The shirt is just red, this new brand is going to sell only a few hundred dollars of shirts.

Gender equality, neutrality, leisure sports heat... There are many explanations, but in any case, the shirt is once again popular. Not only is it popular. Since this spring, the models have walked through the Vettes of the autumn series of Vetements 2016 in this shirt. This simple piece, which was regarded as “underwear” more than 200 years ago, suddenly became the most meta-exposed and most exposed expression.

No one has ever designed the shirts at the right time – at the Coterie Apparel Industry Show in New York, there are fat shirts that look like pajamas and exaggerated cuffs. No one wears a shirt any more – you can match it with an expensive Gucci maxi dress, or half it into Levi's 501 jeans, then pull the neckline and pull the hem.

“Because shirts give you a lot of freedom,” Aude Casteja said. “Who can wear it the way you like it. As a brand, you don’t need to spend time explaining it to customers.”

Aude Casteja originally worked in Céline's public relations marketing department. In 2013, she also noticed the two trends of minimalism and shirts, so she set up the women's brand Monographie.

Monographie only makes shirts. In the 2017SS series, you can see a minimalist version of a collar, flared sleeve, baby blue or pure white, as well as a black and white stripe and pleated design.

Designer brands like Aude Casteja, which started out as a single item, are getting more and more. For example, the London brand Shrimps, which only makes candy-colored faux fur, only sells the Portuguese brand Marques'Almeida in the 90s retro denim design, or obsessed with the être Cécile that prints Logo on basic items such as sweaters and T-shirts.

For young designers, the benefits of this niche and precise positioning are obvious: it is more convenient for manufacturing; it is easier for consumers to feel the brand tonality and prepare for the expansion of the product line in the future; It also wins more attention for designers.

But their challenge is also whether they have enough recognition and how to build a competitive advantage based on a single product category.

Aude Casteja's approach is to use the resources that he has accumulated in luxury brands to work hard on quality and price/performance. 100% cotton fabric can be a selling point, so she found Thomas Mason, a well-known fabric supplier in Italy; the garment making process is another, so the manufacturer of all products is handled by the Paris workshop LCC - this workshop is also Christian Dior, Louis Vuitton and Chanel's partner.

Based on these two points, the price of single items is controlled at around 270 to 620 dollars. Not cheap, but the brand tonality is also stuck in the mid-end market that more and more people are chasing.

The same is true for the channel strategy. “We only want to work with top international suppliers.” Aude Casteja said in an interview with WWD that in addition to the luxury pre-sale website Moda Operandi, Monographie's offline strategy is to open stores in mainstream department stores and then to the world. Buyers' stores around the country expand.

On November 15, they just opened a store in Harrods. Compared with similar department stores such as Selfridges and Liberty, the latter's consumer groups are mostly international tourists. In order to attract young people in the near future, this department store brand has also introduced sports and leisure brands such as Lululemon and Bodyism, and also upgraded the 4G network service in the store. Its earnings performance also benefited from the Brexit and the resurgence of tourists, and the profit for FY2016 increased by 16.9%.

However, for a single-brand brand such as Monographie, even if it can win the initial attention of the market, the more crucial thing is the next step: whether to refuse to expand, risk the growth slowdown, or expand the product line, facing “how to maintain brand personality and The challenge of design coherence.