Natacha Ramsay-Levi didn’t know much about Ecco before she started working with them in 2021. Hardly surprising given the 60-year-old Danish shoe company’s comfort-first (some might say orthopedic) approach to footwear and Ramsay-Levi’s rarified fashion bona fides. Before taking the reins at Chloé in 2017, Ramsay-Levi spent nearly 15 years at the side of Nicolas Ghesquière, working her way up from intern to design director at Balenciaga and then following Ghesquière to Louis Vuitton in 2013. She stepped down from her position at Chloé in December 2020 and, six months later, was still figuring out
her next move, when she received a call from her friend Kostas Murkudis about a unique opportunity. Murkudis was preparing to design his first capsule collection for At.Kollektive — the fashion-forward brainchild of Ecco’s current CEO Panos Mytaros — and wanted Ramsay-Levi to join him as one of four designers in the brand’s inaugural class. Their brief was simple (and enticing): design a collection using Ecco leather. But Ramsay-Levy wasn’t sure. “I’d just left Chloe and I wasn’t really ready to jump into another project,” she says. But the more she spoke with Mytaros, the more convinced she became. “I realized [that what he was offering] was exactly the way I wanted to work: collaboratively, without a
[complicated] brief, being close to the manufacturer, and close to the materials.”
The collaboration with Ramsay-Levi was a huge success for the fledgling At.Kollektive, and Mytaros so enjoyed working with the designer that when her time with the brand came to an end, he invited her to join him at Ecco proper. “It’s very important to me to work with designers like Natacha who want to get their hands dirty,” says Mytaros. “They can’t just send in drawings and say goodbye. They have to want to come into our atelier and touch everything and know what we can do.”
But Ramsay-Levi was apprehensive about joining the Ecco mothership. “I had never worked on that scale before,” she says. “And when Panos showed me all the collections, it was kind of overwhelming. I thought, it’s already so huge and doing so well, I wouldn’t know where to jump in, where to start.”
Mytaros did not share Ramsay-Levi’s concerns, though. After nearly 30 years at Ecco, Mytaros was appointed CEO in 2021, during Ramsay-Levi’s tenure with At.Kollektive, and he was chomping at the bit to take the company to the next level. Before his promotion, he’d already succeeded in establishing Ecco Leather, which supplies raw materials to luxury brands including Fendi and Louis Vuitton; vertically integrating Ecco’s manufacturing processes; and launching At.Kollektive, so he was confident in his ability to move the company forward. And he felt sure that Ramsay-Levi was the right designer to help him. “I remember, he told me, ‘we have nothing to lose by trying and everything to lose by not trying.’” says Ramsay-Levi. “He was like, ‘let’s just try it and if something good [comes of it], we’ll jump on it, and if it doesn’t, that’s okay too.’ That’s a pretty rare statement in fashion, I would say.”
They decided to start small, with a capsule collection of women’s footwear that would come to bear Ramsay-Levi’s name. The shoes utilized existing Ecco molds with new Ramsay-Levi-designed soles and uppers. And thanks to the company’s vertically-integrated manufacturing processes, they were able to bring the collection to the market in a fraction of the time it would take other companies. “I had never been in a situation like that before,” says Ramsay-Levi. “It really allows you to see every step of the process from A-Z, which, as a conscious designer (or trying to be) felt really good.”
Ramsay-Levi was also amazed at the quality of what Ecco was able to produce. “Every prototype was really beautiful — from the quality of the leather to the manufacturing,” she says. “And Ecco is not a high-fashion brand, but, honestly, the quality is much better than what you get in high-fashion. I was really impressed.” Ramsay-Levi designed the first two collections all at the same time and used the same aesthetic approach that had served her so well throughout her high-fashion career. “My designs are always a bit of a collage of two things,” she says. “Taking something you already know and twisting it with something else. Like taking a boxing shoe and adding scuba elements on top to make something more elevated. That’s really where my point of view lies.”
Her approach paid off and the first collection, which launched in 2023, was a major commercial success. So much so that there are now plans to fold a handful of those designs into Ecco’s main line. “I think part of the success of that first collection is that everyone can understand it and it still feels relevant to Ecco,” says Ramsay-Levi. “That was really my goal, to build products that were disruptive, but still faithful to the brand.”
Mytaros agrees. “It’s very important for us to maintain the fundamentals of what makes us who we are,” he says. “Comfort, the way we wrap the foot, and making sure the customer and their feet feel good is really important. Top quality is really important. Making long-lasting, good quality products in our own kitchens is really important. We’re not looking to turn Ecco into a different brand. We just want to reach more consumers.”
To that end, the company has been investing heavily in the US market, opening a 3250 square foot flagship in SoHo last year and doubling down on their commitments to third-party retailers like Nordstrom, by investing in new displays and shop-in-shop installations to better showcase their evolving brand identity. And all this at a time when third party retail and the fashion industry in general is struggling. “This is a difficult moment for the industry,” says Mytaros. “Wholesale is tough. Business is tough. But we need to keep taking these steps. This is just the beginning. We need to do more.”
For now, that means continuing to collaborate with Ramsay-Levi (whose second collection for Ecco drops this month), slowly but surely folding her into more and more of the brand’s day-to-day design decisions, and learning everything they can from her along the way. “Working with her, we’ve learned so much already,” says Mytaros. “She’s shown us how we can take a product that we have sold for years, like our off-road sandal, and turn it into a fashion sandal. Or take a trail running shoe and turn it into a ballet flat. To put super soft leather in a place we hadn’t previously thought to put it. To just really see our own products in a different way.”
After years at some of the biggest fashion houses in the world, Ramsay-Levi says she is happy to be working at Ecco. “I’m not the creative director, I’m not working on the campaign, I’m just designing the shoes,” she says. “I’m a designer. And I think what I like best about this partnership is that I’m really doing the best of what I do: design.”
Written by Charles Manning
