Fashion startup Atorie announced Thursday a $9.5 million seed round, with participation from investors including a16z Speedrun, Night Capital, and Lightspeed Ventures' Jeremy Liew.
Shoppers can visit the Atorie website to purchase handbags and clothing made from the same materials—and in the same factories—that produce high-end luxury goods. The prices are notably accessible: an Italian leather handbag costs just a few hundred dollars, compared to thousands for comparable pieces from brands like Prada or Louis Vuitton.
The startup enters the market at a time when 'dupe culture' has surged in popularity, while the luxury sector faces growing consumer backlash in the post-pandemic era, driven by swift and frequent price hikes. As a result, younger consumers especially have increasingly sought cheaper, near-identical replicas of premium items, with the act of finding and flaunting dupes becoming almost a status symbol in itself.
However, Atorie's offerings are mostly not dupes, according to co-founder and serial entrepreneur Redouane Ramdani. 'It's the same material, same craftsmanship,' he said. 'It's coming from the same factories.' He also distinguishes Atorie from fast fashion. 'It's slow,' he clarified.
Before launching Atorie, Ramdani built the creator platform Snipfeed, which was acquired in 2024. Growing up in France in a family involved in luxury manufacturing, he always harbored an ambition to return to the industry he loved as a child. By the time he sold Snipfeed, however, the luxury manufacturing landscape had transformed significantly.
The biggest shift he observed was that luxury factories were no longer merely manufacturing goods. Traditionally, a brand like Ralph Lauren would provide its own designs and materials to a factory, which would then produce them. The challenge was that brands had to commit to large minimum orders, often leading to overproduction. Meanwhile, factories depended on a small number of large brand customers, exposing them to financial and inventory risk if a brand withdrew at the last minute or overproduced items went unsold.
'What's changing is that the best factories increasingly have their own design and product-development capabilities,' Ramdani told TechCrunch. 'Instead of simply manufacturing someone else's designs, they can develop products themselves, adapt them quickly, and produce in smaller batches.'