Power Couple: How Anine and Nico Bing Created a Global Fashion Phenomenon

A few years earlier, she had started the blog, Anine’s World, to keep in touch with friends and family and to document her travels as a model. To her surprise, the site attracted followers from all over the world — total strangers who checked in every day to find out what Anine was wearing, what she was eating, and what city or country she was traveling to next.

When her husband, Nico, came home that evening, he found Anine sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by boxes. “What’s all this?” he asked. She told him she had put more than a hundred items up for sale on her blog. Within an hour, everything sold.

Nico couldn’t believe it. In nearly 20 years of retail and manufacturing, he had never seen anything like this. Ecommerce was in its infancy; Instagram was a privately owned startup, the concept of “influencer marketing” still years away. The apparel brand Nico had recently founded and sold, where he still worked one day a week, did mainly wholesale, and in fact had produced many of the garments Anine sold to her followers, only she had sold them used, at a better price, in just one size, without a storefront or online payments system — “all 118 of them, with no leftovers,” Nico says, still amazed, years later — in less than an hour.

“It was all because of community and trust,” he explains. “To her followers, Anine was like a cousin they had never met. These were people who were afraid to put their credit cards online, but they trusted Anine enough to wire money to her directly.”

“I want [our children] to see that if you really believe in an idea, if you put your mind and heart into bringing it to life, you can create something meaningful."
—Anine Bing

Today, that community has evolved into ANINE BING, a global fashion house with a thriving ecommerce store, more than 500 wholesale partners, and 30-plus retail locations across North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. Led by Nico as CEO and Anine as Chief Creative Officer, the company employs over 250 people at offices in Los Angeles, New York, and Paris, and recently tapped supermodel Kate Moss — whose images adorned Anine’s bedroom walls and the brand’s moodboards for years — to be the new global face of ANINE BING.

For Anine and Nico, the “little family business” they started 12 years ago was never just a side project. Its success is a testament to years of risk-taking and hard work, belief in a vision, and building something bigger than themselves. That the company is the same age as their two children isn’t lost on Anine; she hopes they’re learning from it as she and Nico have.

“I want them to see that if you really believe in an idea, if you put your mind and heart into bringing it to life, you can create something meaningful,” she says.

A successful marriage

Born in Denmark, Anine grew up in what she calls a “very creative home.” She and her three siblings were always singing and playing instruments — Anine the violin, flute, and guitar — and she attended a Waldorf school, where the arts were a big part of her education.

Fashion, however, was an interest she developed on her own. She didn’t get her first piece of new clothing until she was twelve (“a pair of brown boots,” she recalls fondly), relying instead on hand-me-downs from friends and family — a pair of her brother’s old jeans that she cut and sewed into flares, or random pieces from her sister that she mixed and matched. “When you don’t have a lot, you learn to be creative with what you have,” she says.

She was nine when her family moved to Sweden. One of her favorite things to do was visit her grandmother Elly’s house and look through her closets. Years later, she would name a line of handbags after her grandmother, who she calls her greatest inspiration.

“She just knew how to put things together,” Anine says. “I loved going through her jewelry and looking at her vintage handbags. Even though it might not have been expensive brands, she had such a cool style and sense of grace.”

At fourteen, Anine told her parents she wanted to go to Milan to become a model. “I don’t know why they let me on the plane,” she jokes. “But I was determined to go out in the world and make something for myself.” When she arrived at the modeling agency, they gave her a map and directions to her first casting. The rest she had to figure out on her own. She spent the next decade traveling the world, trying on clothes, working with designers and photographers, learning not just how the fashion industry operates but about grit and perseverance.

“In fashion, you have to be strong to survive,” she says. “You have to really know what you want, because it’s not always glamorous, and it’s not always fun.”

“When you take everything Nico brings from an apparel, leasing, and production perspective — and you combine that with Anine’s vision for branding and design — pardon the pun, but it’s a very successful marriage.”
—Paul Courell, CFO of ANINE BING

While Anine was cutting her teeth as a model, Nico was getting his own start in fashion and entrepreneurship. He was seventeen when he started his first business, a clothing store called Catwalk Scum, selling a mix of vintage streetwear and designer brands. He operated the business for more than a decade, expanding to multiple locations in cities across Denmark. Among the shop’s bestsellers were hooded sweatshirts and other white-labeled goods manufactured by vendors in Turkey — key partnerships that served as Nico’s entry point into production and that remain an important part of ANINE BING’s success today.

Nico sold Catwalk Scum in the late 2000s, using some of the proceeds to buy a three-unit house. He renovated it himself, living in one of the apartments and leasing the other two. This marked the start of a new venture in real estate, which eventually grew to include 65 units, before he again sold it to investors.

Despite not growing up around entrepreneurship — his mother was a child psychologist, his father an insurance salesman — Nico credits his parents for being supportive, open-minded, and “always encouraging me to try new things.” Between retail, real estate, and manufacturing, he was involved in dozens of ventures throughout his twenties and thirties, some of which he owned outright, others he was “just a part of in a certain way.”

“I think I was always just a wheeler and a dealer,” Nico says. “Whatever I could get my hands on, I tried to spin that around and make a little money and move on.”

"They’re creative in their own way... Anine being more artistic and Nico more analytical, but at their core they’re both creative thinkers."
—Olivia Gentin, COO of ANINE BING

In 2008, Nico was managing several fashion brands, splitting his time between Indonesia, Turkey, and Denmark. One evening in Istanbul, he and Anine were introduced by a mutual friend. They hung out for a few days, and Anine said she would look him up the next time she was in Copenhagen. “I think she was playing hard to get,” Nico says, smiling. Three days later, Anine told him she would be in Copenhagen. “We’ve been together ever since,” he says.

The couple married in 2009, and while it was a few more years before they became business partners, their paths to entrepreneurship have always complemented each other. “They’re creative in their own way,” says Olivia Gentin, ANINE BING’s COO. “Obviously they approach situations differently based on their past experiences, with Anine being more artistic and Nico more analytical, but at their core they’re both creative thinkers.”

Paul Courell, the company’s CFO, adds, “When you take everything Nico brings from an apparel, leasing, and production perspective — and you combine that with Anine’s vision for branding and design — pardon the pun, but it’s a very successful marriage.”

Ahead of the wave

The morning after Anine’s initial blog sale, the couple wrote up a business plan. “It took about five minutes,” Nico says. The basic premise was to create a collection they could sell directly to Anine’s followers, only instead of following the traditional approach — developing products, creating content to promote those products, and trying to reach consumers — they would “flip the script” and create content first, with products developed to match the content.

“We had no idea Instagram would take off the way it did,” Nico says. “But we had a loyal following, a community that came to Anine every day for styling and inspiration. Blogging meant you could have a curated experience, more like flipping through a magazine than a designer catalog. And with the rise of ecommerce, you could buy styles directly from the brand — in Anine’s case, from someone you admired and trusted.”

During Nico’s next trip to Istanbul, they used their savings to begin production on a line of jeans and T-shirts. While the garments were being manufactured, they flew to Los Angeles, where Anine had lived previously, and where she wanted to return. “I always said that if we were going to move to California, we needed to have a family business,” Nico says.

They arrived in May of 2012 and a month later launched ANINE BING on Shopify. They didn’t have a credit score in the U.S., so in order to process online payments, they put $100,000 into a secured account. In their first month, they sold $50,000 worth of goods. When they exceeded $100,000 the next month, the bank blocked their account, suspecting them of fraud. Once the bank understood that the sales were legitimate, the account was unfrozen, and the sales continued to pour in. That original Shopify site, created with a budget of $1,500, took the brand to “millions of dollars in sales before we ever thought about changing it,” Nico says.

Annika Meller joined ANINE BING as their first hire in the summer of 2012. She remembers working 12-hour days alongside Anine and Nico in the garage they rented in Silver Lake, each of them doing whatever was needed in the moment — shipping orders, answering emails, arranging photoshoots, sorting inventory. At one point, Meller, who had a business degree and came from a marketing background, suggested they make a five-year plan. Anine smiled at Nico, who said politely, “How about we just focus on packing these boxes?”

For Anine, who knew fashion but had never run a business, those early days doing “a bit of everything” were critical to her success as an entrepreneur. “Today, with 250-plus employees, I have a much better understanding of what each team member is doing, because in a way I’ve been doing their jobs myself since the beginning,” she says.

“Most entrepreneurs get their start because they’re good at one thing,” Nico adds. “What they don’t know is that if you want to build a successful and sustainable business, you have to get good at a lot of other things. You’re forced to wear a new hat every month.”

In 2016, Index Ventures partner Danny Rimer was waiting to pick his daughter up from preschool. As another parent commented on the rise of influencers, Rimer said he thought Instagram might emerge as the next big shopping channel (“the next QVC or Home Shopping Network,” as he puts it). The other parent, who was from Denmark, told Rimer about a couple he knew who had started a fashion business with a similar vision. Rimer met with Anine and Nico, who he says won him over with their authenticity and drive.

“Anine was absolutely not interested in fame or celebrity. She was exclusively interested in building a great brand and a portfolio of products that would resonate with their target customer,” Rimer says. “And then in Nico, you had someone with enormous experience on the production and supply side, with a huge network of manufacturers all over the world. The fact that their skills were so well-matched, and that as a husband and wife team they seemed to have a healthy relationship, gave us the confidence to back them.”

Anine and Nico’s complementary skill sets paid off from the beginning. Their initial collection was only nine products, but with Nico taking photos and Anine styling and modeling the clothes, they were able to mix and match the pieces, posting new content every day. “Anine trained for that on her blog,” Nico says. As their following grew, celebrities and stylists began coming to the garage to try on clothes. “That was one of the secret sauces to why we were picked up so quickly,” Meller says. “With Anine and her background, and Instagram taking off right at that moment, we could ride that influencer wave that was about to be created.”

"They’re both good with change. They adapt quickly, they’re super flexible, and at the same time humble enough to understand that over time you need to bring in experts who know more than you do about certain things, because that’s what will take the company forward.”
—Annika Meller, Chief Strategy Officer at ANINE BING

Another strategic decision the company made was launching new products every week. As Meller explains, this approach was “unheard of” in designer fashion at the time, with nearly all brands operating on a seasonal basis. Once again, Nico’s manufacturing experience and vendor relationships came in handy, allowing the brand to consistently launch new products and collections, and “giving customers a reason to check in with us every week, to come into the store, to go visit one of our wholesale partners,” says CFO Paul Courell.

After a year in the garage in Silver Lake, ANINE BING moved into a room in a downtown office in 2013. More than a decade later, they still occupy the space and have since taken over the entire floor of the building, along with offices on the floors above and below. In 2015, the brand opened their first retail store, in New York’s West Village, followed by a second location in Los Angeles later that year. Today, they operate five stores in New York City, four in the Los Angeles area, and dozens more around the world.

Meller, who is now ANINE BING’s Chief Strategy Officer, has seen the company change in more ways than she can count. She says her favorite memories are still those early days in the garage — “sitting on the floor eating Subway sandwiches, cutting labels out of denim that had arrived from Turkey in the wrong size.” Through all the ups and downs, she says, Anine and Nico have stayed focused on building the business.

“That’s one of those fantastic characteristics they both have,” Meller says. “They’re both good with change. They adapt quickly, they’re super flexible, and at the same time humble enough to understand that over time you need to bring in experts who know more than you do about certain things, because that’s what will take the company forward.”

Gentin joined in the spring of 2020 — a week before Los Angeles went into lockdown. She says the company acted quickly, sending everyone home and halting production, while slowing their release cadence to ensure they had new products to last through the year. “Something I noticed right away is how fast we move,” she says. “We take a long time to make decisions, deliberating and analyzing and reviewing all the data. But once a decision is made, we act fast.” (“We move quickly, but we always sleep on things,” Nico adds.)

“In many ways, I feel like we’re just getting started."
—Olivia Gentin, COO of ANINE BING

Gentin says it was clear even before joining the company that Anine and Nico had built “something akin to a rocketship.” Meeting with them individually, hearing them describe their vision, she says the founders were clear and consistent about building a “global brand that would define our space.” That’s evident in their retail strategy, with directly owned and operated stores in eight different countries. “For a brand that’s only been around for 12 years, that’s a huge undertaking,” Gentin says. “It reflects not just ambition, but long-term thinking and a confidence to go and build a physical presence all over the world.”

Today, ANINE BING is poised to keep expanding globally. While it can be a lot to juggle — an international team, multiple offices, three seasons in development at any given time — everyone on the team sees the opportunity in front of them. Meller, who recently celebrated 12 years at Anine Bing, says, “In many ways, I feel like we’re just getting started. There’s so much energy and excitement for the future, knowing that we’ve been working really hard to build this brand, and now we’re sitting here today optimized to keep growing and be successful.”

“We have all the structure in place,” Nico says. “We have the brand, the styles, the fittings are right. We’ve sold enough to know the customer group is out there. Now it’s just about scaling to meet that demand. And you need to do that while the cake is hot out of the oven.”

For Anine and Nico, the biggest adjustment of the past few years has been learning to step aside and let others lead. “Today, it’s much more about alignment and finding the middle ground,” Nico says. “You can’t win every battle, and you shouldn’t fight every battle.”

In June 2024, they welcomed Julie Bourgeois as ANINE BING’s first global president. Based in the company’s new Paris office, Bourgeois previously led global retail strategy at the Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, and before that worked at global brands like Jacadi, Nespresso, and Christian Dior. She’s been tasked with building the team in Europe and expanding into new markets like Asia. Already this year, the company has opened three stores in China — none of which Nico has stepped foot in, a far cry from the days when he was walking the streets scouting new locations, installing the light fixtures and laying the floors himself.