Entrepreneur by design: How this founder continued her career on her own terms

Lauren Bucquet spent nearly a decade learning how to build footwear inside an established fashion company. Then she decided to see what she could build without one.

As design director at rag & bone, Bucquet worked with factory owners and patternmakers to develop footwear and accessories for the brand. But after 10 years, she was ready to leave institutional fashion behind—and take the expertise she had developed there with her.

Bucquet joined rag & bone when it had just four employees and watched it grow to roughly 350 by the time she left. That early experience was formative: There was no product development team, so designers worked directly with factories and took on responsibilities well beyond design.

As the company grew, she missed that scrappy environment and the founder mindset that came with it. But she wasn’t leaving with a business plan in hand.

“I didn’t have the idea to immediately start my brand,” Bucquet said. Instead, she moved from New York to Los Angeles and took on freelance consulting work, a reset that gave her room to think about what she would do differently if she built a brand of her own.

In October 2018, Bucquet launched direct-to-consumer contemporary women’s footwear brand Labucq, a portmanteau of her first and last names. Starting the company wasn’t simply about putting her own name on a shoe—it meant figuring out how to make decisions without the structure she’d spent her career working within.

Stepping out

When Bucquet entered the footwear market, she knew she needed to find an opening where her experience could give her an edge. As direct-to-consumer brands gained traction, she saw an opportunity to bring a design perspective and level of craftsmanship she had trouble finding elsewhere.

“I wasn’t seeing anything with the design perspective that I could bring to the table,” Bucquet said.

At the same time she was also paying attention to the risks built into the traditional fashion business—watching department stores struggle financially and hearing stories about brands waiting to be paid. For Bucquet, that made independence feel less like a gamble and more like a way to reduce her exposure to a system she no longer trusted.

“If we could figure out how to market online and sell directly ourselves, why not operate independently and not be relying on orders and payments from outside vendors?” she said.

Sole decision

Running Labucq also exposed Bucquet to parts of the business she hadn’t needed to think about at rag & bone. Customer acquisition, in particular, was a learning curve.

“How are we going to attract people to this brand and remind them to come to our website?” she said. “It’s really a constant thing that I really underestimated before I started.”

At first, Bucquet handled all customer service by herself. Eventually, she hired someone to take it off her plate. She found the role taxing not only because of the time it consumed, but because she was emotionally invested in every interaction with customers.

For someone considering leaving an established career to start a company, Bucquet said she would recommend aspiring founders focus on resilience before making the leap.

“Ask yourself if you have the grit to really stick with it and figure it out,” she told Founder Brew. “When you have your own company, the buck stops with you. If you don’t do it, it’s not going to get done, and you’re going to have to continue problem-solving every single day.”

Becoming a founder has changed Bucquet’s life outside of work, too. She is now raising two young children in Los Angeles, and says that running her own business gives her the flexibility to set her own hours and be present for her family. Rather than leaving her career behind, Bucquet said the move has expanded what she’s capable of doing.

“I left behind the grind of working in an office every day, which has been a real positive thing for me,” she said. “Even though you could say I left my career, I know how to do so many more things now than I did when I was leaving that job. It’s been a whole life reset for me in a good way.”