With e-commerce topping half of DTC sales and handbags outpacing shoes, the brand is using its resort-focused Kurt’s Cabana collection to court emotional spend.With e-commerce topping half of DTC sales and handbags outpacing shoes, the brand is using its resort-focused Kurt’s Cabana collection to court emotional spend.
LONDON — British footwear and accessories brand Kurt Geiger is doubling down on the resort and holiday market to court mood-driven spend. The Kurt’s Cabana collection is built to generate attention at both destination resorts and in social-media feeds that shape how people pack.
According to Rebecca Farrar-Hockley, the brand’s chief creative officer, summer is the most important trading season for Kurt Geiger.
“As a brand known for its bold use of color, texture and statement design across footwear and accessories, this is the time of year when our products truly come to life. People also shop very emotionally during this period. They’re buying into a mood as much as a product,” the executive said.
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“For this high summer moment, I really wanted to create a collection that would make our customer smile. Something playful, indulgent and a little bit tongue-in-cheek. It’s not simply, ‘Here’s a sandal,’ or ‘here’s a beach bag.’” It’s an entire world with a strong point of view and personality, and I hope our customers want to be a part of it,” she continued.
Farrar-Hockley anchored that “world” in the juxtaposition of a quintessential English summer and a good old American country club.
“There’s something very charming about the idea of an English summer — strawberries and cream, tennis courts, and the kind of glamour that’s a little bit undone — and then you contrast that with the polished, cinematic feel of a retro American country club. Kurt’s Cabana sits somewhere between the two,” she said.
Internally, Farrar-Hockley said the team started from the idea of summer as theater, with striped awnings, vintage pool clubs, retro tennis photography and Slim Aarons imagery as key references.
“I wanted every element, from the collection itself to the campaign creative, to feel joyful, escapist and inspiring. The color palette, textures and styling are all designed to stand out, both in real life and digitally. You can absolutely imagine it appearing in everyone’s holiday photos this summer,” she said.
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The executive said the approach also taps into a broader shift in overall vacation dressing.
“I think people are moving away from minimalism [and] feeling quite so serious. There’s definitely a return to personality, humor and a more expressive approach to dressing. People want their holiday wardrobes to feel joyful again,” she observed.
Behind the resort-led storytelling is a mix of proven commercial drivers and newness designed for discovery, Farrar-Hockley said.
“We pair creative intuition with data insights to stay closely connected to what our customers want. With every collection we design, we obviously look closely at customer behavior and understand what categories perform strongly for us, whilst introducing something fresh and unexpected: pieces our customers may not even realize they want yet, but quickly fall in love with,” she added.
Within Kurt’s Cabana, customers will find top-selling styles like the Kensington bag and cross-strap flatform sandals reworked in the Cabana aesthetic, sitting alongside new silhouettes and ready-to-wear that complete the resort narrative.
The high-summer offer also plugs into a broader pipeline of thematic and seasonal capsules that has become a reliable sales engine, particularly around gifting and emotional moments. Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day edits “consistently perform very well,” Farrar-Hockley said.
Kurt Geiger
To wit, new sparkly pink sling bag from a five-piece Mother’s Day collection sold out within a week in the U.S. A campaign fronted by Tina Knowles added “authenticity and cultural relevance,” she noted. Collaborations with Matthew Williamson and U.K. florist Tatti Isles are another way the brand reaches new audiences.
Kurt Geiger is “a deliberately inclusive brand,” Farrar-Hockley said. “Our customer is everyone. What connects them is a shared love of self-expression and the belief that fashion should feel uplifting, empowering and fun — never intimidating.”
Looking at regional differences, the Kurt Geiger Gen Z shopper in the U.S. favours playful, expressive pieces like micro crossbody handbags and colorful sandals, while in Europe, they are looking for a more elevated, polished look, with demand building for brown suede handbags.
Break down by category, Farrar-Hockley said handbags now outperform shoes annually, and e-commerce accounts for more than half of direct-to-consumer sales, with discovery increasingly happening via social media.
“We continue to invest heavily in these platforms to ensure the experience is seamless, inspiring and highly engaging,” she added, citing that AI-driven product recommendations and enhanced mobile journeys are making shopping “faster, more personalized and more intuitive.”
Physical retail, however, remains “absolutely central to the brand experience,” particularly in key travel and resort markets.
Farrar-Hockley said the brand, which is owned by Steve Madden Ltd., has been expanding its U.S. store network and growing its international footprint through new markets and strategic pop-ups, including recent activations in Hong Kong with local partner Lane Crawford, and a new franchise and distribution agreement with Reliance Brands to bring Kurt Geiger to India beginning in the fourth quarter.
