MILAN — Carrer has been on a mission to elevate wardrobe essentials with a product-centric strategy that wants to leave hype and social media noise out of the equation.
Two years in, that approach hasn’t changed, although its cofounders, stylist Marc Forné and actor Manu Ríos, are both social media darlings with huge followings and the dapper, brazen attitude of digital native “It” boys.
“I feel like nowadays you have 200,000 million brands [popping up] on Instagram and social media that I am not able to identify,” Forné said in an interview. “That, to me, is the worst nightmare. I always admire people launching new projects that make sense or have a particular vision or aesthetic, and that’s the goal with Carrer. That’s why we’re not going too hard into the kind of communication that works on social media, we’re trying to make it a bit more conventional. Maybe it’s harder, but we’re trying to focus on what’s important for us. That might be the aesthetic, the details, the community, even if it’s our community, which is not the most mainstream or the biggest, but starting small, starting slow,” he said.
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The due boasts a combined Instagram following of 10 million, but Forné underscored that Carrer — which means “street” and derives from the Catalán language — was established in 2023 to serve their close-knit group of friends who shared the same vision of clothing, informed by workwear references with street credibility and a vintage flair.
Collections spark from the design duo’s daily life wardrobes.
“We wanted to be able to travel and get dressed in the morning with clothes that we were making, to create a brand that represented what we were wearing on a daily basis and bring that to other people,” Forné explained. “I feel like we had seen all those pieces in different places, but we never had them all under the same brand. So, the idea was creating all these wardrobe staples,” he said.
“We shared a strong creative understanding and a similar vision, sometimes aligned, sometimes complementary, and always enjoyed the process of creating looks together,” added Ríos. “Over time, we realized we shared an interest in vintage workwear, yet felt the need to reinterpret it in a more contemporary and fashion-forward way, adding versatility and comfort as essential elements to create something that truly reflected our own influences.”
The reception was great, especially in the insiders’ circles, and the first drop sold out quickly.
“I was super scared because I expected people [to think ‘this is] another unnecessary brand,’ which probably some [did], but we also received good feedback. Then, as we went on and started dropping other stuff, we realized our initial community was not enough, and it was going to be much harder than we thought,” Forné said. “It’s a real business and the consumer is the hardest judge.”
Since 2023 the brand has launched five collections sold directly to consumers, until the spring 2025 season when Carrer linked up with Tomorrow, the fashion incubator, accelerator and showroom.
In the first season together, the brand garnered about 20 wholesale accounts globally, which have grown since to 45 doors scattered across Europe — with Spain and Italy being the strongest markets — as well as Asia with stockists in China, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea.
The spring 2026 collection was picked up by the French Printemps store while Bloomingdale’s in the U.S. became a stockist since the spring 2025 collection. The U.S. is Carrer’s top performing in e-commerce market.
Part of the brand’s success, said chief executive officer Nerea Ayerza, lies in the price positioning. Customers can build a total look for about 600 euros.
“In this shaky market situation, the aspirational luxury consumer is looking for something else,” she said.
Marking the second anniversary, Carrer opened a pop-up shop carrying the fall 2025 collection on Madrid’s Calle de Manuel Silvela this past weekend and hosted a party inviting the creative collective of DJs Real No Real playing vinyls and musician Teo Planell.
“Championing workwear in a contemporary way, we are always looking to explore and expand to new categories that make sense with Marc’s and Manu’s vision, their lifestyle,” Ayerza said.
In September the duo linked up with the Santa Eulalia boutique in Barcelona, which has operated a tailor’s workshop since 1843 in addition to a multibrand luxury boutique, to debut a sartorial lineup. Forné said they found a gap in the market for cool, laid-back tailoring that would fit the cofounders’ globetrotting lifestyle and their peers’ desire for fancy, but unpretentious clothes to wear out at night.
“Suits have somehow been the workwear of 19th century and as much as they differ from the kind of workwear Carrer offers, they are still very much part of Marc’s and Manu’s lifestyle,” Ayerza added. “The tailoring category was unexplored in a more comfortable, easy way, and that’s our vision for it.”
Asked about introducing accessories, Forné said they are his favorite fashion items and “the dream is to be able to launch the category properly. But I think it should be done extremely well. So that’s the next step.”
Next January, Carrer will test the waters for accessories through a collaboration with a still undisclosed Spanish fashion company. The lineup, which will include shoes and one bag, will be unveiled during Paris Men’s Fashion Week in January and hit retail the following month.
As more categories are added to create Carrer’s full fashion proposition, the brand is looking ahead at retail and overall growth with cautious optimism.
“We don’t have a specific date and place [to open a store], because we want to make sure that when we do it, we have the best product assortment,” Ayerza said. “We don’t want to rush — it’s another huge adventure, which we want to try and taste, but when it’s the right moment.”
She added that the team works hard to ensure that customers won’t get tired of the brand in five years and move on. “We want to be a long-term brand, establishing [ourselves] properly the basis and create something that it’s not too noisy and too saturated.”
“Over the next three to five years, I see the brand continuing to build its identity through recognizable elements in the product, iconic pieces that remain over time, exploring the idea of timelessness while expanding into new categories we are currently developing,” Ríos said.
“Beyond the product itself, Carrer will also continue to grow as a space where the creative community has a voice, a place to express different visual arts, to connect, to be inspired and to tell stories. We want it to be a meeting point for creativity, culture and inspiration, with fashion at the core of that dialogue,” he added.
The brand is backed by a Barcelona-based investor already working in the fashion field which the cofounders and CEO declined to mention.
