Rikard Adolfsoon from Axel Arigato: we will continue to challenge everything
Today we bring you the first part of an interview with Rikard Adolfsoon, Supply Chain Director from Axel Arigato, which was founded in 2014 as a direct-to-consumer fashion brand. Axel Arigato has physical stores in six countries across Europe and UAE and is present online in 134 territories worldwide
Axel Arigato
Axel Arigato was founded in 2014 by Albin and Max, who were our co-founders and who are still active in the company today. Max is our Creative Director, whilst Albin is our CEO. So, then went together in 2014 with an idea to bring disruption to our industry, basically. In 2015, our first product was made and sold to the consumer. The concept behind Axel Arigato was to disrupt the industry in the sense of offering an affordable luxury product. So, challenging the conventional luxury brands and the conventional fast fashion brands and find a sweet spot in between, where you can basically get affordable luxury.
The business model or approach was very much Instagram based, online based, being close to the consumer, being able to quickly follow up on trends and having short lead times to the market.
Continue to be closer to the consumer, being it on Instagram or in TikTok or where the consumer might be, is and will continue to be a cornerstone of our business model.
Democratising luxury in a way: our products are priced quite differently from luxury products. Like I said, is affordable luxury. So, for us it is crucial to be able to create the shoes with craftsmanship, like we do in our Portuguese factories.
Business Partnerships
I think agility has been quite important for us to be able to be quite adaptable, or a supplier for us. We are starting to come to a place where we need more of reliability and predictability. So, when we evaluate suppliers, for us it is important to look at it from lead time, because we want to be close to the consumer trends and the market, and look at it from quality perspective.
XChange
The XChange platform was launched quite recently. It is basically an initiative to try to close the loop, in a way. We can be sustainable in all the choices that we made, in terms of products composition and transportation, and so on, but in the end of the day that is quite a small part of the product life cycle. And we want to try to offer a way of extending that life cycle, into several life cycles and that is what Xchange is there for; to enable peer to peer sales and community as well, as well as for us to bring all samples to life.
Future of the brand
We will continue to challenge everything we do, what we do and how we do it. I think the pandemic has shown us that we cannot take anything for granted. (and) Always bringing the customer to the centre.
