“Where Do We Want to Be After This Crisis?” The Saks Potts Founders Are Going Back to Their Beginnings to Move Forward

Barbara Potts and Cathrine Saks are the founders and designers of the Copenhagen-based label Saks Potts.

Barbara Potts: Right now we are working from home a lot but still going to the office individually, since in Denmark you can have three people or less in a space. Online, we just launched our collaboration with vintage car dealer L’Art de l’Automobile, and in general, one good thing in this terrible situation is that our webshop is doing really well and we are selling a lot, especially our comfy shimmer pants and tops, so I think people are still shopping, and we hope that can continue.

Cathrine Saks: We are very happy about that…

BP: Right now, in terms of Fashion Week in the fall, we haven’t really decided 100% what our plan will be. We can do a lot of things online and we can pursue resort, but of course the problem is that we don’t know if any of our retailers will buy that collection. What we are sure of is that we will not make a big, big, new collection with a lot of skus, and instead we are talking about making a smaller collection.

CS: As Barbara said, it’s tricky to know what we will do for the future but also, in terms of our collections and drops of products, we’ve been talking a lot about whether or not it is the right thing to make full collections three or four times a year, or if it makes more sense for us to do smaller drops and feel confident about the product we’re putting out there, a product that we know is good and works and sells. The difficult thing about fashion is that you have to think such a long time out into the future, and with the world that we live in right now, we want to create things and buy things immediately. When we see something on a catwalk or at a presentation or on some girl on Instagram, we just really want to buy it in the moment. So I think right now is an especially good time to adopt the see-now-buy-now model. That’s something we discuss a lot and we’re figuring out if it’s something we should work towards, but again, it’s early and we haven’t decided on anything for now.

BP: And really, no one has the answer right now, no one knows what the right thing to do is.

CS: But I also think it’s a time to be asking questions and connecting with people from all over the world. Connectivity in fashion is actually better at the moment, more immediate, because this global community is being forced to communicate even more than before online. I actually think it’s quite exciting to figure out new ways to translate Fashion Weeks and appointments and shoots online, especially for us.

BP: For sure, and people are also really helping one another. I think that’s one beautiful thing to come out of this. You can see [it], especially in the fashion industry. We have been thinking about this a lot, and actually, one of our production facilities in China sent us leftover masks they had and we will donate them to the local hospital in Copenhagen, so we of course are trying to do something to help outside of the company, and we can do more, but we are still a small company, so it’s not that easy. But we are really trying to think about how we can help outside of our little fashion company.

CS: In terms of production, we have been very lucky and have made all of our deadlines. We did have some samples from fall 2020 which were not manufactured in China, but we were able to contact a really amazing manufacturer in Turkey that we’ve worked with before and [they] helped us. I feel like we are lucky to have great relationships with our suppliers and manufacturers, and we’ve all really been supporting one another.

BP: And speaking of relationships right now, I do think collaborations make more sense than ever. For example, through our collab with the vintage car dealer, we were exposed to completely new customers and his group was introduced to our brand. We are two very different communities, but it has been such a success. I think it’s a good idea for brands like ours to pursue more collaborations. I also think it’s a good time to slow down and refocus on things like: What do we want to make? Which products do we actually want to sell? Where do we want to be after this crisis?

CS: It’s really about improving your business. Especially younger brands like ours, I think we always have a tendency to be very out-there and innovative and do new things all the time, but sometimes it’s better to look inward and see what our core actually is and what we are best at in terms of execution and sales.

BP: Still though, we’re always thinking about ways to take our core products and make them different or cooler.

Originally Appeared on Vogue