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Armed with that insight, the brand has shifted emphasis to Europe’s major cities and built what van de Camp calls a “pyramid model” of distribution: top-tier retailers for brand-building, mid-tier for broader access, and mass for volume. The key change is segmentation. “If you go to a luxury retailer and offer them a product that is also on Amazon, they won’t be interested,” he says. “So we now design assortments unique to each level of distribution. That was a fundamental change — and fundamental to our success.”

This means difficult choices. “We have massive business at the bottom of the pyramid with one of our most iconic products, the Brasil Logo,” van de Camp says. “Now, we need to divest from that, because you want to sell it at the top of the pyramid. In the past, we had one line and sold it to everybody. That has shifted since we started this journey at the beginning of 2024.”

Examples illustrate the approach. In London, Havaianas sits within Schuh, Office, Foot Locker and Selfridges — stores that are metres apart, yet serve very different customers. Paris follows the same pattern: Galeries Lafayette with a premium execution, versus youth-focused Citadium next door. In the UK, Flannels secured exclusivity for the Dolce & Gabbana collaboration, while Office received a bespoke in-store system tailored to its customer base.

Alongside wholesale, the brand has redefined its own channels. “Our dot-com used to be very price driven, very volume driven,” he says. “Now, it’s a full-price proposition, focused on experience, education and storytelling. Premium doesn’t mean more expensive — but it shouldn’t have a grocery feel.”

Still, wholesale remains the main growth engine. “Unlike brands that say ‘DTC [direct-to-consumer] first’, we are not a 365 business; we don’t have a 12-month business. Wholesale is our engine of growth. We leverage those partners like no other, and we leverage DTC to show what a really cool, premium flip flop experience looks like,” he says.

That pyramid strategy has already brought in partners including Zara, JD, Naked Copenhagen and Galeries Lafayette. “The reassurance we’ve had this year is that the strategy works,” says van de Camp. “From Zara knocking on our door to Kylie Jenner wearing Gimaguas, the momentum is real.”

Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.

More on this topic:

The darker side of flip flops

2025: The summer without trends

Do shoes have a circular future?

to ignite our skin
Patricia Ayres, Elaine Cameron-Weir, Sarah Friend, Yu Ji, Mire Lee, Umico Niwa, Mimi Park, Ana Raylander Mártis dos Anjos, Sofía Sinibaldi, and Erik Tlaseca
September 18–December 22, 2025

Opening reception: Wednesday, September 17, 2025, 6–8pm
Artist program: Thursday, September 18, 2025, 6:30–8:30pm
Off-site performance with Onassis ONX: Artist’s Model by Sarah Friend: Friday, September 19, 2025, 6-8:30pm
Find Your Gremlin youth workshop with Umico Niwa: Saturday, October 18, 2025, 10:30am-1:30pm
Exchange Session with Mimi Park: Saturday, December 13, 2025, 1-3pm

to ignite our skin features newly commissioned and recent works from an international group of artists whose contributions, spanning sculpture, installation, photography, and architectural intervention, explore shedding as a condition of the body today, locating it as an act of transition, becoming, regeneration, and refusal.

Like a snake undergoing ecdysis or the peeling of a scab, the artworks embrace the image of replacing one’s own skin, with its opulent decay and raw vulnerability, navigating the uneasy tension between the intrinsic desire to evade capture through transformation and neoliberal-driven tech’s sinister demand for perpetual reinvention. Taking precarious sculpture as the departure point, the exhibition features works that are texturally layered and pieced together from a hybrid of materials weathered by or forged through the body: worn clothes, collected debris, scavenged organic matter, tattered construction material, remnants of military ware, or AI-generated—discarded, found, recovered, composed, and rewrought into embodiments of the in-between.

In Practice: Nadim Choufi
October 2–11, 2025

Opening reception and performance by Elsa Saade: Thursday, October 2, 2025, 5–8pm
A Dragon in the Halls of Diplomacy: Saturday, October 11, 2025, 4–5pm

Nadim Choufi’s work explores how ideals of progress manifest and seduce, and the price of such visions on the lives subjected to their realization. Through sculpture, film, and text, Choufi draws on visual and literary practices that oppose or complicate narratives of national and global progress. For Choufi’s project at SculptureCenter, he has produced a new publication, In the Face of the Dragon, in which he composed a cento poem from lines borrowed from Arab poets who transform themselves, their lovers, and their people into animals and natural elements, speaking through these tongues of love and resistance.

In Practice: Coco Klockner
October 18–December 22, 2025

Opening reception: Friday, October 17, 2025, 6–8pm

Coco Klockner’s practice moves between text, sound, sculpture, and architectural intervention, immersing viewers in site-responsive environments that probe the ways systems of representation are constructed. The forms that emerge in her work mirror and intersect the dynamics embedded in the structural concerns of transness, examining the terms through which its status is constituted. For SculptureCenter, she will present a new installation that uses light, packed earth, moisture, and vibration to resound an intimate encounter between lovers while exploring the conditions that shape language and desire.

Sara Deraedt: Someone else
October 18–December 22, 2025

Support

Generous support for to ignite our skin is provided by Zachary Arnold and Dalal Ani Arnold. 

Special thanks to Tina Kim Gallery, LLANO, and Yehudi Hollander-Pappi. 

In Practice is made possible by the Elaine Graham Weitzen Commissioning Fund for Emerging Artists, which supports the production of new work by artists selected from SculptureCenter’s annual open call.

Major support for the In Practice 2025 program is provided by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. The In Practice program is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Generous support for In Practice is provided by Sarah Elson.

In Practice: Nadim Choufi is supported by the Mondriaan Fund, the public fund for visual art and cultural heritage.

to ignite our skin, Sara Deraedt: Someone else, and In Practice: Coco Klockner are supported by the Eva Hesse Initiative for New Sculpture.

Support for all of SculptureCenter’s work with artists from abroad is provided by the International Council: Anonymous, Stephen Cheng, Micki Meng, Yan Du, Thomas Berger, Antonio Murzi and Diana Morgan, Audrey Rose Smith and Vicente Muñoz, Füsun Eczacıbaşı – SAHA.

Leadership support for SculptureCenter’s exhibitions and programs is provided by Carol Bove, Barbara Gundlach, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation, and Teiger Foundation. Major support is provided by Richard Chang, Jill and Peter Kraus, Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins, Eleanor Heyman Propp, Jacques Louis Vidal, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Generous support is provided by Candy and Michael Barasch, Libby and Adrian Ellis, Andrew Fine and David Andersson, Jane Hait and Justin Beal, Gabrielle Humphrey, Amy and Sean Lyons, David Maclean, Ronay and Richard Menschel, the May and Samuel Rudin Foundation, Inc., and Fred Wilson. Additional funding is provided by Lily Lyons, Charmaine and Roman Mendoza, Elizabeth and Matt Quigley, Katharine Ristich, Alexander S.C. Rower, Julien Sarkozy, Carla Shen, and Lisa Young and Steven Abraham.

The 13th Berlin Biennale, passing the fugitive on, presents more than 60 artistic positions across four venues until September 14, 2025. The artists’ events form an integral part of the exhibition, investigating fugitivity. Together, they comprise the Encounters series. From September 10 until 14 these events take place as part of Berlin Art Week 2025.

Jelena Petrović in conversation with Aleksandar Matković and Godofredo Enes Pereira
What Does the Name of War Stand for Today?
Sequence 2: Is There Anything in This World You Would Be Ready to Give Your Life For?
September 5, 2025, 5–6:30 pm
Former Courthouse Lehrter Straße

Connecting local sites across planetary mines, the second part of the event series initiated by Milica Tomić takes a conversation on the extractivist frontlines where war economies persist—not despite peace, but through it.

Margherita Moscardini, Lawrence Liang and Emîne Osê
The Stairway on Trial
“Give me a legal personhood, and I will be state-less.”
September 6, 2025, 4:30–6:30 pm
KW Institute for Contemporary Art

Mimicking a flight of stairs in East Jerusalem—from the Palestinian Occupied Territories—the walkable stone sculpture by Margherita Moscardini becomes a fitting stage for the talk The Stairway on Trial. A lawyer from the artist’s legal team and one signatory of a single stone composing the staircase, imagine scenarios from legal speculative fiction or the lived experience of the Autonomous Administration of North East Syria/Kongra Star. 

The Claims of Art from a World of Crisis
Zasha Colah, Marita Muukkonen, Selma Selman, Valentina Viviani, moderated by Timea Junghaus
September 10, 2025, 4:30 pm
ERIAC (European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture)

If art exists, most explicitly, in moments of crisis and catastrophe, what are its languages and preoccupations? Is it what we expect, or can even understand fully in the present? In an era where crisis has become the status quo, we ask which are the artistic claims of our times?

Program of the Sister Organization Sophiensæle:
Boglárka Börcsök and Andreas Bolm: subjoyride
September 10, 2025, 8–10 pm
September 11/12/13, 2025, 9–11 pm
Sophiensæle

subjoyride takes audiences on a visceral journey through the extraordinary life and work of German Dadaist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven—a scatological cosmos of performance, poetry, and sculpture.

Program of the Sister Organization Sophiensæle:
Oliver Zahn: Crowd Control
September 11/12/13/14, 2025, 7–9:30 pm
Sophiensæle

To prepare for protests, riot police forces stage scripted simulations of such scenarios. In Crowd Control, seven performers transpose these police tactics and practices into the black box of the theater.

Mila Panić with Tamer Kattan
Big Mouth
September 11, 2025, 8:30–9:30 pm
KW Institute for Contemporary Art

For her stand-up comedy nights, Mila Panić is joined by local Berlin-based comedians. With her texts, she dives into topics like war, empathy, and victimisation—told through personal stories of growing up in Bosnia and moving to Germany.

Sarnath Banarjee
Critical Imagination Deficit Lecture 3: Other People’s Nostalgia
September 12, 2025, 6–7 pm
KW Institute for Contemporary Art

When a comic book is staged well, it can produce unexpected experiences—melancholy, unease, joy, longing, and disquiet. Through his picto-textual performances, Sarnath Banerjee seeks to record the emotional history of our times.

Part of the film series of the Sister Organization SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA: Fugitive Traces: Challenging Narratives and Power Structures:
Esquirlas [Splinters] (Argentina 2020, D: Natalia Garayalde)
September 13, 2025, 6–7:15 pm
SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA

In 1995, in the Argentine city of Río Tercero an explosion at a military arms factory left devastation in its wake. Filmmaker Natalia Garayalde offers a profoundly intimate perspective on this collective memory by turning her lens toward her own family’s experience.

Gernot Wieland with Carla Åhlander and Konstantin von Sichart
Monologue of a sock or What would we have told the children?
September 14, 2025, 3–3:40 pm and 5–5:40 pm
KW Institute for Contemporary Art

Three voices lead the audience through stories of animals and childhood, hierarchies and homes, and the quiet comedy of trying and failing. With a mixture of storytelling, moving image, and the occasional threadbare puppet, this performance is not quite theatre, not quite a lecture.

The Berlin Biennale is organized by KUNST-WERKE BERLIN e. V. The Berlin Biennale is funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation). The Kulturstiftung des Bundes is funded by the Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media).

ANSELM KIEFER’S WASSERFARBEN PREMIERE IN BERLIN

Anselm Kiefer is one of the most remarkable contemporary artists. For the first time, his watercolours will be shown in Berlin. Beginning on 12 September 2025, Bastian Gallery will present the exhibition »Wasserfarben« featuring 21 works by the artist.

Twenty-seven years after the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York devoted a comprehensive exhibition to his works on paper, and following exhibitions in Paris and most recently at the Nolde Museum in Seebüll, Kiefer’s watercolours now find their moment in Berlin.

Kiefer’s works explore human existence and the cyclical nature of history. They are inspired by literature, philosophy, natural and occult sciences, mythology, legends, and religion. Poetry often stands at the center of his artistic practice. Kiefer himself has stated that “poems are the world.” Through emblematic inscriptions, he integrates poetry directly into his visual language. The transient seems to triumph over the illusion of permanence. Becoming and decay, both in nature and humanity, are key themes in Kiefer’s imaginative landscapes. Their essence speaks through titles and inscriptions such as ›Fugit amor‹, ›Not yet‹ and ›Storm of Roses‹. The topography of these watercolours follows the paths of geography and history, but also of myth and fairy tale. They are spaces of recollection and intuition, where the visible becomes a trace, and the moment a kind of echo.

Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945 in Donaueschingen. He has lived and worked near Paris for many years. In Germany, he has been awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and the German National Prize. In France, his works are on permanent display in major public institutions such as the Louvre and the Panthéon. In 2025, museums in Europe, Asia, and the United States including the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Royal Academy in London, Nijo Castle in Kyoto, and the Saint Louis Art Museum present extensive exhibitions of his work.

»Wasserfarben« marks Kiefer’s seventh solo exhibition at Bastian Gallery and his first in Berlin devoted entirely to watercolour. A catalogue has been published to accompany the exhibition, with texts by Heiner Bastian, Christian Ring, and Peter-Klaus Schuster.