Deepica Mutyal is bringing her eye for beauty to Naturalizer’s new collaboration series, Gen N Project.
That works, in part, because the shoe business started off at a good place — Naturalizer touts itself as the first U.S. brand to makeseries is kicking off with a limited-edition capsule collection of slides called Illuminate. Mutyala helped develop the line and appears in the accompanying ad campaign along with entrepreneur and journalist Lauren Chan and body positivity activist Khrystana.
While corporate America, including fashion, made a big show of embracing diversity in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police in 2020, Mutyala said that “a lot of it was performative.” Naturalizer is a good teacher when it comes to lasting power, as it has had to change and change again to keep up with nearly a century’s worth of consumers.
“Once we got the footwear to where we really liked it, we just saw a real eruption of the business,” he said. “Then, obviously, in the pandemic, we went into a kind of slump with the industry in terms of we just had the shutdown period. But it really powered back in a very big way. And I think it’s because really people do have that trust and affinity for the brand right now.”
Caleres — like the rest of the industry — also had a chance to re-envision its business when the world shut down and started back up.