Written by Nia Bowers
After Teetering On The Edge Of Collapse In 2022, Icon Amsterdam Founder Samuel Onuha Rebuilt His Label By Stepping Away From Discount Culture And Rewiring The Company Around Fit, Data, And Long-Term Loyalty.
While most European fashion brands are gearing up for another “biggest Black Friday ever,” ICON Amsterdam quietly navigates around the stampede.The menswear label, founded by Dutch entrepreneur Samuel Onuha, used to play the same game as everyone else: constant sales, aggressive ads, and endless cycles of promotion. For a while, it worked. Then 2022 arrived - and nearly wiped the company out.
As ad costs spiked and returns piled up, the math stopped making sense. Revenue was still coming in, but profitability was disappearing. The more ICON pushed, the more fragile the business became.
“We reached a point where the numbers were loud and clear,” Onuha recalls. “We were selling a lot, but we weren’t really building anything stable.”Instead of doubling down on discounts to chase volume, he did the opposite: he froze expansion plans, held off on new drops, and treated the crisis as a full reset. The goal shifted from “scale at all costs” to “fix the foundation or there’s nothing to scale at all.” Black Friday strategy was one of the first things to be rethought.
“We stopped obsessing over winning one day and started focusing on whether we deserved our customers the rest of the year.”Across direct-to-consumer brands, the conversation has been slowly moving from acquisition at any price to retention at any cost you can defend. ICON Amsterdam chose to make that shift brutally obvious inside the business.
From left to right: at the Icon Amsterdam headquarters in Dubai during a creative strategy session, and at ICON Amsterdam’s fulfillment warehouse in the Netherlands.
Photo credit: AMD Digital Press Office.
Instead of planning the next big promotion, the team dug into the unglamorous questions:
- Why were certain sizes coming back more than others?
- Which fits led to repeat purchases, not just first-time orders?
- Where did the supply chain create friction or unpredictability?
Onuha describes it as “micro-learning” - a constant feedback loop where every return, review, and reorder is treated as a data point for design and operations.
“Discounts give you a quick hit,” he says. “But they also teach your customers to wait for the next code. We wanted to train ourselves to pay attention to the details instead - fit, quality, consistency. That’s the kind of work that quietly compounds.”By tightening fits, refining fabrics, and smoothing out logistics, ICON focused on making every order more likely to stick rather than making every campaign louder. The brand effectively swapped “How do we sell more this week?” for “How do we become the brand men come back to next year?”
Industry analysts have started to frame this shift as a necessary correction: discipline over disruption, sustainable momentum instead of flashy hyper-growth. Consumers are increasingly exhausted by constant promotions and suspicious of brands that are always “40% off.” Loyalty and craftsmanship travel further than the loudest banner ad.
ICON Amsterdam’s bet is simple: in a market addicted to urgency, patience becomes a competitive edge.
“Black Friday isn’t going anywhere,” Onuha says. “But the most resilient brands are built for the whole year to follow. That’s where trust is earned - in the normal, quiet days when no one is screaming SALE.”
