What turns a fashion brand around? Three takeaways from Xandres' CEO Willem Wijnen
For episode 175 of the We Love Belgian Brands podcast, our co-founder John Galeyn joined a conversation with Willem Wijnen, the CEO of Xandres. Xandres is Belgian premium womenswear, nearly 60 years old, part of the French group Damartex, and back in the black after a stretch of harder years. Three insights that stuck with us.
1. The growth was in the margin, not the marketing
Ask most people why a fashion brand suddenly turns profitable and they'll guess e-commerce, or a clever new sales push. That's not what happened here. The fix was almost unglamorous: the margin.
Instead of chasing revenue, the team went back through the collection and made harder choices about what earns its place, and concluded to cut the width of it. That meant fewer styles, yet bought with more conviction, which pushes up the order quantity per piece and improves your cost price.
It's something we also experience constantly when talking to similar brands and companies. Your overall margin can look perfectly healthy while a handful of products bleed underneath, and the weak ones often get bought deeper the next season, so the problem snowballs. You can't spot any of that, unless you can see margin at the level of the individual product. It's a data question before it's a merchandising one, and it's usually the first place we look when a brand is working hard for thin results.
The same restraint shows up in what they refused to do. Shoes and bags were on the table at one point, close to the core, tempting. They said no, because it's a different craft with a different distribution network, and the marketing money would work far harder selling what they're already great at.
Sometimes, the best strategic move is the thing you take off the list.
2. Stop treating your channels as rivals
A lot of brands still act like their webshop and their stores are competing for the same euro. Xandres has stopped worrying about it, and the numbers back them up.
Open a store in a decent-sized city and online sales in that area climb by tens of percent. The webshop then sends people back into the shop. Their own shorthand for it is "one plus one is three." The customer isn't thinking in channels at all. They feel like a Xandres customer and buy wherever suits them that day. The job isn't to pick a winning channel, it's to make sure every channel tells the same story.
Xandres recently opened their fourth store in The Netherlands
That includes the boring, invisible stuff like where the stock actually sits. If someone wants a piece and it isn't there, that's a lost sale online and a flat moment in the store. Getting the right product to the right place at the right time reads like an inventory problem, but it's really a customer-experience one. The two are the same thing wearing different hats.
For anyone growing abroad, the same logic applies with patience attached. Xandres is expanding market by market rather than everywhere at once, keeping sales in-house so they don't lose their grip on how the brand feels. Slower, but it holds together.
3. None of it works unless everyone trusts the same numbers
Here's where it became our kind of conversation. You can have great channels and a sharp collection, and still trip over your own systems.
Xandres runs an older ERP that still does the job, but they're building a layer on top so data from every system lands in one place, in the same shape, and testing smarter, data-led stock allocation on top of that.
When everyone pulls their own report with one setting slightly different, meetings start with an argument about whose number is right instead of what to do about it. One version of the truth is what lets a team actually move.
The same gap shows up in wholesale, where a lot of brands quietly lose hours. A multibrand boutique is a small team buying from dozens of brands, each handing over its products a different way, usually a rough spreadsheet. Getting that in cleanly, with the right photos and prices, is a slog every season. A fairly light connection between the brand's system and the partner's fixes it, so product data and imagery just flow across. The real prize comes once you also share stock data, so partners can replenish, stop missing sales, and the brand can steer its assortment on what's genuinely selling.
And a caveat we'd have added ourselves: systems don't replace the relationship. The best integration in the world just frees up the time to look each other in the eye and go for a coffee 😉
So what do you actually do with all this?
If you take one thing from the episode, make it this: know your numbers at the level where decisions get made. Not the top-line figure, but the margin on the actual product, the stock in the actual store, the sell-through at the actual partner. Most of the good calls hide down there.
Start small. You don't need to replace everything to see the difference, you need the data you already have to be trustworthy and to reach the people making decisions. Keep the customer at the centre of it, because "better inventory data" and "she found the thing she wanted" turn out to be the same project. And treat the tech as the frame around the creativity, not a replacement for it.
If any of this sounds like your world, whether it's margin you can't quite see or channels and systems that aren't really talking, that's the conversation we have most days. Let's talk.
