In 1996, two brothers who had spent their teens helping out in their parents’ shoe shop in Ang Mo Kio opened a small store of their own in Amara Shopping Centre. It sold women’s shoes. Nothing about it looked like the start of a global business.
Three decades later, the name above that door hangs in malls from Jakarta to Dubai.
That is the Singapore fashion story in miniature. The home market is tiny, the climate is relentless and the competition arrives daily from Tokyo, Seoul, Shenzhen and Madrid. So the brands that survive learn to travel early.
A Singapore fashion brand is a clothing, footwear or accessories label founded and run from Singapore, typically designed for a tropical climate and a small home market, and built from the start to sell across Asia and beyond.
What follows is our pick of the ten that matter most right now, and what each one teaches about building a fashion brand that outgrows its birthplace.
How we chose the list
Most of these companies are privately held and do not publish comparable sales figures, so a revenue league table would be guesswork dressed up as data. Instead, this list is selected on market presence, recognition and growth: store footprint at home and abroad, visibility in the international fashion press, and momentum over the past few years. Every brand on it was founded in Singapore and is still run from here.
The order reflects scale first and influence second, with our commentary on what each brand does well.
Two notes on eligibility. Retail platforms such as Zalora are excluded, because they sell other people’s labels. And Shein, now headquartered in Singapore, gets its own section further down, because the question of whether it belongs is more interesting than a yes or no.
Why does a small island keep producing brands that travel?
Because it has to. A label that sells only to Singaporeans hits a ceiling quickly, and that ceiling arrives before the brand has had time to grow up. Most of the founders on this list looked outward early.
There is a well-trodden route for this. Fashion labels tend to go abroad in stages: first through stockists and department stores, which let a brand test a market without signing a lease; then through flagship stores in a few chosen cities; and later through franchising or partners who take on the operational load while the founder keeps control of product and image. You will see every one of those stages below, sometimes inside the same company.
The other thing a small market teaches is clarity. With so little room at home, a muddled brand gets found out fast.
The scale players
1. Charles & Keith
The brothers Charles and Keith Wong opened their first store at Amara Shopping Centre in 1996 and began designing their own shoes the following year, partly to escape a crowded market selling the same styles. They cut out middlemen and worked directly with factories, which let them move quickly and price keenly. Their first overseas outlet opened in Jakarta two years after the launch.
Charles & Keith’s Spring Summer 2023 campaign with ITZY shows how far the Amara Shopping Centre shoe shop has travelled.
In 2011, L Capital Asia, the private equity arm of LVMH, bought a 20 per cent stake for more than US$30 million. That investment was a signal to the industry: a Singapore shoe chain had become a serious fashion business.
The brand’s sharpest branding moment, though, was unplanned. In January 2023, a 17-year-old named Zoe Gabriel posted a TikTok thanking her father for her “first luxury bag”, a black Charles & Keith tote costing S$79.90. Some viewers mocked her.
The founders invited her and her father to lunch and showed them around the headquarters. On YouGov’s brand tracker, the company’s buzz score jumped from 7.9 to 27.6 in eight days.
The lesson? A brand that responds with warmth rather than defensiveness can turn an insult into affection.
2. Pedro
Pedro started life in 2005 as a men’s footwear line under the Charles & Keith group, adding belts, sunglasses and other accessories two years later. It now sells to women as well.
Pedro’s ‘Change Is To Evolve’ campaign film shows the label building a distinct, design-led identity apart from its parent.
Pedro matters because it shows how a group can grow by building a second brand instead of stretching the first. Charles & Keith is unmistakably a womenswear name; asking it to sell men’s brogues would have blurred it. A separate label with its own identity let the company reach a new customer without diluting the original.
Together, the two brands now operate more than 700 stores worldwide.
The digital natives
3. Love, Bonito
Love, Bonito began in 2005 as BonitoChico, a LiveJournal blogshop selling pre-loved clothes, run by Rachel Lim with sisters Velda and Viola Tan. It was renamed Love, Bonito in 2010, when the founders began designing their own range, and it did not open a physical shop until 2017.
That order of events is the brand’s advantage. Love, Bonito spent twelve years learning its customers online before it ever paid shop rent, so by the time the stores arrived, it knew exactly who would walk through the door.
It now has 27 stores in six markets: Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, Hong Kong and the Philippines.
In 2024 it swapped its text logo for a heart-shaped “LB” monogram under the line “Ready to Live, Not Just Ready to Wear”. Rachel Lim and chief executive Dione Song were both named in the Business of Fashion’s BoF 500 in 2023.
4. Aupen
The newest name here, and the most improbable. Aupen launched in late 2022, started by Nicholas Tan, a former Singapore national swimmer and model, from his grandmother’s house. For roughly two years nobody knew who was behind it. Tan revealed himself only towards the end of 2024.
In the meantime, the bags had found their way onto Taylor Swift, who carried the asymmetric Nirvana shoulder bag in 2023. The brand switched from faux leather to calfskin in early 2024, raised prices and began moving production towards Paris, where it works with LVMH’s Métiers d’Art division and French suppliers.
Aupen’s branding lesson is about mystery. A brand with no founder story invites people to project their own, and an anonymous label worn by the famous becomes a puzzle people want to solve.
The tailors
5. Benjamin Barker
Nelson Yap inherited his father’s struggling business in a MacPherson warehouse, along with about S$500,000 of debt. His mother remortgaged the family home to lend him S$100,000, and in 2009 he opened Benjamin Barker at Marina Square, selling suits and shirts cut for Asian builds.
Benjamin Barker’s ‘Reformat’ film comes from the menswear label Nelson Yap opened at Marina Square in 2009 with suits cut for Asian builds.
The name sounds like an old English outfitter. In fact “Benjamin” nods to Yap’s years in Australia and “Barker” to a type of leather. The brand borrows the codes of old-school menswear (vintage-style interiors, in-house tailoring, a café at Cathay Cineleisure) and pairs them with a fit that Asian men struggled to find in Western labels.
It now trades in Australia, Malaysia, Cambodia, the Philippines and Vietnam, and opened its first Hong Kong store in Causeway Bay in September 2025.
6. In Good Company
Four friends founded In Good Company in 2012 with a simple idea: well-made essentials and reworked classics that last longer than a season. Its tailoring is calm, its colours restrained, and every piece is made in Jiangsu by the same partners the brand has used since day one.
That consistency is the brand. In a city full of trend-chasers, In Good Company sells quiet confidence, and it has grown the patient way, through department stores such as Tangs in Singapore and Parkson in Kuala Lumpur before opening a flagship on Joo Chiat Road in 2026. A shop on a heritage shophouse street, sharing space with local makers and a tea stand, says more about its values than any campaign could.
The designers
7. Ong Shunmugam
Priscilla Shunmugam launched her label in December 2010 with a collection called Orientalism, and it became known for rethinking the cheongsam for the intelligent, modern woman. It later reinterpreted the baju kurung and kebaya in a 2017 collection for Malay women.
Ong Shunmugam’s RGB 2017 show at Singapore Fashion Week presents the label’s view that Asian dress can be contemporary without being costume.
Ong Shunmugam showed at Paris Fashion Week for spring/summer 2013, and it was the first womenswear label to retail at the National Museum of Singapore. Its brand is built on a clear point of view: that Asian dress can be contemporary without being costume. That conviction is why it is discussed in cultural terms as much as commercial ones.
8. Aijek
Danelle Woo founded Aijek in 2010 for the modern woman, and its route abroad has run largely through stockists rather than shops: more than 40 of them, including Neiman Marcus and Revolve.
Aijek is a reminder that the wholesale stage is not a lesser path. A label that earns space on international shop floors builds credibility in markets it could never afford to enter alone.
The viral and the principled
9. Beyond the Vines
Husband-and-wife team Rebecca Ting and Daniel Chew founded Beyond the Vines in 2015 as a ready-to-wear label. Then, in 2020, its puffy, pleated Dumpling Bag went viral on social media during the pandemic, and a clothing brand suddenly became a bag brand.
Beyond the Vines’ own team unpacks the Dumpling Bag, the pleated design that went viral in 2020 and turned a clothing label into a bag brand.
The founders did something smart with that luck. In November 2020 they rebranded Beyond the Vines as a “multidisciplinary design studio”, widening the frame so the brand could stretch into bags, homeware and collaborations without seeming to wander off. It has since opened in Thailand and the Philippines and run pop-ups in Japan.
10. Matter
Matter was founded in 2013 by Ho Ren Yung and Yvonne Suñer, and it started with a single product: printed trousers. Its fabrics are made with artisan communities using block printing, handloom weaving and ikat, and its tagline, “Change Beyond Textiles”, makes the brand’s purpose explicit.
Matter shows how a small label can compete without competing on price. Its customers are buying the story of where and how a garment was made as much as the garment itself, and the brand builds every collection around that story.
Is Shein a Singapore fashion brand?
This is the question people actually argue about online. Shein was founded in Nanjing, China, in October 2008, and moved its headquarters to Singapore in early 2022. On paper, then, it is a Singapore company.
But a brand is more than a registered address. Shein’s product, supply chain and identity were formed in China, and to most shoppers it does not read as Singaporean. It belongs in a conversation about where global companies choose to base themselves, not on a list of homegrown labels. The same test applies to any brand: where was its point of view formed, and where are its decisions made?
What the list says about building a fashion brand
Look across these ten and a few patterns appear.
Fit is a brand promise. Benjamin Barker grew by solving a problem Western labels ignored, and that problem became its positioning. Love, Bonito did its fitting online, learning its customers for twelve years before it signed a lease.
Second brands beat stretched brands. Pedro gave the Charles & Keith group a men’s business without confusing its core customer.
Luck needs a frame. Beyond the Vines turned a viral bag into a lasting identity by redefining what the brand was, and Charles & Keith turned a moment of online mockery into goodwill by acting quickly and kindly.
And travelling early is not optional. Most labels on this list looked abroad early, and several used stockists and department stores before committing to flagships. For a Singapore brand, internationalisation is not the later chapter. It is the plan.
Fitting-room questions
What is the biggest fashion brand from Singapore?
By store footprint, Charles & Keith is the largest Singapore-founded fashion brand. Together with its sister label Pedro, it operates more than 700 stores worldwide.
Is Love, Bonito a Singapore brand?
Yes. Love, Bonito began in Singapore in 2005 as the blogshop BonitoChico, became Love, Bonito in 2010 and now has 27 stores across six Asian markets.
Did LVMH invest in Charles & Keith?
Yes. In 2011, L Capital Asia, the private equity arm of LVMH, bought a 20 per cent stake in the brand, which brothers Charles and Keith Wong founded in 1996.
If your label is ready for its first overseas runway, see how the EDGE grant for international branding can help fund the move.
