Lafayette 148 Projects $150 Million for 2026 on Luxury Pivot

Lafayette 148 projects 2026 sales of $150 million, up 12 percent over 2025. Co-founder and CEO Deirdre Quinn attributes the growth to a deliberate move upmarket that began during the pandemic, when demand shocks and supply chain disruption, in her words, "threatened to put the company out of business."

The 30-year-old, privately owned New York label responded by recommitting to its vertically integrated model. The strategy had a clear commercial logic: protecting margins and avoiding order minimums that constrain most wholesale-dependent brands.

What did the pivot change operationally?

Quinn and creative director Emily Smith — who joined the brand in 2002 as an intern — made three moves:

• Invested in higher-quality materials
• Shifted the majority of sales from wholesale to the company's own stores and e-commerce
• Raised prices in step with quality, with more full-price sell-through as a result

The company now holds a two-hour presentation slot on the New York Fashion Week calendar. Last year it began selling in Harrods. This year it opened a Paris showroom for the first time.

Quinn now frames the brand's competitive set as European luxury houses rather than fellow American brands — a repositioning from its former identity as a mid-tier department store name.

Where is the retail expansion going?

This fall, Lafayette 148 opened its first Dallas store, a market where vacancy followed the shuttering of the city's Neiman Marcus. First West Coast stores are planned for 2027. Abroad, the Middle East and Japan are the two target regions.

The expansion rests on the company's first C-suite supporting Quinn: a chief marketing officer, a chief merchant and a chief commercial officer.

Smith pointed to supplier relationships as the operational core of the upgrade. "We're more innovative today with our suppliers, with more of our point of view," she said, describing supplier collaboration as "the defining difference between where we were and how we've evolved."

Will the brand take outside capital?

Quinn ruled it out for now. She considered selling only "at the worst possible times — the times where you needed help with your cash flow," which she called the wrong moment because owners "wouldn't get what you put into it."

Her concern is hands-on: an investor's first move, she said, might be "to buy less expensive fabrics or something that just starts a race to the bottom." She holds a plan through 2030 and runs what she calls an "extremely open-book type of operation" without a board or a boss.

That ownership structure shapes the growth targets. "I don't focus on a metric like having to hit double-digit growth," Quinn said. "Single digit is fine."

What are the production-side constraints?

One figure stands out: the brand cuts 58 sizes. Quinn called sizing "the hardest part because of the engineering that goes into making a garment look good," and said she seeks advice on doing more non-sized business to ease that complexity.

Smith said the design team ignores seasonal trend cycles in favor of proportion, relevance and fabric technology, noting that tailoring drives the assortment. The customer strategy targets no age demographic; Smith described the client simply as "an accomplished woman" who "wants to be taken seriously."

On category expansion, Quinn confirmed openness to collaborations but said ready-to-wear remains the focus, with brand-building and marketing investment as the current spending priority.

Looking ahead, Quinn argued the 30-year track record itself is the expansion asset: "We're not this new brand. We've got the stability and the infrastructure to support everything it takes to build a proper long-term partnership" in Europe.