You probably haven’t heard of Brandy Melville, the privately owned fashion brand founded by the Italian father and son Silvio and Stephan Marsan. Those that have are most likely the parents of young teenage girls. Or perhaps you’re a 12-year-old girl yourself, with a rare enthusiasm for financial news.
The retailer has been selling its brand of collegiate, sunny, cornfed cool for more than two decades. It emerged more fully in 2009 when its operations shifted to California, but it’s still the kind of brand that arrives in your life unannounced, like a troop of screaming cheerleaders in your kitchen. Like adolescence, it just strikes overnight. In 2014, analysts estimated company sales of about $125m annually, and a growth rate of 20 to 25 per cent per year, but its place in the broader fashion landscape has remained deliberately low-profile. It has never placed an advertisement. It keeps its store numbers low — although it has a busy online business. And, unlike the showy founders of comparable youth-centric fashion brands, such as the now-defunct American Apparel, its executives rarely do press.
Instead, Brandy Melville is an entirely millennial phenomenon, propagated and fed by its mostly pubescent patrons, for whom it holds a cult-like appeal. Most discover it on Instagram, where its 3.9m followers can admire a seemingly never-ending feed (pictured below) of honey-blonde, tawny-limbed beauties skipping around piers, beachfronts, cafés and libraries in teeny-tiny shorts and cute slogan cropped tops.