Graduate Stories
Lín Studio, two years after Paris
The first label to graduate from LePont opened its own atelier in the 3rd. It also stayed. The founder explains the least sentimental decision they made.
Camille Ferrand7 min read
The room is smaller than you would expect and there is nowhere obvious to stand. Lín Studio's Paris atelier, opened in 2024, is a working space that occasionally sells things rather than a shop that occasionally makes them.
It is also, on paper, the moment a platform loses a brand. The label has its own address, its own European customers, its own reason to stop paying anyone a commission.
Why stay
“Paris gave us a room. LePont gives us Manchester, Rotterdam, Bilbao — and the returns desk for all three.”
LePont still accounts for the majority of the label's UK orders. More usefully, it absorbs the part of the business the studio has no interest in running: cross-border returns, duty handling, and the regulatory paperwork that arrives every time a rule changes.
The founder now mentors two labels in the current intake, and is blunt about the reason. The pitch to a studio in Guangzhou is not a slide deck. It is a founder in Shanghai who did it, and a room in Paris to point at.
