Walk through Copenhagen Fashion Week and you will see the same print again and again: leopard spots, on a satin midi dress, a nylon puffer, a pair of ballet flats, even a pair of sneakers. It is not a trend chasing the runway. It is a brand’s signature, worn so consistently for over a decade that Danish fashion insiders now treat leopard print as a Ganni neutral — as safe and as recognisable as black. For a country whose fashion reputation was built on quiet minimalism, that alone makes Ganni an outlier. It is also, by most measures, Denmark’s most successful fashion export of the last twenty years, and one that has done it by openly rejecting almost every rule Scandinavian style was supposed to follow.
From a Cashmere Label to a Creative Director’s Wardrobe
Ganni did not start out as the brand it is today. It was founded in Copenhagen in 2000 by gallerist Frans Truelsen as a small, fairly conventional cashmere knitwear label. For most of the 2000s it stayed that way — a modest, well-made basics brand with no particular ambition to be culturally relevant.
The turning point came in 2009, when husband-and-wife team Nicolaj and Ditte Reffstrup took over the company. Ditte, who became creative director, has said the brand grew out of frustration with the two boxes Scandinavian womenswear seemed to offer at the time: severe minimalism or loose bohemia. She wanted to design clothes for herself and her friends instead — pieces with colour, pattern, and a sense of humour that Nordic fashion rarely allowed itself. Nicolaj, meanwhile, took the CEO seat and built the business infrastructure that would eventually turn a niche label into a genuine international house.
That founding tension — between Scandinavian restraint and something louder — is what separates Ganni from Sweden’s Acne Studios, the region’s other breakout fashion story. Where Acne built its identity on stripped-back denim and monochrome cool, Ganni built its identity on refusing to be cool in quite that way. Two Nordic capitals, two completely different fashion philosophies, born within a few years of each other.
Leopard Print, Bold Colour, and the “Ugly-Pretty” Aesthetic
Ganni’s clothes are instantly identifiable, which is rarer than it sounds in an industry built on subtlety. Balloon-sleeve dresses in clashing florals, neon paillette skirts, chunky Mary Janes, oversized checks, and that leopard print running through nearly every collection since the early 2010s — the brand calls it, and its customers agree, an “ugly-pretty” sensibility: pieces that shouldn’t quite work together but somehow do.
It is a deliberate contrast to the tasteful neutrals that dominate the country’s other major fashion export, the Danish clothing brands built on Scandi-minimalist tailoring, and to the pared-back design language that made houses like HAY and the broader Danish design tradition famous around the world. Ganni proved that “Scandinavian” and “maximalist” were not mutually exclusive, and in doing so opened a lane that Copenhagen’s fashion scene has leaned into ever since.
The Home Team at Copenhagen Fashion Week
Ganni has also become one of the biggest boosters of its home city’s fashion industry. In 2024 the brand became a patron of CPHFW NEWTALENT, contributing a biannual financial bursary through Copenhagen Fashion Week to support emerging Danish designers — a role that mirrors, in the fashion world, the same civic investment culture that shows up across Danish design and architecture more broadly.
The B Corp Fashion House
What actually distinguishes Ganni from most “buzzy” fashion labels, though, is not the leopard print. It’s the sustainability paperwork behind it. Ganni became a certified B Corporation in 2022, scoring 105.3 on the B Impact Assessment — well above the median score for businesses that complete it — putting it among the highest-scoring names in luxury fashion, a sector not exactly known for passing ethical audits with ease.
The brand’s sustainability strategy, first launched in 2019 as “Gameplan” and now in its third iteration (Gameplan 3.0, running 2026 to 2028), targets a 50% absolute reduction in carbon emissions by 2027 against a 2021 baseline. Ganni has also pushed for full traceability across the first stages of its supply chain and has published its Stage 1 and 2 suppliers through the Open Apparel Registry — the kind of transparency most fashion houses avoid, since it makes it much harder to quietly change factories when scrutiny gets uncomfortable.
Ganni Repeat: Renting, Reselling, and Betting Against Fast Fashion
In 2019, Ganni launched Ganni Repeat, a rental platform allowing customers to borrow pieces for one to three weeks, with cleaning, insurance, and delivery bundled into the price, and the option to buy the item outright afterwards. It has since expanded into resale: a partnership with Reflaunt lets customers resell previous Ganni purchases across a network of secondhand marketplaces, while a separate tie-up with Vestiaire Collective offers instant store credit — plus a 10% bonus — for trading in pre-loved Ganni pieces. The pitch, as the brand puts it, is garments meant to be experienced by many people rather than owned by just one.
It is a genuinely unusual position for a brand growing as fast as Ganni is: actively building infrastructure that lets customers buy less from it. Whether that holds up as the company scales globally is an open question, but it is a rare example of a fashion label treating circularity as a real operating model rather than a marketing line on a hangtag.
Sneakers, Collaborations, and Staying Everywhere
Ganni has also become a fixture of the sneaker world through an ongoing partnership with New Balance, reworking the classic T500 silhouette — unsurprisingly, often in leopard print — into collections that reliably sell out. The collaborations do double duty: they keep Ganni relevant to a streetwear audience that would never set foot in a traditional fashion boutique, while reinforcing the leopard motif as something closer to a logo than a pattern.
Between the rental platform, the B Corp certification, the emerging-designer sponsorships, and a print so consistent it functions as a signature, Ganni has built something genuinely difficult in fashion: a brand identity that is both maximalist and disciplined at the same time. It is, in its own very un-Scandinavian way, still a distinctly Danish story — a small Copenhagen label that decided the rest of the world’s idea of Nordic style was too narrow, and built a global business on saying so.
Photo by Pratik Gupta on Pexels.
