Frame started as a lark. Now it’s nearing USD$200 million in sales

The brand has turned a single style of jeans into a growing international business and celebrity collaborations.

Erik Torstensson and Gisele Bundchen at the Frame NYFW Dinner held at Indochine on February 12, 2024. Picture: WWD via Getty Images)

One night in 2011, in the dressing room of her Kensington townhouse, Natalie Massenet, the founder of online retailer Net-a-Porter, nervously tried on a pair of jeans. She had sold plenty of them, but this particular pair didn’t look so promising by the standards of the era. They weren’t too skinny, too stiff, dyed or decorated. Just simple, deep blue jeans with a gold button. Even worse, this pair had been made by her boyfriend, Erik Torstensson, a creative director who was now trying his hand at designing denim.

“Well, there goes our relationship,” Massenet remembers thinking. But, to her relief, the jeans were “chic and not tacky.”

The relationship was saved – 12 years on, they are still together. And Frame, Torstensson’s denim brand, is now ringing up nearly $US200m ($xxm) a year in sales.

Denim is a supersaturated category, one where former superstars like J Brand have crashed and burned into fashion obsolescence. Yet Frame has grown steadily for 12 years– including 20 per cent sales growth thus far over last year – without paid print ads or fundraising. It’s still owned by Torstensson and co-founder Jens Grede, whom he calls his “brother.” Now, Frame is opening new outposts, including a Paris office and a shop in Shanghai, and planning five new stores in the US Though it launched with just one style of denim, half of the brand’s sales now come from ready-to-wear for men and women, with many pieces priced under $US500.

“Frame wasn’t really supposed to work,” says Torstensson from his East Hampton home. He and Grede launched it on a lark. At the time, the native Swedes ran the Saturday Group, a set of London-based agencies that mostly created advertising and marketing campaigns for a fashion clientele. They knew a guy in Los Angeles who said he could help them make jeans and thought, “Why not?”

Karlie Kloss collaborated with Frame. Picture: Shutterstock

They financed the “pure passion project,” says Grede, out of their Saturday Group earnings. Even the name was gut instinct: Frame has five letters and therefore would look symmetrical as a logo. Their business plan was modelled on luxury fashion rather than the $US200 jeans market. “Because we worked with all these big brands, we thought, ‘OK, you need to do a campaign with a supermodel, and we need to do an event at fashion week because that’s what our clients do, and it should come in a beautiful box because Chanel does that,’” he says. A key difference was that they leveraged the relatively new platform Instagram rather than buying pricey print advertisements.

It helps to have model friends. The duo canvassed them for ideas, resulting in a slightly higher rise and quality denim that stretched without bagging out, as well as cuts inspired by French styling of the ’70s. The effect was quiet luxury before that really existed. At shoots for Saturday clients, or when they saw them socially, Torstensson and Grede handed Gisele Bündchen, Anja Rubik and Miranda Kerr the results. They were inevitably paparazzi’d wearing them after shows, or they posted them on their own social media feeds. Over dinner during Paris Fashion Week in 2013, Torstensson and another supermodel friend, Karlie Kloss, concocted the idea of a collaboration. “I was this lanky model, and I could never find jeans long enough,” Kloss remembers.

The Forever Karlie came in two styles, one skinny and one flared, each with 40-inch inseams. “It was the first time I was given the opportunity to launch something that was my own,” says Kloss, who was given a percentage of sales. “That gave me the confidence and the data to show to other brands and companies that there was a potential to build around me.” Other similarly structured collaborations followed, with models including Lara Stone and Imaan Hammam, and stylists like Julia Sarr-Jamois.

“They were on the forefront of the influencer thing and celebrity endorsement, things that are now commonplace,” says fashion investor Andrew Rosen, who is on the board.

Their “holy s—” moment was selling a quarter million pairs in 2014, says Grede. “First we made $6 million, then $36 million, then $65 million and then $100 million.”

The growth made the demands of running the company suddenly very real. They sold off Saturday Group in 2015, and focused on organizing the business, which now has around 200 employees. Grede relocated in 2017 to Los Angeles to run Kim Kardashian’s Skims label. Torstensson now lives in New York, where he focuses on Frame full-time as chief creative officer. That guy who they had first found to make jeans with was California-based denim-head Nico Peyrache. Joshua LeVine took on a CEO role. It was Grede’s idea to bring in Rosen as a minority investor, whom they had met doing consulting work for Rosen’s brand Theory.

Inside the Frame store in New York City.

“We can either make all the mistakes ourselves, or work with a guy who has done this before,” Grede recalls saying. Rosen and private equity head John Howard, who also made a minority investment, are now on their speed dial. Now that luxury prices have shot up—plain bluejeans from Celine cost $1,100 to $1,500—Frame’s relative affordability gives the brand a great deal of leeway, Rosen points out.

In early 2020, CEO Nicolas Dreyfus joined from French high street brand The Kooples to oversee even more expansion. To liberate the brand from the constraints of wholesale, Dreyfus focused on building the direct-to-consumer business, both online and in brick-and-mortar stores. In 2019, Frame had 10 stores solely in the U.S. The brand now has 17, including two in London and the newest in China.

With a seasoned exec on board, Torstensson is more free to indulge his creativity. He often shoots Frame campaigns himself, though he sometimes cedes the camera to photographers such as the duo Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, who recently shot influencer Alix Earle for an autumn collaboration. Earle, who more typically works with mass cosmetic brands, calls the experience “a pinch-me moment.”

Other Torstensson brain waves have been the ongoing Ritz Paris collaboration, featuring popular sweatshirts and caps with the hotel’s logo, and luxurious new store designs. A sinuous metallic table featured in the revamped Madison Avenue boutique is actually something he designed, with the help of AI, and is for sale for $22,000. More furniture will follow for the five stores which are slated to open in 2025.

As surprised as he is that Frame is still around, he is still excited about the brand he and Grede call their “baby.” Torstensson says, “It’s like we were in puberty, and now that we are a little older, we can do so much more.”

The Wall Street Journal