L.A. fashion brand and celeb favorite L’Agence is in major growth mode

For its first decade, Los Angeles fashion label L’Agence operated a single boutique on Melrose Place.

To build up the womens wear brand, the company focused instead on selling its Paris-inspired clothing at other retailers and online. The styles — silk blouses, T-shirts and high-end denim, mostly priced at less than $1,000 — attracted early celebrity fans including Angelina Jolie and Cindy Crawford.

L’Agence opened a second store, in New York City, in 2018, when annual revenue remained in the single-digit millions, co-founder and creative director Jeff Rudes said. Around the same time, the company began rolling out new product categories: blazers, leather jackets, knits, shoes, bathing suits and candles.

Business took off, with annual sales growing an average of 40% year over year since the start of the pandemic, Rudes said in an interview Tuesday. Online revenue from the company’s website alone last year totaled “well over $100 million.”

Now, L’Agence is rapidly scaling up its retail footprint. A Beverly Hills flagship opened in July 2023, followed by a Malibu location four months later. This summer, the company turned its original Melrose Place store into a denim-oriented Jean Bar and launched its first international boutiques, in Paris and Seoul.

By the end of the year, L’Agence plans to open two more stores, at Fashion Island in Newport Beach and in Houston.

“They’re all profitable so it totally makes sense for our financials to expand,” Rudes said. But he noted that the company wants to do so carefully — “15 to 20 stores in America in the important fashion cities” as opposed to 200 locations.

“This is not a, ‘How many can we open?’” he said. “We’re saying, OK, Miami. We’re looking at San Francisco, Dallas, the cities where our peer companies do well, where our wholesalers do well.”

L’Agence has a large wholesale presence and is carried at more than 300 retailers around the world including Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom and Revolve.

Currently, the six branded L’Agence stores make up about 10% to 12% of the company’s gross revenue; the goal is to increase that proportion to about 20% to 25%, Rudes said.

Its recent growth spurt also necessitated a corporate move: This week, L’Agence relocated from its headquarters in the Arts District to the historic Harbor Building at Wilshire and Crenshaw boulevards, leasing more than 21,000 square feet on the fifth floor.

L’Agence opened a Paris store, its first international location, in July.

(Justino Esteves)

Built by Claud Beelman for Tidewater Oil Co. in 1958, the six-story building takes up a city block in an area known for being a lower-cost alternative to more expensive neighboring office markets, said Greg Astor, a real estate broker at JLL who represented the landlord in the deal. A little more than half of L’Agence’s 200 employees will work from its new headquarters.

Rudes, who also co-founded cult denim label J Brand, started L’Agence in 2008 with Margaret Maldonado. The fashion line was intended to bridge the “easy-chic feel of Southern California with a Parisian sensibility.”

“We design for her, the customer. We don’t design for, ‘Oh I came back from Saint-Tropez and something looked clown-y, but I think we should have it,’” Rudes said. “We don’t say, ‘Is that on brand?’ I say, ‘Is that on her? Is that our girl?’”

L’Agence’s target “girl” is typically a 40-something woman with sex appeal who wants to look and feel confident, he said. The company has taken a data-driven approach to crafting new styles, including routinely surveying its core customers on what they want to wear, and has stuck to a tight, highly curated product assortment.

Next year, L’Agence will add intimate apparel and sleepwear to its collection and plans to open half a dozen new stores. Rudes waved off concerns about a challenging brick-and-mortar landscape for retailers.

“If you’re doing well, your product is right. The market is not suffering,” he said. “We don’t have any fear expanding.”

Times staff writer Roger Vincent contributed to this report.