The teenage fashion market has a representation problem. Brands build their world around one type of girl and leave everyone else invisible. Cherry Hill brings these customers in around a popular aesthetic.
A pivot, not a launch.
Years spent building an e-commerce platform brought traffic but never product-market fit. Market research and internal data pointed to one answer: growth comes from a community built around shared values, not from a wider catalogue. Production capacity and content resources set the boundary. A teenage cotton basics brand fit both constraints, with fewer garments, fewer fabrics, a simpler brand to produce and to tell. The plan started narrow: win a local niche in Rennes, solve every problem at small scale, then expand into a market sized for North America and Europe.
Before investing in full-scale production, I needed real market proof. The demo collection was a deliberate test: limited units, real girls, real boutique environment. The goal was simple: validate fit, fabric and price point before committing to a 5,000-unit run.
Summer top anges
Reggie top Newport
Alicia top California
Lindsay top Hawaii
Joey top Newport Yacht Club
Summer top papillons
Reggie top Hamptons
Paris top Newport Beach
Moesha top USA
Sabrina top Yellowstone
Summer top Hawaii
Joey top New York
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Sabrina top Los Angeles
Lindsay top New York
Summer top New York
Summer top USA
Summer top Newport Beach
Sabrina top Los Angeles 1984
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Summer top New York
The Cherry Hill collection was initially developed as a full-scale brand prototype designed to validate product categories, visual identity and merchandising direction in real conditions. Built from carefully reworked existing stock and early sourcing tests, the project allowed the brand to experiment with silhouettes, graphics, retail presentation and content production before moving into larger-scale development.
A physical space in Rennes built to test the concept, connect with the community and produce lifestyle content. The store drew about 10 visits a week during the test period, with no sales recorded yet. Merchandising in a real store taught us how visual display shapes customer visits, and gave local girls a place to identify with the brand and create content on site.
Most teenage brands spend their budget talking about their product. We did the opposite.
Instead of building a content machine around the brand, we built a network around people. The idea was simple: find girls in Rennes who wanted to become models, support their personal project, invite them into Cherry Hill's world and let them tell their own story.
Each model activated her own audience. Each shoot became content for both her page and the brand's. Growth came from real relationships built model by model.
Model pages consistently outperformed brand pages on discovery metrics. Audiences follow people first. Building a roster of emerging local models meant building authentic distribution from day one.
The strategy was designed to grow with the brand. A small group of girls at the start, each building her own following in parallel, so by the time Cherry Hill scaled, the audience already existed and had watched the story unfold from the beginning.
What we learned the hard way.
Rennes is a small city with a specific culture. Getting teenage girls to put themselves publicly online is not a given. Recruitment was slow, trust-building took time, and production budgets limited how far we could take each model's journey. By the time funding fell through, the brand's own Instagram page had reached 200 followers and had not yet been activated as a full content channel. The community strategy was the right call. The constraint was execution at scale.
One month of shooting. Twelve months of content.
Producing content every week is the standard approach. It was already tested on Condate Online and proved inefficient, so a different model was built for Cherry Hill. Everything is planned upfront, shot in one month, then distributed across twelve.
The approach works because the storytelling runs on four repeated frames with recurring characters and activities, which makes the brand easy to remember. Boutique, street, beach and countryside tell the story of a fashion-loving girl sharing her life online: working in a small boutique, filming content on the street with friends, or heading to the beach and countryside. This consistent aesthetic, carried by models who represent their own generation, gives the brand consistency at scale without a permanent production budget.
Boutique
The boutique is the heart of the story. It's where the girls work and share their passion for fashion, restocking merch, trying on outfits and showing new pieces.
Rue
The most iconic corner for outfit photos, with a café just across the street. Girls pose for the camera to share on social.
Plage
The beach frame always tells a good story and matches the brand's cool Californian aesthetic.
Campagne
A day out with friends to see horses or have a picnic in a field or park fits teenage culture and the brand's simple, everyday pieces.
Built on Prestashop.
The site aimed to convert traffic coming from social media. The real objective ran deeper: build the first brand where every girl could recognize herself, whatever her skin tone. Inclusion served as a sales facilitator, helping customers rarely represented by classic brands identify with the product.
The full collection was shot in three skin tones, with each aesthetic named after a 90s model.
Naomi. Kate. Yasmeen.
Three models. Three skin tones. One brand.
Funding fell short.
Textile production was the largest line in the budget, so we raised funds from people around us. Love money brought in €30K, but the collection needed €50K to launch at full scale. We missed the raise window and didn't close the gap.
5K
Units ready to launch: full production briefs completed, factory coordination done, collection ready to manufacture at scale.
€30K
Raised in love money from family and friends, funding sampling, boutique setup and production. €20K short of the €50K needed to launch at full scale.
4
Visual frames produced in one structured month: boutique, street, beach, countryside. Twelve months of omnichannel content from a single production sprint.
Full
End-to-end ownership from fabric sourcing and factory coordination to retail launch and digital distribution. No step outsourced.
Brand infrastructure complete.
Collection, identity, e-commerce and content system fully operational. The boutique validated the concept with a real local audience, and the funding gap set the ceiling on how far the project could go alone.
This project confirmed the role I want next: a senior, end-to-end position where I can apply brand, product and e-commerce building at a bigger scale, backed by a full team.
Currently seeking a senior brand or marketing management role to take on a project like this further.
