The activewear label announced that it secured growth investment in a funding round led by Raine Partners, the equity arm of investment firm The Raine Group. The brand also counts Hanaco Ventures and Felix Capital as investors.

The investment will support Castore’s functional capabilities and infrastructure systems to further build out the company’s supply chain.

The label was founded in 2016 in Bebington, England, a small town near Liverpool. In the last seven years, Castore has partnered with elite football, rugby and cricket teams to manufacture their apparel and has been seen on high-profile figures including Hailey Bieber and Gigi Hadid.

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How Regional Brands Go Global

Labels that get their start outside of major fashion hubs are leveraging their local identities and a strategic approach to wholesale to gain international followings.

OXFORDSHIRE, United Kingdom — Is creativity in crisis? This was a key question Thursday morning at the The Business of Fashion’s VOICES 2023 gathering.

The power of taking risks, the power of saying no and the power of simply integrating a moment of creativity into each and every day were top of mind as designers, artists, filmmakers, creative directors and more shared their thoughts on the state of creation in an age of artificial intelligence and corporate mediocrity.

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Everyone Is An Artist

Artistic director and creativity expert Keith Yamashita, who began his career working for Steve Jobs, encouraged guests to think of themselves as artists.

Yamashita recalled using Polaroid cameras and sketching to empower himself and seek inspiration and optimism when growing up poor, gay and Japanese-American. “As a kid that didn’t fit in, that label of ‘you’re creative’ was my lifeline,” Yamashita said.

He urged people, no matter their profession, to tap into human creativity, integrate art into their work, and to carry tools for self-expression and inspiration with them everyday of their lives. “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?” he asked.

Creative Risks; Commercial Savvy

Creating with integrity in the confines of a commercialised industry — be it show business or fashion — was a key topic of the morning as designer Jonathan Anderson (the creative director of LVMH-owned Loewe and founder of JW Anderson) and Netflix-backed actor-filmmaker Dan Levy spoke on stage with BoF editor-at-large Tim Blanks.

Levy spoke about the power of taking risks. “When you go out on a limb and it succeeds, then you’ll never not have that. It becomes a lot easier to say, well — it worked,” Levy said. “Now I have no problem saying to someone ‘If we can’t do it this way we won’t do it.’ It’s about making sure you fight for the integrity of your idea from beginning to end. You’re the one who has to sleep at night as the one who created it.”

“As the brand gets bigger, the marketing spend gets bigger — and now we have to consider so many different things,” Anderson said. “But I enjoy succumbing to it somehow; to maintain a creative approach while filling a much bigger window.”

Still, working as a creative means “sometimes you have to make the decision to give the audience what they don’t want — to annoy them even,” said Anderson, who sees Loewe as a brand that’s constantly shape-shifting and warned against falling into a formula, no matter how well it works. “That’s when the clock starts ticking,” he said.

‘Pretend to Obey’

Bend, don’t break: creating within constraints can be a matter of life and death for Saudi Arabian artists Abdulnasser Gharem and Halla Bint Khalid. Both are known for subversive works that embed deft critiques of religious fundamentalism and oppressive politics while navigating strict government censorship.

In a context where freedom of expression is limited, freedom of thought is vital. “There are no options, either you obey or you pretend that you are obeying — even though it’s really very difficult to pretend to obey,” Gharem said in an interview with Ahmed Zaidi.

Halla Bint Khalid, another member of Gharem’s studio in Riyadh, spoke about growing as an artist while attracting additional scrutiny as a woman. “I would pretend to be in the picture like everyone else was, but I had to create my own sensibility. I had to find my inner voice and not follow the limiting stories that surrounded me,” she said.

Food Is Culture

Former Malala Fund CEO Shiza Shahid spoke about her journey from running Malala Yousafzai’s education foundation to starting the inclusive cookware venture Our Place. As her line of enamel-coated pots and pans wins over consumers with its candy-shop colours and minimalist shapes, she hopes her brand can also uplift people, both by paying homage to the cooking techniques and traditions of cultures around the world (as well as answering their cookware needs) and by tapping women-owned firms throughout her supply chain.

“We have to be sure we’re investing in a culture not appropriating it,” she said of the brand’s efforts to extend its polished, Instagram-friendly aesthetic to traditional cookware items that are usually absent from designer lines.

Emotional Functionality

British designer Thomas Heatherwick — known for his multi-disciplinary practice melding art, interior design, engineering and architecture — spoke with retail and marketing entrepreneur Ross Bailey.

At school, Heatherwick met resistance from professors when he first tried to blend construction and art. Ultimately, friends and friends-of-friends came out of the woodwork to help him execute his first projects. “Most people are a little bit bored. If you do what appears to be the wrong thing to do, that might be the right thing to do,” he advised.

Heatherwick went on to build structures including a cauldron to hold the Olympic flame during the London 2012 games, or Manhattan’s Little Island, a park constructed above the Hudson River that opened in 2021 and instantly became a New York City landmark.

Heatherwick believes in the architect’s credo that “form follows function”— with one key caveat: “Emotion is a function.” Therefore, the emotional value of a building, for example, is critical.

Crisis of Creativity

“We are facing a crisis of creativity,” said John C. Jay, the marketing legend who has spearheaded the concept of artist collaborations at fashion and retail since the late 1970s.

Working with Marvin Traub at Bloomingdale’s and then Nike’s Phil Knight and Mark Parker, Jay was a force behind some of the most memorable marketing in history. The key to his success: baking true cultural creation into marketing campaigns.

John is now the president of global creative at Uniqlo owner Fast Retailing, where he continues to promote a strategy rooted in connecting business leaders with figures from art and culture to achieve new, better and more engaging communications that put creativity and quality first, something Jay believes is under attack from artificial intelligence and corporate mediocrity.

“Good enough is never good enough,” he said.

BoF VOICES 2023 is made possible in part by our partners Snapchat, McKinsey & Company, Porsche, Getty Images, Invisible Collection and Soho House.

Disclosure: LVMH is part of a group of investors who, together, hold a minority interest in The Business of Fashion. All investors have signed shareholders’ documentation guaranteeing BoF’s complete editorial independence.

Dr Martens has issued its fourth profit warning this year as a tough consumer environment in the US continues to affect sales of its sturdy boots.

The Northamptonshire-based footwear brand said sales fell 5 percent to £396 million ($499 million) in the six months to 30 September and pre-tax profits dived 55 percent to £26 million ($32 million). While this was better than City analysts had expected, the company said the outlook for the following six months had worsened because of a slower than hoped for recovery in its US business.

Shares in the retailer plunged 20 percent after the announcement, making Dr Martens the biggest faller on the FTSE 250 on Thursday. Priced at 92p ($1.16), the shares are now 75 percent lower than the 370p float price in January 2021.

Sales for the full year are now expected to fall by about 8 percent and underlying profits to drop back below the £223.7 million ($282 million) minimum expected by the City – continuing the slide seen since the company’s listing on the London Stock Exchange.

Kenny Wilson, the Dr Martens chief executive, said the group had fixed problems with its US warehouse, changed most of the management team there and was rebooting its marketing effort but added that it was proving “more challenging than expected” to return that part of the business to growth.

While the macroeconomic environment in the US is quite strong, Wilson said shoppers were holding back. “Virtually all of the big footwear and apparel brands have had difficult numbers,” he said.

In January, Dr Martens said costs had soared after a string of “operational mistakes” at its Los Angeles distribution centre, which opened in 2022. The company was forced to open temporary US warehouses in late 2022 after it bought too much stock and was affected by supply chain bottlenecks.

Wilson said Dr Martens had achieved better profits than expected in the first half of its current financial year as it had taken action to reduce costs in its supply chain that had helped offset inflation.

The brand put its footwear prices up in July, by about £10 ($12.5) to £169 ($213) for a classic boot, but Wilson said there would not be another price rise until at least the end of 2024 because inflation had now dropped well below the 6 percent.

Dr Martens continued to trade well in Europe and Asia, with sales up 8 percent in the UK in the half-year, helped by a return of tourists to London as well as a 4 percent contribution from price rises. The brand has opened a second store on London’s Oxford Street, with shoppers from the US and continental Europe returning to the capital after the coronavirus pandemic.

By Sarah Butler

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When 29-year-old Maria, a social media executive from New York, arrived for a routine Botox appointment, she was surprised by an elective add-on her doctor proffered: Ozempic.

“[My doctor] said, ‘Oh, do you want a shot of Ozempic while you’re here?’ like she was offering me an extra napkin or something.” On hearing she could lose up to fifteen pounds that week, Maria took it, later finding the subsequent nausea overwhelming. But on the Upper East Side, where she had her shot, and across the nation, more and more people are collecting a weekly prescription — covertly or not.

In the blink of an eye, Ozempic, otherwise known as semaglutide, and its competitors like Wegovy and Rybelsus went from a little-known medicine for diabetics to a cultural touchstone. Its off-label use for weight loss, and fast, is what catapulted the drug from pharmaceutical-rep chatter to the preserve of Hollywood starlets, socialites and elite zip codes.

The drug’s prevalence has led to less consumption of candy and beer, per Walmart, and the rise of Ozempic face, a “suddenly gaunt, hollow-looking … prematurely aged face,” leading clients to change their minds on once-undesirable roundness and plumpness, said Dr. Ahmed El Muntasar, a general and aesthetic practitioner in the UK.

Moreover, Ozempic’s rise has yielded a hit on the “snatched” look. Spate, a consumer trends platform, found that social media searches for “contouring” are down 10.6 percent year-on-year, with co-founder Yarden Horwitz adding that while contouring techniques are slowing down in search, bronzing products, which create more of a healthy all-over glow, are up 33 percent since last year.

Skin-tightening lasers like Morpheus8, which can cost around $1,700 for a single face-and-neck session, and microdroplet treatments like Profhilo and the newly-FDA approved Skinvive that improve skin hydration the fine lines caused by sagging skin are also trending, experts said. Microdroplet treatments can cost upwards of $500 in prestige clinics.

“In my practice, I see a lot of people who didn’t need any facial filler because they were heavier people,” said Dr. Corey L. Hartman, a board-certified dermatologist with an aesthetic practice in Birmingham, Alabama. Now, those same patients are starting to request volumising treatments to replenish what Ozempic has taken away.

Plump It Up

The idea of roundness as desirable is an about-face from the contouring era that’s persisted since the mid 2010s, where sculpting ruled supreme. Popularised by social media influencers and celebrities, contouring accentuates shadow and definition, giving the face a sculpted look. In its heyday, cosmetics brands like Anastasia Beverly Hills and Fenty Beauty rushed to add sculpting sticks, palettes and kits to their line-up. In 2022, the craze went even further, with a procedure known as buccal fat removal, which can cost around $9,500, becoming popularised. A permanent, surgical procedure, it slims down the fat pads in the cheeks for more angular appearance.

But now some of those same patients are looking to be re-plumped. The likes of Dr. Hartman and Dr. El Muntasar can offer a range of procedures, including injectable dermal fillers composed of hyaluronic acid to give instant volume or bio-stimulating injections such as Sculptra, which can cost upwards of $1,000 per syringe, that help the skin produce more collagen to replenish what’s lost.

Dr. Hartman noted interest in Sculptra in his clinic is up threefold this year alone. Lisa Goodman, founder and chief of the bicoastal Goodskin Clinics pointed to the rising popularity of a treatment called Renuva — around $1,800 per syringe in some clinics — that stimulates the production of fat. Goodman said that clients view it as more holistic, or less fake, “because it stimulates your own fat cells, rather than just filling with pure volume.”

For Dr. Robert Schwarcz, an oculofacial plastic surgeon based in New York’s well-heeled Upper East Side, Ozempic has meant a change to an old faithful: the facelift. For a facelift to look natural, there still needs to be a good amount of volume under the skin to play around with. “Oftentimes, [patients] now just don’t have enough fat on their face,” he said. Instead, he has to harvest the fullness from other parts of the body via a fat graft.

The volumisation side of Dr. Schwarcz’s practice has expanded 25 percent, including client requests for fillers and fat grafting.

The Investment Opportunity

Aesthetics clinics and medical spas are in a strong position to capture residuals from the Ozempic boom. Research from consulting group McKinsey & Co. indicates that the US beauty services sector is expected to grow by 7 percent per year up to 2027, nearing $80 billion as a sector.

With a flood of new Ozempic patients looking for the next facial filler, clinics are expected to become more attractive investment targets. Just last year private equity juggernaut KKR took a minority stake in SkinSpirit, a US chain specialising in injectables.

Investors favour aesthetics practices due to their relatively straightforward financial modelling. Once a business has a certain number of units open, it’s easy to predict how many more can be opened in five years, providing the clinic concept is proven. What’s more, consumers show no signs of cutting back — partly because they can’t self-administer fillers like they might DIY a manicure, but also because it’s become normalised. A 2022 audit by the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPs) showed a 124 percent increase in Botox treatments against the previous year.

Dr. Hartman added that for the best results, bio-stimulating treatments require a few sessions, spaced apart. That’s more chargeable chair time for the proprietor.

There’s also the fact that one change often begets another. “[Patients] often come in towards the middle of their weight loss. And they say, ‘How do I make my face match my body?” said Goodman.

Maria’s name has been changed to protect her identity.