Gabriela Hearst Built a Luxury Brand Around Quality, Sustainability, and Staying Power

When Gabriela Hearst arrived at Chloé in December 2020, the Paris fashion house was at an inflection point. Two years later, revenue had risen 60%, the house had opened 11 stores in a single year, and it was profitable.

Hearst did it while continuing to run her own New York-based luxury label, Gabriela Hearst. That dual role says a lot about how she works: she is a designer, but she also thinks deeply about the business behind the product.

“The product is queen,” Hearst says. For her, that means starting with quality, the materials, the people making the product, and the realities that shape what can be made. “I think limitation is a force for creativity.”

Hearst is applying that same philosophy to the company she is building today. At Paris Fashion Week, her Spring Summer 2027 collection put many of those ideas into practice, pairing traditional craft with material innovation and an emphasis on natural and repurposed materials.

An operator first

Hearst’s instincts as an operator were formed long before Paris. She grew up on her family’s ranch in Paysandú, Uruguay—a 17,000-acre property where she worked across production, sales, and operations. Economic instability was a recurring fact of life in South America, and she watched her father make decisions through downturns rather than wait for stability. He bought cattle and land when others were pulling back. “To grow businesses in that scenario, you have to be extremely savvy,” Hearst says. “The fact that my father was able to be successful in that environment definitely made me very fit for fashion.” In 2011 she became the ranch’s seventh generation.

Her first company came in 2003. Hearst and two partners each put in $700 to start Candela, and the company claims to have passed $1 million in revenue in its first year. In 2015 she launched Gabriela Hearst on a principle she still follows: build the product and the business first, and spend on marketing only once both are ready to support it. The label does relatively little traditional advertising. Despite that, the company notes that roughly 60% of its customers are returning customers.

Two companies, one calendar

When Swiss luxury group Compagnie Financière Richemont SA named Hearst creative director of Chloé on December 7, 2020, she did not step back from her own label. She ran both houses at once.

At Chloé, Hearst moved quickly to assess the business and set a direction for the house. Before her first collection, she wrote a 92-page brief outlining her strategy. She then put that strategy into practice on an accelerated timeline: her first collection came together in roughly two months, against the 12 to 18 months a new creative director typically gets.

The strategy translated into specific product decisions. Hearst introduced the Nama sneaker, which became a commercial pillar of the house’s shoe business. She also identified knitwear as a category with room to grow, given its strong margins and greater flexibility on fit. She expanded the category and refined its sizing, citing it as the reason she was able to triple the size of Chloé’s knitwear business.

The results followed. By early 2023, 60% of Chloé’s business was being sold directly to customers, and the house had set itself an internal target of €1 billion in revenue, Bellini told WWD.

Sustainability built into the product

For Hearst, sustainability is not a separate initiative. It is part of how the product gets made. That means thinking about the materials, where they come from, how they are used, and whether the claims around them can be backed up.

Sustainability has shaped Hearst’s product decisions with both Chloé and the Gabriela Hearst brand. In 2021, Chloé became the first luxury fashion house to earn B Corp certification. She says that at her namesake label, every garment has carried a traceability code since 2020, allowing customers to follow a piece back through its supply chain. For the Spring and Summer of 2026, the company says deadstock fabric accounted for 97% of the brand’s wovens.

Hearst brought this focus on materials and sourcing to her Spring Summer 2027 collection, presented at Paris Fashion Week. The collection grew out of Hearst’s study of a century of Afghan women’s history and the country’s rich textile and jewelry traditions, including the embroidery on Look 12, which is said to be based on a Hazara prayer cloth, the dastmal-e mohr, a sacred object that holds the clay prayer tablet on which Shia Hazaras pray.

Working with Turquoise Mountain, a nonprofit that has supported artisans and traditional crafts in Afghanistan since 2006, Hearst collaborated with women artisans in Afghanistan to create pieces for the collection. The collection also incorporates repurposed and deadstock fabrics alongside natural materials. “I have never thought of sustainability as a campaign,” Hearst says. “It is how you make decisions.”

A different model for luxury

For Hearst, those decisions are inseparable from the business itself. She notes that she has built her namesake company around the idea that quality, craftsmanship and environmental responsibility do not have to compete with commercial ambition. That’s something any brand focused on sustainability, quality, and environmental safety can build upon.

It is the same philosophy that runs through the rest of her career: understand the business, start with the product and resist the idea that creative and commercial decisions belong in separate rooms. She sees constraints as a source of creativity, not an obstacle to it, and believes that what a product is made from, how it feels and how long it lasts are all part of what makes luxury valuable.

Whether running her own company or leading an established fashion house, she approaches design as both a creative and a business problem, with the product at the center of both.

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