Johanna Ortiz Eyes Further Retail Expansion for 2025
This past year was a busy one for Johanna Ortiz, the Colombian fashion designer who expanded her brick-and-mortar presence to Madison Avenue and Bal Harbour, Fla., and embarked on the traveling “caravan” concept around the U.S., Europe and South America. These direct-to-consumer moves, which will continue into the new year, bring her brand’s Latin heritage and artisanal craftsmanship to life in both permanent and transient, experiential retail formats.
The JO Caravan, which creates a nomadic experience, kicked off April 10 at a private residence in San Antonio, Texas, where the brand partnered with the National Cowgirl Museum for an evening of shopping and celebration, and traveled to Saint-Tropez to the Maison Revka, where the restaurant’s boutique was transformed into the world of Johanna Ortiz, offering customers a curated assortment from the Collection and Vacation lines. In August, JO Caravan touched down at the Hamptons’ Polo Club, where Ortiz hosted a VIP cocktail party and polo match. Guests gathered at a pop-up tent in the open fields, and shopped the latest Ortiz collections. It then moved on to Comporta, Portugal, where it landed at Fashion Clinic Comporta on Oct. 5. Last month, the caravan wound up in Ortiz’s home country of Colombia in the historic part of Cartagena in Plaza Santo Domingo.
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Connecting With Customers
“It’s been a busy year. Not only opening Madison but finishing the year opening in Bal Harbour. We’re in touch with customers, and it’s been an amazing experience for me as a designer,” said Ortiz, founder and chief creative director, in a phone interview from her headquarters in Cali, Colombia. “It’s been nice to see a lot of customers who knew the brand, but there’s also a lot of customers who didn’t know about the brand so it’s being discovered, so that’s really good for us,” said Ortiz.
In June, Ortiz opened her first U.S. location — a permanent flagship at 799 Madison Avenue, spanning 14,000 square feet over four floors that includes the brand’s headquarters. The two retail floors carry the full assortment of all Ortiz’s collections: Johanna Ortiz Collection, Johanna Ortiz Vacation and Johanna Ortiz Home.
The store’s architect was Jessica Hyland and the design incorporates works of Latin American artists and wallpapers and textiles from the Johanna Ortiz x Schumacher collaboration that launched in October. The store’s interior design mirrors Ortiz’s aesthetic, characterized by vibrant hues, intricate prints and luxurious textures, designed to transport shoppers and give them the full Johanna Ortiz experience.
Last month, Ortiz opened a seasonal retail store at the Bal Harbour shops in Florida that will remain open until March 30. The store’s interiors also feature wallpaper and fabrics from the Johanna Ortiz x Schumacher home collection. The boutique offers an assortment of the designer’s gowns, ready-to-wear, vacation and accessories collections, as well as her home pieces.
The space, curated by Ortiz, reflects her creative vision. In addition to the walls upholstered with Schumacher’s natural “Kiyoko” woven jute wall covering, the shop features floating wood shelves, fiber-crafted furniture and handwoven carpets. It also pays tribute to Latin American artistry, showcasing a cabuya-coated art installation by Colombian fiber artist Rosana Escobar.
Ortiz said she decided to open the brand’s first store in the U.S. on Madison Avenue “since for me, our customer is a New York, Upper East Side client. That’s our number-one client.”
Her cocktail and evening dresses, along with her destination getaway clothing have been selling well at the Madison Avenue store. She said the store spotlights a curated collection of Latin American art that one can see while shopping. She said accessories, which she doesn’t sell in the majority of her wholesale accounts, have been discovered by her customers in the Madison Avenues store, such as her baskets, earrings and hand-woven accessories.
Ortiz’s accessories feature bags, belts, necklaces and bangles, which are handcrafted by various artisanal communities across Colombia.
The JO Home collection similarly highlights this craftsmanship. Home products run the gamut from ceramic dinnerware handmade in Colombia in Carmen de Viboral, Antioquia to serveware crafted by a jewelry studio in Medellín, Colombia. Salt and pepper shakers are carved from teak wood by skilled artisans from the Atlantic Coast, while table linens are produced through a meticulous hand-block printing process. Placemats and bread baskets are handwoven with iraca fiber by artisans in Sandoná, Nariño in Colombia.
Ortiz’s average retail price for her main ready-to-wear collection and Vacation line is $1,200. Ready-to-wear alone averages $1,750.
In the U.S., Ortiz sells such clients as Saks Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, Net-a-porter, and Moda Operandi. The brand also does significant business with The Webster, Kirna Zabête and Elyse Walker, according to Ortiz.
On April 26, Ortiz plans to open a huge pop-up in the Bon Marché in Paris for six months. “We’ll have a big space on the third floor and we’ll show a little bit of the World of [Johanna Oritz],” she said. She believes it will be important for brand positioning in Europe.
She also plans to do the “Caravan,” again in places where she doesn’t have brick-and-mortar. “We do it in different spaces and we go in our high season for the brand,” she said. “It’s been nice and we’ve got an amazing response, and we’ll keep doing that model,” she said.
In business since 2003, Ortiz became an international brand in 2014 when she started selling Moda Operandi exclusively for two years. She then added Bergdorf’s as its first brick-and-mortar account. Ortiz self-finances the brand. “We’ve grown organically. We’re a vertically integrated company that produces everything responsibly in our own facilities,” she said. Most of their fabrics are Italian and French “since Colombia is not a huge producer of textiles,” she said.
Ortiz said they also have a school, the “Escuela Johanna Oritz,” where they train professional sewers and give them six months of training. It’s an onsite training program that was established in 2016. Its primary goal is cultivating advanced seamstress and high-end embroidery skills, fostering local expertise in haute couture and JO techniques. Beyond technical proficiency, the program instills life skills and comprehensive training with a gender-focused approach for vulnerable women. It also provides essential psychosocial support, empowering participants to enhance their quality of life. Since the program’s inception, 260 individuals have benefited from the Escuela Johanna Oritz, which includes different courses. Among these, 97 percent are women, and 79 percent have joined the JO team after completing the courses.
A vertically integrated business model has resulted in over 90 percent of all production ethically taking place in Cali at the Johanna Ortiz Atelier, a state-of-the art facility employing more than 460 people, 76 percent of whom are women. The brand produces about 50,000 pieces a year.
The brand shows its main collection in Paris. “I wanted it to feel like home but since nobody is traveling to Colombia, I have my space [in a hotel] to have the feeling of the brand,” said Ortiz. She also shows additional lines in New York.
She wants the brand to feel organic and have responsible growth at its own rhythm. She said they’re not on the Paris calendar, but they have their application in and are among the next brands to be included. She doesn’t do runway shows, but presentations. “Presentations take a lot longer to be included on the calendar,” she said.
Ortiz has five stores globally, including Cali and Bogota, Colombia.
A Festive and Elegant Place
When asked how the company benefited from the “caravan” experience this past year, Ortiz said, “There’s a feeling of enjoyment, and when there’s festiveness,” it transports you to a festive and elegant place. She wants her dresses to have a lot of life and a lot of uses, and her customers are looking to create memories. She described her customer as a woman “who likes to enjoy life, go out, be festive, be colorful, have fun and build memories.”
Expanding retail locations is on the agenda. Although it’s hard to find the right retail space that’s authentic and transports the customer to the feeling of her home country, she said, “We’d love to open in Texas, and somewhere else in Florida, such as Palm Beach and Miami. We already have Bal Harbour.”
Looking to the year ahead, Ortiz said she plans to grow with her current roster of wholesale accounts and her retail spaces. E-commerce, which was launched last year, is currently 20 percent of the current business volume, showcasing growth with a compound annual growth rate of 122.7 percent from 2022 to 2024, and a 130 percent increase from 2023 to 2024. She also seeks to expand her business in the home area, both her own collection and the Johanna Ortiz x Schumacher collection. For 2025, she’s planning five new locations for the “Caravan” experience.
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