A curious gathering took place on a recent afternoon at Frankfurt’s Dippemess, the city’s historic funfair. It represented the basketball club, the ice-hockey team, the rubbish collectors, the public-transport operator and the youth fire brigade. Even Germany’s central bank had sent someone along. The only unusual thing was that none of them had come in human form. Frankfurt was holding its annual mascot summit.

Bembli – a plush, oversized version of the grey-and-blue stoneware jug traditionally used to serve Frankfurt’s Apfelwein cider – hosted the gathering. The idea had been dreamt up rather spontaneously at last year’s event. “It seemed obvious: mascots just bring good vibes,” Patrick Hausmann, one of the organisers, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. This year, 15 local plush stars turned up.

Some, such as Dunking Kong the gorilla and Trevor the lion, are seasoned professionals, accustomed to working the crowds at basketball and ice-hockey games. Others keep a lower profile. Lisa, the public-transport operator’s mouse, leaves her burrow only once or twice a year. Some of the mascots are animals (or close enough): a meerkat, an eagle, a bee and a dragon. One is quite literally a walking euro.

Germany has had a complicated relationship with mascots. Things started promisingly with Waldi, the striped dachshund created by Elena Winschermann under Otl Aicher – the designer behind Lufthansa’s landmark 1960s corporate identity – for the 1972 Munich Olympics. Cheerful and resolutely unheroic, he became an ambassador for the friendlier postwar Germany. The country’s last big mascot, Goleo VI, fared less well: the shaggy lion of the 2006 World Cup wore a Germany shirt but, conspicuously, no trousers – a fact that prompted a weeklong national debate.

Goleo VI more or less killed off Germany’s remaining enthusiasm for mascots, which was a pity because the country once had a rich cast of them. Organisations that had long kept one on the payroll – including many of the nation’s regional broadcasters – retired their mascots in the following years or simply let them fade away. As marketing moved online, the slow-burning characters fell out of fashion, replaced by influencers with ready-made audiences.

At about the same time, ironically, Japan went in the opposite direction: from the mid-2000s, local mascots began multiplying at extraordinary speed, complete with dance competitions and popularity contests. Its yuru-chara (“loose characters”) represent almost everything: cities and prefectures, police departments and railway companies, tax offices and even prisons.

Some yuru-chara have become celebrities in their own right. Kumamon, the rosy-cheeked black bear created to promote the city Kumamoto, has become a national figure who has even been sent abroad. Funassyi, an unofficial pear fairy from Funabashi, built a career on being deliberately chaotic and even landed a deal with Universal Music Japan. And when JR East announced that its much-loved Suica Penguin would be retired in March 2027, fans reacted as though a celebrity had died.

In Japan, mascots are part of the civic PR playbook. Alongside promoting tourism, they make institutions feel less remote, giving otherwise abstract organisations a face. It might be a particularly good moment for Western cities to take note. At a time when urban identity is wavering and trust in institutions is wearing thin, people are looking for things that feel tangible and unmistakably local. A slightly ridiculous creature can do more for civic affection than a six-figure branding exercise.

Western Europe has a few lessons to take from Japan. First, institutions need to tolerate a little silliness. Western city governments and companies often worry that being playful means not being taken seriously but Japan demonstrates that credibility and absurdity can happily coexist. Second, keep it local and stick with it. The best Japanese mascots are long-term characters, rooted in local food, folklore, history and in-jokes. And third, let adults enjoy them too. Japan has made kawaii aesthetics perfectly respectable beyond childhood. Mascots shouldn’t only be wheeled out for school fêtes and funfairs but allowed into everyday life.

For mascots to catch on in the West, this admittedly might require a rethink but Frankfurt’s gathering offered a glimpse of what it might look like. People stopped for photographs with the mascots or simply lingered around them. There was no awkward small talk and no need to explain. Several of the city’s furry ambassadors have stories of grown adults approaching them for a long hug simply because they were having a bad day. Try getting that from a fancy logo.

Florian Siebeck is Monocle’s Frankfurt correspondent. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

Why would you want to start your own business? Being an entrepreneur has a certain allure; it certainly makes for a better introduction when you meet someone at a party. But the sweat and stress that come with this job title should not be underestimated.

At the start-up stage, there’s money at stake (and often funds contributed by friends and family who wouldn’t mind seeing it come back to them one day). In the up-and-running years, questions about stamina arise: can you really keep working seven days a week? Then, when you hit your stride, there are additional anxieties to contend with. How can you continue growing at pace? Should you bring in investors – or even sell?

But, every year, hundreds of Monocle readers decide that it’s time to say farewell to the corporate life, give up on salary security and do their own thing. Though I imagine that most of them would like to make enough money to lead a comfortable life, for many there are other important factors to consider: a sense of freedom, doing something that they are genuinely passionate about and taking a chance.

And these are the ideas, the draws, that we unpack and investigate over the following pages. This is a magazine for entrepreneurs at every stage of the self-driven adventure. Across its pages, it offers encouragement, advice and some amusing asides.

One idea that becomes apparent is that you don’t have to come up with a crazy new idea to succeed. Often finessing something that already exists is the way to go – so don’t hold back while you search for that elusive gap in the market. In this issue, you will meet the switched-on team that has revitalised an old East German lighting brand and the crafty folks who are continuing centuries-old trades with the support of guilds.

There are also plenty of modern innovators who we would like to introduce you to, from a maker of tiles in Shanghai who uses recycled plates and pottery to the business exploring how co-working and homes for seniors can create a powerful union in Hamburg. There’s much to discover.

Then there’s the question of where you should run your business from, the places that will foster an entrepreneurial flair. We’ll take you on a tour of two Spanish outposts that are attracting design-minded start-ups: Galicia and Valencia. We walk you around a Jakarta market that has become a hothouse for generating new brands in Indonesia and more places besides.

Every entrepreneur needs to start their journey somewhere. Perhaps yours will begin after you finish reading this copy of The Entrepreneurs. Your business won’t be easy but it will be worthwhile. And it will be yours.

For more on starting up and running a company, ensure that you listen to Monocle’s weekly podcast, The Entrepreneurs.

In the village of Osøyro on the waters of the Fusafjorden on Norway’s west coast sits the base of Oselvarverkstaden – the Boatbuilder Guild of Os. It’s an organisation dedicated to the craft of constructing oselvar, the region’s traditional wooden vessels. Its headquarters, a specialised boatyard and workshop, was established with funding from the regional municipality in 1997 at a time when numbers of local boatbuilders, once in the hundreds, were dropping significantly and wooden hulls were increasingly being replaced by fibreglass alternatives.

Today the centre is used for training people in the 2,000-year-old craft. Here, masters instruct apprentices while archiving their knowledge to guarantee authenticity. “We don’t use drawings,” director Vidar Langeland tells Monocle, explaining that much of the work relies on instinct and a sharp eye. “Everything exists in the mind of the masters.”

The guildhall currently hosts a five-strong team, including 27-year-old apprentice Ashley Hallén, who arrived from Stockholm searching for a hands-on career. “This is a lot more physical and, in a way, more thoughtful,” she says, comparing Oselvarverkstaden with white-collar careers. “I have more guidance here.”

A boat can take up to 400 hours to build, so customers might wait months for a commission. But apprentices must also be patient: before learning to build vessels, they are taught how to select timber for every project and make their own tools. Many of the tools used at Oselvarverkstaden cannot be bought in a shop as they are designed for the profiles of each boat; the five models that the workshop produces are all unique.

“The differences can be almost invisible,” says Stig Salbu Henneman, the guild’s master boatbuilder. “But an experienced craftsman can recognise who made a vessel just by looking at its lines.” It’s an example of the kind of knowledge that only a guild model can provide. “The builders gather around completed boats and examine tiny variations in shape, sometimes down to fractions of an inch,” says Henneman. “It’s about quality control but it’s also another lesson for the apprentice.”

A further advantage of the guild environment is that apprentices learn many skills. They observe the entire process of building the craft, from forest to finished boat. Oselvarverkstaden’s teaching methods have not gone unnoticed: the guild has received recognition from Unesco for the safeguarding of cultural heritage. But for Henneman, the real output consists of more than just boats. “The purpose is to preserve knowledge,” he says. Though the guild might be young by international standards, it’s playing a part in protecting an old system and the idea that a skilled trade should be learnt by spending time alongside those who already know it best.
oselvarverkstaden.no

The farm-to-table concept comes instinctively to the French. More than half of the nation’s territory is given over to agriculture, amounting to 17.4 per cent of the EU’s total farm land. Speeding eastward from the capital on an RER train, Monocle spies uninterrupted fields of wheat, barley and corn.

We’re on our way to Presles-en-Brie, a commune 40km southeast of Paris, where canteen and grocery shop Mûre cultivates about 1.5 hectares of south-facing land in small plots. Unlike most commercial farms that tend to focus on a primary crop, Mûre’s produces 150 varieties of fruit and vegetables. This traditional style of farming is known as maraîchage (market gardening); those growing food in this way often sell crops directly to restaurants.

Mûre’s farm is almost completely unmechanised. There’s one machine to remove old roots; everything else is done by hand. This allows space that conventional farms would reserve for tractors to drive on to be used for growing instead; failed crops can also be more swiftly substituted for new varieties. As demand for locally grown produce has risen and farming has become more sensitive to the vicissitudes of extreme weather, maraîchage has proven the efficacy of old-fashioned farming methods.

Instead of selling its produce to other businesses, Mûre keeps things in the family. At 05.00, electric vehicles transport the farm’s produce to the company’s grocery shop in Paris’s residential 11th arrondissement and its five restaurant canteens. At 07.00, chefs begin using those ingredients to prepare dishes for the lunchtime rush. At about 12.00, city workers flock to their nearest Mûre outpost to feast on the resulting dishes; the next morning, this cycle starts again.

On paper, Arnaud Dalibot doesn’t seem like the type of person who would have masterminded such an operation. But in 2014, the former finance executive at Moët Hennessy swapped the champagne business for planting, recipe testing and the difficult task of building a farm. “At the time, it was à la mode to open a burger restaurant in Paris,” says Dalibot. “But there was also growing demand for organic vegetables, beyond those prepared by fine-dining institutions such as Paris’s three-Michelin-starred L’Arpège.”

The idea for Mûre, which means “ripe”, took root while Dalibot was working in New York, where the urban-growing trend was in full bloom. “I liked the idea of connecting agriculture with nourishing cooking,” he says. Returning to France, he became aware that 85 per cent of the nation’s produce was being exported. “Paris has 10 million inhabitants and I wanted them to benefit from what grows on French soil,” he adds. “I’m interested in feeding Parisians.”

It can be gruelling work. “Running a restaurant when you’re also the grower and supplier means starting from scratch every day,” he says. “It’s a 24-7 job.” As well as spending three days a week overseeing the farm’s operations and the rest zipping between his grocery shop and canteens on a bike, Dalibot also develops seasonal menus. At weekends, he collects eggs from the farm’s 250 chickens (“This one’s called Linda,” he says, pointing to a mischievous hen trampling on the Swiss chard) and looks after donkeys Timy and Toumou. The link between the farm and the table here is Dalibot himself.

Back in Paris at Mûre’s new canteen on Rue des Italiens, a steady stream of employees from neighbouring offices are brandishing their restaurant tickets. Dalibot wanted these tax-efficient meal vouchers, provided by employers and typically valued between €7 and €14, to dictate the prices. A hot meal at Mûre costs €10.50. “We have slim margins,” he says. But affordability is a priority. On the menu today is roasted vegetable lasagne, an aubergine and confit tomato quiche and a courgette pizza with Grana Padano. “Parisians are epicureans,” says Dalibot. “Their first concern is the taste. Price is their second preoccupation. Whether a dish is produced sustainably tends to be at the bottom of their list.”

Bold, instructive branding is fundamental to Dalibot’s efforts to improve awareness. Mûre’s motto – “La cuisine des gens qui sèment” (“The cuisine of those who sow”) – is plastered on chalkboards. He concedes that some of the business’s hungry consumers might not fully appreciate the message. “But that doesn’t matter to me,” he says with a shrug. “I know that we’re doing the right thing.”
mure.family

Few start-ups make as much noise during their first 100 days as Yi Design. The Chinese ceramic tile and brick company spent the spring of 2021 knocking on studio doors in Jingdezhen, China’s porcelain capital, asking to buy leftover ceramics and then transporting the broken plates, bowls and mugs to its factory outside the city centre. The resulting pile of high-grade porcelain – weighing millions of kilogrammes – provided the basis of the business’s product development and inspired its slogan, “We move mountains”.

Customers, including Chinese luxury fashion brands Erdos and Icicle, are using the YiTile, made from 70 per cent recycled materials, to kit out their shops and flagship boutiques. International expansion to Japan, the US, Australia and South Korea has come through several design- and eco-conscious clients across Europe. “Cos is extremely supportive of us and global studio Brinkworth is using our tiles for its New Balance shops,” says Caroline Cheng, Yi Design’s 63-year-old founder and creative director. She speaks to Monocle at the company’s headquarters in Shanghai, one of its several outposts alongside those in Jingdezhen, Dali and London.

Born in the UK to parents from Hong Kong who were scions of the Amoy soy-sauce empire, Cheng grew up surrounded by the family business but her career has been dedicated to ceramics rather than condiments. Her artworks sit in the collection of leading museums and she tutors at Central Saint Martins College of Art in London.

Her route into entrepreneurship started in 1991 when she joined Hong Kong’s The Pottery Workshop – a centre based in multiple locations across China that teaches students the art of handmade ceramics to support and provide them with a career after graduation. Now that her daughter has taken leadership of that operation, Cheng is dedicating most of her time to Yi Design.

Her brand’s products, including the YiBrick, an award-winning permeable brick made almost entirely from recycled materials, now sit in the material libraries of firms including Foster + Partners, Brinkworth and Heatherwick Studio.

The business is breaking even and Cheng says that she is in no rush to make a fortune. As interest in Yi Design’s products grows in influential circles, she is focusing on lowering the carbon emissions of her kilns, either by firing at cooler temperatures or making the transition to renewables. “In China, every business likes to explode but I want to do it slowly until one day paying a premium for recycled ceramics is suddenly something that everybody can do.”
yidesigngroup.com

For decades, mass emigration drained Poland of its brightest and best. In the first 10 years of the country’s membership of the EU, from 2004, about 5 per cent of citizens left the country – the majority of them settling in Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and the UK. Most were young people. A 2013 survey showed that as many as 69 per cent of Poles had either a family member or close friend living and working permanently abroad.

Those days are passing. Poland’s economy has grown 4 per cent on average every year since 2004. Salaries have tripled, disposable income has skyrocketed and Warsaw has one of the fastest-growing economies of Europe’s capitals. Poland is the continent’s land of opportunity – and its brain drain has reversed: between 2017 and 2024 at least 300,000 Poles who were residing abroad moved back home. Here, we meet four young Poles who have returned or turned down opportunities to leave.

---

1.
Agnieszka Homanska
The political adviser

Agnieszka Homanska is rarely seen without her wheeled suitcase. The 27-year-old runs the political cabinet of Poland’s foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski – so does a lot of travelling. Taking up the job three years ago meant not pursuing a master’s degree in political science at McGill University in Montréal. “I had already booked the flights,” she tells Monocle outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building in Warsaw. A graduate of the University of Warsaw, where she read applied linguistics and international relations, Homanska made a name for herself during the 2023 parliamentary election, running the campaign of Aleksandra Uznanska-Wisniewska, one of Poland’s youngest MPs. On the campaign trail, she bonded with Sikorski, who then offered her a job.

“I always wanted to be a diplomat,” she says. “I wanted to stay and strengthen Poland’s position in Europe.” In 2023, Homanska co-founded Zryw, a nonpartisan initiative that aims to convince students and graduates to become involved in public life. “Poland is recognised as a key European geopolitical player and our economic success story is well-known,” she says. “Yet we are having trouble telling that story internationally. My generation wants to change that.” This year, Zryw held six events to persuade graduates to work for the state. And those flights to Canada? “I went skiing there for two weeks,” Homanska says.

---

2.
Michal Tarnowski
The civil servant

Michal Tarnowski considers himself a social entrepreneur. The 30-year-old returned to his homeland from the UK seven years ago to work as a social entrepreneur, during which time he developed a civil service fast-track scheme for young candidates. In 2025 he joined the Ministry of Digital Affairs to work on Poland’s digital services tax. “I always saw myself in a career with high public impact,” he says. “In Poland, which has stunning macroeconomic indicators but very low civic activity, that is a readily achievable goal.”

Tarnowski calls Poland a “partially mature country” in terms of public involvement. “With the civil service, the system often does not know how to make good use of your talent, especially if you studied abroad,” says Tarnowski, who has a PPE degree from the University of Oxford. “So you need to create space for yourself, which is not easy.” Still, Tarnowski would never dream of leaving Warsaw. “Over the past five years, this place has changed beyond recognition,” he says. “You can find employment, education and public service but also a great lifestyle.”

---

3.
Marcin Szala
The educator

“We would often hear from students and parents that any foreign education was better than staying in Poland,” says Marcin Szala. “That is no longer the case.”

In 2022, Szala co-founded Liceum Artes Liberales (LAL), a private high school whose aim is to prepare students for 21st-century life. Spanning two floors of a vast office building in Warsaw’s Wola district, the space features relatively few doors or walls. This is supposed to instil in students a feeling of freedom. Unlike in the majority of schools, the teachers’ room is accessible to all – and the curriculum is similarly expansive. “Nowadays, students and their parents think differently about education,” says the 46-year-old, leaning against a whiteboard filled with ancient Greek and Latin words. He aims to introduce a sense of multidisciplinary curiosity into students’ minds by moving the conversation away from vocation and instead towards free thinking.

Students are required to take the responsibility of organising trips for themselves and their classmates to businesses, museums and educational institutions. They also run a programme called Current Affairs, inviting guest speakers to the school once a week to discuss the state of the world. Recent subjects have included the gig economy and the US government’s trade policy.

“It is an entirely reactive project,” says Szala. “Even with that in their schedule, our students still find time for extracurricular societies.” These include Latin, chess and philosophy clubs, which are treated as intrinsic to, rather than separate from, subjects such as chemistry and economics. Szala believes that the Polish education system now teaches STEM subjects at a similar level to those of its European peers. “This summer we had cases where students turned down offers from prestigious UK universities to enrol at the University of Warsaw.” Still, Szala laments a gap in business studies, as well as in the humanities and social sciences, which he says are still underfunded and underappreciated in Poland. With LAL, he aims to change that.

---

4.
Aleksandra Pedraszewska
The fund manager

“Every major investor in Europe wants to be up to date with news from Poland,” says 32-year-old Aleksandra Pedraszewska, who left a career in tech in London to set up Vastpoint, a venture-capital fund that focuses on Polish start-ups. Monocle meets Pedraszewska at the Google Campus in Warsaw’s post-industrial Praga District, where she’s speaking at a conference held by a tech company in which she and her two co-founders have invested. “We have three decades of experience spanning London, Berlin and New York,” she says. Pedraszewska takes daily phone calls from curious overseas fund managers. “We aim to bring international investors here and show them the inside story of our economic miracle.”

ElevenLabs, valued at $11bn (€9.5bn) and a global market leader in AI-powered voice-to-text tech, often comes up in such conversations. Founded in Warsaw in 2022 by Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski, it was largely shunned by Silicon Valley but has become synonymous with Poland’s economic miracle. Pedraszewska helps foreign investors avoid such oversights. “We have grown big enough as a market to attract international investors and give people opportunities to make a lot of money,” she says. “It’s hard to think of a situation more apt for an emerging manager like me.”

Still, challenges remain. “We have very good schools but we lack opportunities and capital for the very best ones to scale their talent up globally,” she says. “There is still not enough private capital for young companies to grow, so we keep losing people who move overseas, mostly to Silicon Valley. But that is a pan-European problem – Poland will not solve it alone.”

“It’s somewhere between indoors and outdoors,” says Danai Surasa. “People can remain connected to daylight, fresh air, the landscape and weather throughout the working day.” The co-founder of Bangkok-based Studio Krubka is explaining his firm’s design for the new HQ of natural pharmaceutical company Novolife on the outskirts of the Thai capital. The striking concrete building has lofty curved roofs and large, rectangular apertures – some of them windows, others portals to a verdant internal courtyard.

This blurring of boundaries between inside and out is a reflection of the company’s entrepreneurial aspirations. “Novolife develops products using Thai herbs and natural ingredients with the aim of supporting people’s wellbeing,” says Soyploy Phanich, Surasa’s fellow co-founder. “So we started with a simple question: if wellbeing is central to what the company produces, how can it also become part of the everyday working environment?”

The answer came in a layout that prompts people to encounter the lush courtyard as they move through the building. This is supported by a restrained colour palette that directs the eye to the leafy gardens – an effect that is enhanced by shifting light, weather and temperatures, all of which become accomplices to the architecture. “This workplace can feel different from one moment to the next, even though the building itself remains the same,” says Phanich. This environmentally minded approach is enhanced by the materiality and construction processes. The concrete was made using locally sourced aggregates without extensive chemical additives, while a reusable steel formwork shapes the structure.

Though the building has a strikingly minimalist concrete form, it also pays tribute to Thailand’s vernacular wooden architecture. Life in a Southeast Asian climate means dealing with heavy rainfall, so the office has a traditional bowed butterfly roof that channels rainwater to a central collecting spine. “Thai architecture has long developed ways of responding to the region’s heavy rain and tropical climate,” says Surasa. “We wanted to reinterpret that in a modern way.”

The building makes a compelling case for the beauty of a workplace shaped around nature and connected to the environment, while retaining something in common with the business inhabiting it. “A workplace should reflect the same ideas as the people developing the products,” says Surasa.
studiokrubka.weebly.com

“Everyone thinking that they could become unicorns was clearly a fool’s errand,” says Lauren Santo Domingo, who co-founded fashion retail platform Moda Operandi in New York in 2010, just as venture capitalists and private-equity firms began eyeing up fashion businesses. The opportunities for quick customer acquisition and scaling up seemed endless, so investors started pouring money into the fashion sector in the same way as they had been with the tech industry and food businesses.

“Private-equity firms wanted to replicate the success that they had with the grocery sector, particularly in Canada,” says Santo Domingo. “They thought that fashion is an equivalent industry because we have seasonal products. But you can’t apply private-equity logic to a business that’s so much about instinct and relationships. Sometimes the decisions that fashion brands or retailers make aren’t rational.” Santo Domingo raised several rounds of funding to expand Moda Operandi to new territories, including $165m (€142m) led by Apax Digital Growth. The same year, the fund also acquired London-based competitor Matches Fashion at a valuation of $1bn (€860m).

These investors began betting heavily on up-and-coming apparel-and-accessories brands such as Copenhagen-based Ganni, which sold a majority stake to L Catterton (LVMH’s investment vehicle) in 2017; and Los Angeles-based Anine Bing, which raised $15m (€12.9m) in 2018 in a series-A round led by firms such as Felix Capital and Index Ventures – and $13.5m (€11.6m) less than a year later.

“At any start-up event, the conversation was always about how much money you raised and how many people you hired – as if those were the only metrics of success,” says Noura Sakkijha, who founded jewellery start-up Mejuri in 2015, during the industry’s private-equity boom. “This was a time when funding seemed unlimited if you were a fashion entrepreneur.”

Equally, investors had full confidence that they would receive their returns tenfold by simply opening more shops and boosting production of existing bestselling products. But this strategy diminished the importance of innovation and customers grew tired of seeing the same products, as well as shop concepts being copied and pasted, around the world. At the turn of the decade, revenues slowed and investors began to realise that quick returns are almost impossible when it comes to an ever-changing industry that’s reliant on storytelling and consumer psychology.

It’s why L Catterton has pulled back on most of its fashion investments, including the sale of sustainable-clothing label Everlane to fast-fashion giant Shein (a controversial move because of a clear misalignment in ecological values). US-based label Reformation – another product of the 2010s investing boom – started trading publicly in July, with its stock price continuing to fall below market expectations. As for Apax, it sold Matches for €60m to the UK’s Frasers Group, which declared the company bankrupt shortly afterwards.

These public fallouts have transformed the current landscape. The entrepreneurs who managed to make it out are buying back their businesses and rethinking the pace at which they want to operate, while investors looking to make quick exits are staying clear of fashion. “We were lucky to get out alive and put our private-equity days behind us,” says Santo Domingo, who was able to exit her partnership with Apax and refocus on her original business model and the company’s home market. “Any brand that is still doing well today is staying true to itself – hype is becoming hard to sustain.”

In place of that hype-based businesses is a new generation of brands that are returning to fundamentals: customer-centric approaches and understanding the value of ownership and creative control. In the United States, designer Jamie Haller has been building her company at pace. Her namesake clothing-and-accessories brand grew 450 per cent between 2023 and 2024 – without taking on any outside investment since its launch in 2020. “In an age of hedge-fund brands, AI-generated content and faceless marketing, what I’m doing feels intimate,” says Haller, whose brand stands out for its polished suiting and smart penny loafers. “I write my newsletters myself every night; customers can talk to me. These small moments of connectivity give customers a place to land.”

Haller makes a compelling case for the benefits of a self-starter approach in a business’s early days. It also signals a broader cultural shift towards independent brands with a clear mission statement. “Entrepreneurs are valuing ownership, control and bootstrapping more so than before, which is refreshing,” says Eshita Kabra-Davies of By Rotation. In the past decade, she pursued several rounds of investment for her fashion-rental start-up but stayed focused on her original peer-to-peer business model. As a result, By Rotation is on its way to reaching profitability: “I always think about my ownership and the alignment of the potential investor with our mission and values,” she adds.

Elsewhere, Mireia Llusia-Lindh, the founder of contemporary accessories label Demellier, argues that raising capital is still a necessary step for any ambitious entrepreneur who wants to build a global enterprise – but today partnerships are being formed on different terms. “More people are recognising that raising capital does not necessarily mean building a better company,” says Llusia-Lindh, whose brand’s sales grew 60 per cent last year, despite tough market conditions and an investment drought. “You need to build a company for long-term growth, not just for the next two years. Building a fashion brand, in particular, takes time. You can accelerate distribution or marketing but you cannot manufacture genuine customer connection or a strong brand identity overnight. Those are built through consistency over many years.”

Llusia-Lindh, who’s preparing to open a first flagship shop in London this autumn, adds that there’s more “scrutiny on profits” on the part of investors and an understanding that luxury is a long-term game. This means that fashion entrepreneurs shouldn’t give up on financial partnerships but do need to look beyond private equity to family offices or boutique firms that specialise in luxury. David Wertheimer, son of Chanel co-owner Gérard Wertheimer, is one of them. He set up 1686 Partners in Luxembourg to back fashion and lifestyle brands that prioritise slow production and high-end quality, such as artisanal eyewear label Ahlem and high-end running label Satisfy.

Santo Domingo is also using the expertise that she has built during decades of championing young designers and growing Moda Operandi to create her own fund, St Dominique Capital. Some of her early investments include handmade rug company Nordic Knots and The Row, an American label that has become an emblem of modern-day luxury. “I don’t care where a venture capitalist sits – they’re never going to have the same intel,” she says. “We have a front-row seat; we know whether a designer is a one-hit wonder or whether they have longevity. By taking an equity stake, we have extra incentive to propel these brands forward using the tools at our disposal, from warehousing to merchandising. There was so much money and so much burn. Don’t get me wrong, it was fun while it lasted – but it wasn’t sustainable. We need to go back to basics and remember that fashion businesses really are about the designer and the customer.”

In the early 2000s, Monocle first encountered Club-Mate in Berlin. It tasted unlike anything that we had ever encountered: herbal and slightly medicinal, with the briskness of something engineered to keep you awake. “You’ll get used to it,” promised the gaucho figure on the bottle. And we did. In the techno and hacker scenes, it spread quickly thanks to a caffeine content about twice that of Coca-Cola – a useful pick-me-up.

More recently it has begun travelling more confidently abroad. In London, bottles have appeared in independent grocer Nourished Communities. “What’s interesting is how Club-Mate cuts across partygoers, health-conscious customers and even tech bros,” says its founder, Rollo Millership. He attributes this to the drink’s ability to tick several boxes. It’s low in sugar and offers a natural hit of caffeine. “The fact that it’s under the radar adds to its cult-like mystique,” says Millership.

The company behind the drink is something of a mystery too. It doesn’t give sit-down interviews or allow factory visits, though it is, in correspondence with Monocle, very responsive. “We follow a no-marketing strategy, aiming to win people over solely through taste and quality,” says a spokesperson.

The drink is derived from South American yerba-mate shrub leaves, which have long been brewed into a stimulating tea. In 1924 a German pharmacist turned it into a carbonated soft drink called Sekt-Bronte. Some 20 years later, drinks merchant G Latteyer licensed it. Then, in 1994, Latteyer’s son-in-law sold the licence to Loscher brewery in Bavaria, which renamed it Club-Mate and it began its slow journey towards becoming a cult hit. The brewery is said to export Club-Mate to more than 60 countries but how the caffeinated soft drink travelled so far without any marketing is something that even the brewery cannot quite fathom.

Club-Mate comes in seven varieties – probably a response to a growing field of competitors. Most drinkers, though, stick with the original, whose decades of subcultural credibility are harder to copy than its recipe.
club-mate.de

---

Further reading:
From Crodino to Jarritos: The world’s most beloved soft drinks

Standing out in Jakarta’s highly competitive shopping-mall sector requires something special. The crowds pouring into Agora Mall, a mixed-use development in central Jakarta (and the southern hemisphere’s tallest building), are flocking up the escalators for the latest edition of Brightspot Market. The temporary retail jamboree is held twice a year and hosts 251 fashion brands and food concepts, whittled down from 3,000 applicants. A record 217,000 people end up attending the May and June market, and total sales hit new heights, despite Indonesia’s misfiring economy.

“When we started in 2009, we wanted a festival where the stars are Indonesian retail brands,” says Anton Wirjono, Brightspot’s 56-year-old CEO and co-founder. “But we couldn’t find a sponsor because there wasn’t trust in local brands. Now, Indonesian brands are the draw.” Monocle meets him at the entrance just before 10.00 on the market’s second day (in total, it’s running for 10 across several weekends). Considered the “mayor” of Brightspot’s pop-up city, he has been staying up late with his brother, Hogi, to perfect the wayfinding. Long-term sponsorship by Bank Central Asia means that entrance is free and every stall has the same payment system.

Brightspot is as much about raising brand awareness as selling products. Monocle meets investors, retailers and tastemakers looking for the next big thing. Emmelyn Gunawan, the founder of Bali-based multibrand shop Escalier, is here to catch up with vendors. “I have found many brands at Brightspot over the years,” she says. Two years ago, she came across fashion label Sunburn, which was founded by a surfer from Java. “His T-shirts took me back to the 1990s. This year we started a collaboration.”

Over lunch at Brightspot’s food hall, the Wirjono brothers, their sister, Cynthia, and co-founder Leonard Theosabrata reflect on their journey from outsider status to the mainstream. In the 1990s, Anton returned to Jakarta from San Francisco, where he had been a DJ. “There weren’t any cool things happening here so we had to create them,” he says. He decided to put on a retail and food festival. Seventeen years later, Brightspot has become a major event. “Our aim is for the mass market to be more culture, design and brand aware,” says Anton, who adds that 2025 was a turning point, when running the market over two consecutive weekends (rather than one) boosted attendance.

A new outdoor “picnic” called Taman Brightspot debuted this year to host more food and drink brands, and serve as a feeder event for fashion labels aspiring to be included in the main market. Similar events could follow in other Indonesian cities and Anton is eyeing up global expansion, starting with Malaysia and Singapore. “Post-AI, this is it: humans selling to humans,” he says. “Offline retail is the future. When people go to Tokyo, they see the temples only once or twice. But they go back to shop and eat. That is our contribution to Jakarta.”
brightspotmrkt.com