How Another Tomorrow built and scaled a sustainable fashion brand

It’s been a tough year for fashion businesses, with many sustainable and independent brands closing their doors. New York womenswear brand Another Tomorrow has managed to sail through the turbulence. How? By prioritising desirability alongside sustainability and supply chain resilience, and targeting investors with a long-term view.

At the latest Vogue Business Fashion Futures event, which took place in London on 4 December, founder and CEO Vanessa Barboni Hallik detailed the holistic “systems thinking” approach that has kept the brand going. “Early on, I did a lot of graveyard diligence,” she said. “Before we even had a designer or a brand name, I looked at why things fail to scale in the consumer landscape. A lot of it was a prioritisation of sustainability, but without a deep understanding of why the customer buys products. So product integrity and design were absolutely central to us and we really invested in that.”

That’s why the brand brought in Proenza Schouler and Derek Lam 10 Crosby alum Elizabeth Giardina as creative director in 2022: to turn the brand’s custom materials library — which includes more sustainable versions of traditional natural fibres (such as organic cotton, ethical wool and peace silk), as well as next-gen materials like Seacell — into products people would buy and love.

Reflecting on her learnings from the last five years of running and scaling Another Tomorrow, Barboni Hallik shared how her background in finance informs the way she runs the business, meaning she mitigates business risks by taking a portfolio approach to everything from materials to retail channels.

“We started out as predominantly direct-to-consumer (DTC) with one strategic wholesale partner,” she explained, pointing to Matches, which went into administration in March. “One pivot we made early on was developing a drop-ship business in 2022, so we could expand our customer audience while protecting the brand and selling products at full price. That has given us a lot of agility and the ability to connect with the end customer.” The key is having a strong mix of retail strategies, said Barboni Hallik, which includes DTC, wholesale and drop-ship.

When it came to raising capital, Barboni Hallik deployed her finance background — she founded Another Tomorrow while on sabbatical from the emerging markets team at Morgan Stanley — to create a targeted fundraising strategy. “A lot of investing is just pattern recognition. That’s why I look for capital on a global basis. If you look at where people have made money in the US, it’s been technology, real estate and mass consumer goods. It’s not necessarily been in high-integrity products, but there is a deep pattern of that in Europe, and parts of Asia and the Middle East. So we have a very global cap table.”