to be protected all the way through. The performance marketing might drive the click, but if the website looks wrong, if the product is being pushed at a discount, you've already lost something. Émilie designs the object. Our job is to protect what she's designed through every layer of communication.

Esteban: Émilie, how much do you actually think about distribution, returns, customer segments when you are designing?

Émilie: Not in terms of the proportions between retail and wholesale. More from a global perspective. Which designs sold immediately. Which ones had to wait. I look at figures, but from the angle of fabric, shapes, size, complication in use. And I compare season to season, not because I am redesigning things, but because the data tells me something about what a particular material or color or shape is doing for the customer.

Esteban: So you use what's working as a foundation and then apply the intuitive process to everything that comes after.

Émilie: Yes. But you also have to compare what was produced against what was sold. If you produce a very small run and sell everything, the figures look like a huge success. But that might just mean you didn't trust the design enough to produce more of it.

Graeme: That has happened more than once. The Merrell 1TRL collaboration, the shoe, everyone was a little skeptical about whether it was too experimental. It was wild. And it sold out quickly, and performed better from a communications standpoint than almost anything we've done. Same with the ready-to-wear Uniform Collection. The most extreme piece sold first.

Joe: I think these special projects, the more creative, more pushed ones, are the ones that give us confidence to go further next time.

Graeme: There's also a lesson in that about not over-relying on data. From a design and product perspective, you can get too caught up in it. The key is making sure Émilie has the freedom to do what she does intuitively. And also giving the customer more credit. They're the ones paying for it. And when they put their money down on the more unexpected designs, that tells you something data alone cannot.

Esteban: The brand is now slowly expanding into ready-to-wear, furniture, objects. That is ambitious on every level. Is there a risk of losing what côte&ciel  actually stands for?

Joe: We do see ourselves as a design brand that happens to make bags, so I don't think so. These projects are extensions of the core thing, which is Émilie´s design language. They support the bags rather than compete with them. If we do a shoe, we have something to style the bags against. If we do small accessories, they become props in campaigns. It becomes a system of products that all intertwine because they share the same design DNA.

Graeme: And it gives Emily new territory to experiment in. New problems to solve. Which is ultimately what drives her.

Esteban: What is it that people who truly love côte&ciel  understand that people who just know the brand have not yet seen?

Émilie: What looks complicated is actually very simple. The shapes might seem complex, but they all follow the same process: turning a surface into a volume. People assume it takes enormous technical complexity to produce these bags. But most of the time it is more like a sketch. I stopped drawing years ago. Now I sketch in fabric. A drawn sketch takes five seconds. The bag is made the same way. People who don't know how to draw look at a sketch and see pure art. But the sketch itself is fast and direct. The bag is the same thing.

Graeme: There's also an internal club aspect. If you see someone wearing côte&ciel , you know something about them. They appreciate design. There's a shared understanding. A kind of hidden language.

Closing Reflection

What stayed with me from this conversation was not the design philosophy, even though that part was worth the hour on its own. It was the structural argument underneath it.

côte&ciel  is not succeeding because Emily has a gift, though she does. It is succeeding because around that gift, there is a machine built specifically to push back against it. A CEO who challenges creative decisions. A finance director who questions commercial ones. A communications person who fights the performance marketers to protect the brand inside the very ads designed to sell it. The tension is not a problem to solve. It is the architecture of the business.

The moment that landed hardest for me was when Émilie described how she works. She stopped making sketches. She sketches in fabric now. And what looks from the outside like an object of enormous complexity, a bag that transforms, that plays with disorder and order at the same time, is made the way a pencil sketch is made. Fast, direct, intuitive. Five seconds of clarity translated into a physical object. The complexity is in the surface. The simplicity is in the process.

That is actually the lesson for any founder building a creative brand. Your customers will project complexity onto what you make. They will assume it required everything you have. The truth is that the thing that required everything you have was building the structure around you that lets you work that fast and that freely. Protect the creativity. But build the machine.