In a matter of hours, the London-born label, Studio Nicholson, will unveil its first runway collection after 16 years in business and an impressive growth trajectory. The move forms part of an ongoing strategy, devised to build authority and reposition the label amongst luxury giants in stores across the globe. The stakes are high, but the brains behind the business are confident that a runway show is a logical next step that could reap a major return on investment.

Contextually, it’s an interesting move. Indeed, despite its UK base, Studio Nicholson launched its wholesale business in Japan, where founder and creative director Nick Wakeman had sourced early inspiration for the label’s sturdy workwear codes. Early stockists included Journal Standard and 1LDK. “Oh, we wouldn’t be alive without the Japanese,” she says, video calling from Studio Nicholson’s office in East London. “It was a natural territory to start with.” Previously, she co-owned another label, Birdie, alongside Kazuyoshi Minamimagoe, then the buying director of the multi-brand store Beams, which was largely sold in Japan. Unlike most cult Japanese-style basics brands, Studio Nicholson started with womenswear; menswear came in 2017. Today, the business split is 55% men’s and 45% women’s.

Studio Nicholson quickly garnered a strong, discerning consumer in Japan through its wholesale network. As for London, where the brand launched wholesale in 2010, this was a slower burn compared to Japan, reliant on the likes of now-defunct concept store, The Shop at Bluebird, alongside Liberty and other small independents. “I don’t know. It’s a weird thing, but London was never a huge focus for me or the brand,” admits Wakeman. More recently, Studio Nicholson has been amping up growth globally, expanding its wholesale footprint in South Korea and China, as well as in Europe and the US.

Enticing new consumers and maintaining loyalists of yore, the label has a clear value proposition rooted in high-quality production — premium European mills and factories have been integral — and a refreshingly reasonable pricing architecture. Today, the cheapest item on its site is a £20 ($26) tote bag, and the most expensive is a sheepskin bomber jacket priced at £2,400 ($3,173).

Studio Nicholson CEO Mark Suddards — who previously helped take Ganni from a small cult brand to a global contender — has, alongside Wakeman, been leading the new strategic charge since his appointment in May 2023, as managing director. He became CEO in December 2024. “Our strategy now firmly sits around how we take our niche East London brand and become more of a global player,” he says. “How do we really assert our position against some of the contemporary brands: the Lemaires of the world, the Auralees. When you look at what they invest into marketing and how they position their brands globally, of course, all of them do shows in Paris.”

Under Suddards’s leadership, the results look positive. From 2023 to 2026, Studio Nicholson’s revenues have grown 56% thanks to category expansion. The average global transaction value for the business’s DTC wing fluctuates “between £450 ($595) and £500 ($661)”, per Suddards, and the CEO reports that within the first seven months of this financial year (which ends September 30 for Studio Nicholson), the brand has seen 25% growth, teeing it up for another record year. In the last three years, DTC retail via its London stores, online, and Farfetch has climbed 87%, while wholesale increased 36%, securing 200 new retailers in the space of two years, including Mytheresa, Bloomingdale’s, and Selfridges.

Studio Nicholson works with advisory firm Rianta Capital, although Suddards could not share the stock split with Vogue Business. “They came in in 2016 with a very small investment, and we’ve had no investments since,” says Wakeman of Rianta Capital. Prior to Rianta’s investment, Wakeman was the sole director. “I started [the brand] with five quid at my kitchen table,” she says. In the 2024-2025 financial year, the company reported a profit of £241,000 ($314,300).

Studio Nicholson plans to reach a total of 400 wholesale accounts imminently, concurrent with an ongoing DTC expansion. Meanwhile, a visual shake-up — including a newly designed SN logo — is underway as part of the repositioning. “We wanted more of a robust, established logo that really made us feel like a true British brand,” says Suddards. “It’s important, particularly for markets like Asia.” China, Japan, and South Korea account for 35% of the business.

Still, seducing new customers without losing the original set requires legwork. And so far, so good. Looking ahead, it seems the brand will rely more on operational, distributional, and positioning tweaks, without remixing its blueprint, but simply developing it. In other words, if it ain’t broke, scale it.

Life-styling

Studio Nicholson has long established a highly engaged consumer base in place — one earned through a modular approach to design that makes it easy to build an entire wardrobe using only the brand’s range. Nowadays, the concept of modularity is big business, chiming with an appetite for functionality and transformability, and the brand is doubling down. “The customer comes back. Our store teams will say to us, ‘Oh, they were in last week to buy a trouser. He just popped back in because he wants the shirt; he’s seen the way it’s styled on e-comm,’” says Suddards. Building on that, the brand has focused on developing its accessories and shoes, hoping to push these categories to 20% of the product mix. In fact, Studio Nicholson has hired an in-house designer to build out that part of the range alongside Wakeman. “He’s a very accomplished shoe designer,” says Wakeman. “And a pretty accomplished bag designer, it turned out as well.”

While upping the ante on merchandising, the brand still wants to maintain its big hitters. Historically, trousers have accounted for 40% of brand revenue, so the goal is to ensure ample style options and continued fabric development. “In menswear, for the last two seasons, our best-selling pant is the Line pant, and the reason goes back to what I’ve been telling you: it’s tropical wool, which means it breathes in the summer and it’s warm in the winter,” says Suddards. “So our customers know that, and they buy a pant for all year round.” To this point, Wakeman pinpoints some longstanding bestsellers, some of which are 16 years old, or 10, in the case of menswear: The Dordoni pant, priced at £325 ($430), and its men’s counterpart, the Sorte pant at £375 ($496). “They are still exactly the same, they’re still in the same fabric, and they’re never out of stock for our wholesale customers or our retail.”

“The thing for Studio Nicholson was that it was always seen as a pants brand, where you bought your staple pieces,” explains Suddards. “The driver and strategy of the last three years has been, ‘How do we become a lifestyle brand?’” As such, the runway brings this mix of accessories, ready-to-wear, and footwear to life. “These are products that really sell, products that you won’t just see on the catwalk; you'll see them in a store,” says Wakeman. “And I think that might be the difference between other people and us.”

Within this shift, the brand has been astutely securing collaborations to widen the scope of its market. The Asics collaboration, which launched earlier this month, sold out in a day in Korea. “We’ve been doing these things because we are growing our shoe business,” says Suddards. “We want to bring in a new customer specifically for that.” Suddards also cites the Perfumer H fragrance collab launched in February this year — a savvy move that capitalized on the shared customer base of Studio Nicholson and the fragrance house.

East to West

That customer in question has regional nuance, a factor that has become increasingly clear with international expansion. In 2022, Studio Nicholson opened its first store in Apgujeong-dong, a wealthy fashion district in Seoul. Now, there are four single-brand stores across Seoul. “Korea is very much a women’s market for sure — like 60-40,” says Suddards, comparing it to London, which has a more even split. “In Japan, it’s very much a menswear market, so it’s about 70-30.” Wakeman concurs: “Yeah, the men shop more than the women over there. And then, I think EMEA is 50-50.”

When Suddards joined the business, Studio Nicholson ramped up its expansion in China, focusing heavily on womenswear. The company launched its online presence with Tmall in 2024, joining the platform’s ‘Luxury Pavilion’ section alongside Toteme, Lemaire, and Bottega Veneta. He says it’s growing in double digits. “We own the [Studio Nicholson] business directly [in China] with a retail partner, which most brands don’t do,” he adds, noting that this was how he approached Ganni’s China presence, too. Studio Nicholson works with an undisclosed retail partner to provide back-end support.

The brand also has around 60 wholesale accounts in China, including the prestigious concept stores Dongliang and B1OCK. All of this, Suddards explains, paved the way for this year’s Shanghai flagship store launch in February, which, per the brand, is “overperforming” and for the Beijing store is slated for launch on July 23. “We have around 10 to 12 more planned for the next two to three years in China,” says Wakeman. “That [market] was more alien to me. You know, they love to shop. In Japan, someone will spend four hours contemplating a white shirt. In Shanghai, they spend about two and a half minutes, and they buy the white shirt, plus 12 other things. Like, the consumerism there is insane.”

Despite this APAC boom, it’s still surprising that the brand’s homecoming has taken so long. It was only in 2018 that the brand first launched a store in London, opting for the same road in Shoreditch as its first office. That “ephemeral” East London location has since been swapped out for a permanent address five minutes away, which opened in 2024, joining the Soho location opened in 2021 and another West End spot opened in 2025. Suddards explains that the focus has been on developing DTC because he “believed it was under-potentialized”. As well as that, Studio Nicholson has leant into its UK wholesale distribution, securing End, Liberty (again), and Harvey Nichols. Selfridges is in the works, too. “We focus very clearly on top-tier distribution,” says Suddards.

More recently, Studio Nicholson has made significant inroads in the US, its second-strongest online DTC market after the UK. Previously, the US was a pain point. “The American market is probably the most difficult to crack,” says Wakeman, explaining that the “reticence” has since lifted. “We understand it a lot better now. As you get bigger, you can start diversifying your collection towards different territories.”

Suddards confirms it. “We’re now breaking into some major players like Bloomingdale’s,” he says. “The strategy from now to the next few years is to continue our DTC growth and to work on flagships around the world, so our eyes are now on New York and Paris.” Until then, the buyers’ responses to the show and the brand’s ability to adapt to differing territory demands will be telling. For small Western companies with a tight USP and vision wanting to scale without diluting the brand, Studio Nicholson might have put forward the playbook, and it starts in reverse order: Japan, then Paris.