Hanifa 暂停运营 8 个多月后重启，从预售转向现货发售

November 11, 2026

Hanifa founder Anifa Mvuemba.Photo: Courtesy of Hanifa

Hanifa is back. A little over eight months after founder Anifa Mvuemba paused operations for her label, which had been in business for 15 years, it’s relaunching with a new collection and updated business model.

The collection features the colorful party clothes the brand is known for, like a red evening gown with a bright blue feathered brooch and a blue liquid organza dress (a 2022 revival bound to become the season’s made-to-order showstopper). There are also more practical pieces, like Hanifa’s take on the track pant (barrel-legged with a silk stripe) and bomber jacket. The Harper dress, a green and black-dotted hit from last year, is now available in a deep blue.

Mvuemba hopes the new Hanifa feels true to the brand’s original ethos, just a little more mature: the designer was 21 when she started the brand in 2011, and now that she’s about to turn 36, her style and taste has evolved, she says, alongside her customers’. Mvuemba spent months reworking the brand’s fabrications, cuts and patterns, especially for knitwear, its biggest category. She went through dozens of iterations to find the right cashmere blend, for example, that will hold its shape and have cashmere’s soft handfeel, while keeping the brand in the price range its customers have come to expect.

The relaunch will be a test in regaining consumer trust. Things began to unwind last December, when purchases made during her brand’s annual Hanifa Friday sale in November failed to ship, thanks to production delays and supply chain issues. For some customers, months went by without any communication — or delivery — from the brand. Disgruntled customers took to social media to complain, not just about delayed orders (all of which Hanifa said it was eventually able to fulfill, or issued refunds for), but about the brand’s general direction, which they believed went downhill. In a statement posted online in March, Mvuemba apologized, and announced the brand would go on hiatus.

“Mentally, I wasn’t prepared to continue,” Mvuemba says. “I wasn’t in the right headspace. And in order for me to be the best version of myself, the best leader, mother, wife, I could be to my family, my team, my business — I needed that mental clarity to just take a step back, rest, recalibrate, to get a clear view on what we needed to do for the business as a whole. I needed a break,” Mvuemba says. “I’m just not the type of founder or person that performs for the optics. It was extremely hard to do, but it was necessary, because in this space, it’s not something that we see often. But it’s something that we as founders need to be able to do.”

In the end, Mvuemba only took about two weeks off from work, she says. She found a therapist and spent time with her baby, who was born in December and whose maternity care was interrupted by crisis management in the fallout. Then, she turned her attention to Hanifa 2.0.

“I love this business so much. I love this brand so much. I had to get back,” she says. “We uprooted everything. We looked at our communications, our branding, our sizing, our website. Now, everything — our processes, our manufacturers — has shifted, and it’s nice to have had this time to sit through everything, go back, revise, go back, revise, and then say, ‘OK, we’re ready.’”

Now the brand is ready to relaunch, Hanifa is returning to market on different terms.

The biggest change to Hanifa’s operations is switching to a ready-to-ship model, versus a past pre-order model. With no pre-order period, where the brand could produce only a committed number of SKUs, the company has fronted the entire new collection (which Mvuemba says is “expensive but necessary”) and plans to use real-time performance data to determine production cadence and inventory investments. Having inventory overhead also shortens lead times for purchases to be fulfilled, and gives the brand space to ship items by sea rather than air, which cuts costs.

“We thought it was really important to come out the door swinging,” Mvuemba says. “People want their things when they want their things.” It’s also invested in new customer service and logistics partners, with brand plans to build data analysis into its production cycle to ensure that it’s responding quicker to what’s selling. Mvuemba hired a brand strategist, an art director and a PR firm to help steer the comeback story. The brand has always been bootstrapped, but she says she’s open to outside funding if the right partner comes along. She’s also open to the right retail partners, but that right now, the direct-to-consumer model is the best fit thanks to production and shipping timing.

Her focus above all, she says, is her customer. Mvuemba comes back time and again to the importance of data, and how much she wants to spend the rollout of this collection listening to feedback. She hopes that the brand’s core customer — the company has a legion of longtime loyalists who were sad to see it go — returns, and that the brand can grow its reach. By category, she’s excited about expanding the brand’s shoes and outerwear, both of which are steps in building a more complete ready-to-wear label, which is her main goal for next year. Scaling, Mvuemba says, will come at the right pace.

“I used to say I want it to be as big as LVMH. And with this year, I just had so much time to reflect and I’m OK with the pace that we’re going,” she says. “I just want to have a globally recognized brand that a lot of women can identify with and that we can continue to create these beautiful, amazing pieces. I’m so excited to show them this new era of the brand. We’re sharper, we’re clearer, we understand who our girl is, who our customer is, and I’m excited to give them more.”

Hilary Milnes is the executive editor at Vogue Business, based in New York. Before joining Vogue Business, she was editor of Modern Retail, a digital trade publication covering the changes happening in the retail industry. Prior, she helped launch Glossy, an online fashion trade, and served as its managing editor ... Read More

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