A range is not a list of what sold last season. It is what survives four questions — and someone has to be able to say which ones.
I ran the buying cycle as buyer and creative advisor — the range decided together with management: assortment planning, supplier comparison and order appointments on the floor at Maison & Objet, MICAM and Cosmoprof, judged on quality, delivery terms and price, not gut alone.
Order appointments at PUMA's HQ and the Sealup atelier; goods receipt and incoming inspection back home; market and competitor analysis feeding a coherent, profitable range.
It is also where COMVM began — the label I co-founded and built end to end alongside the buying job: moodboard, logo and signet, spec sheets written at the bench, first order placed. It ran as its own house through 2023.
Left with a standing rehire offer from management.
A welted shoe, layer by layer.
Ten steps, in the order they actually happen. The last seam is the reason a welted shoe outlives its sole.
Goodyear-welted · illustration Last, upper, welt, sole — and one seam that lets the sole be replaced without touching the shoe. A rendered demonstration of the construction, not a shoe from the range.
What actually came onto the floor
Three of the houses the range was built from — a workwear outfitter from Seattle, a Spanish welted-shoe maker, a Breton knitwear mill. Each was presented the same way: who they are, what they show, and why that belonged next to what already hung there.
The fair floor
Two of the floors
Order appointments are not catalogue work. You walk the halls, you handle the make, and you decide in front of the rail — with the wall you have to fill already in your head.
Where the range was bought
European trade journeys — Maison & Objet, MICAM, Cosmoprof, Pitti Uomo, Première Vision and CIFF. Nineteen fairs in ten European cities between 2017 and 2023 — every one a floor where assortment and price were decided in person.
Panorama
SEEK
MICAM
Maison & Objet
Who's Next
Top Drawer
CIFF
Pitti Uomo
Cosmoprof
Cosmopack
Ten of the nineteen.
The route2017 → 2023
Fifty square metres in a ten-thousand-metre house — and 17 % of its revenue.
A year and a half later the same job ran again on a smaller floor: a fashion concept on 50 m² inside a 10,000 m² furniture house — concept, buy and interior build in one pair of hands. In the first three months of trading, that half-percent of floor generated 17 % of the whole house’s revenue.
What the wall actually held.
Welted construction, tooled shafts, woven calf — the product the four tests were run against.
Bought on four tests, not on last season's numbers.
Every brand that wanted onto the floor went through the same four questions. Does the make hold up next to what already hangs there — construction, seams, material. Does the price carry the architecture of the wall, or tear a hole in it. Will they deliver on time and stand behind returns. And do our customers want it — not customers somewhere else.
Sell-through told me what had happened. It never told me what belonged. So the answer went against the obvious choice more than once: a brand that performed elsewhere was turned down because the make would not have survived the comparison. A dearer supplier won over a cheaper one, because two late deliveries cost more than the margin they saved. And a label went onto the wall against its own numbers, because the range had nothing standing above it.
None of them are named here. In buying, discretion is part of the work.
One is, and for a reason. ARTHOUSE Unlimited is a British charity: artists living with learning and physical disabilities make the work, and the work becomes the product — cards, soap, chocolate, textiles. I found them on a fair floor, negotiated the terms with the house directly, chose the part of the range that would carry here, and set the German pricing. We were the first shop in Hamburg to stock them.
The others stay unnamed because discretion protects a supplier. This one is named because visibility is the whole point of the house — for the artists behind it.
- Make
- Construction, seams, material
- Price
- Carries the wall's architecture
- Supply
- Delivery reliability, returns terms
- Fit
- Our customers, not customers elsewhere
Buying does not end at the order sheet
A supplier can show you a perfect sample and produce something else. So the range was not only chosen on the fair floor and sold on ours — it was checked where it is actually made: the factory floor, the machines, the conditions people work in. What a house looks like inside tells you more about the next delivery than any datasheet.
Nor are the producers named. The same rule applies upstream.