Maison Corda had spent three years building an audience who genuinely cared about how clothes were made. Their newsletters on fabric sourcing and pattern-cutting had more engagement than most brands' product launches. The question was how to translate that interest into a commercial moment without it feeling like a gimmick.
Creative director Léa Moreau was initially sceptical. Her concern — shared by many designers we've worked with — was that opening decisions to an audience would produce conservative, lowest-common-denominator results. We'd heard this before. The data consistently says otherwise.
Framing the decisions carefully
The key was choosing the right decisions to open. Not every decision belongs to the community — some require expertise that can't be compressed into a vote. We worked with Léa to identify three genuine forks in the road: the silhouette direction (structured versus fluid), the primary fabric (a Japanese double-weave versus a Portuguese linen), and the colourway (a warm slate palette versus a bone and deep navy pairing).
“I gave them real choices. Ones I could genuinely go either way on. And they responded with the seriousness the question deserved.”
The community voted decisively for the fluid silhouette, the Portuguese linen, and the bone-and-navy palette. Léa's instinct had been toward the structured Japanese double-weave. The result surprised her — and forced a conversation about why her instinct differed from the community's, which she explored in a long essay shared before launch.
The launch
The capsule launched to the community first — a 48-hour window before any external announcement. 2,100 pre-orders were placed in that window, representing 87% of the total allocation. The remaining pieces sold within hours of the public announcement.