Fleur du Mal names Vanessa Abreu president to drive retail growth
The role has been empty for two years at the New York lingerie and ready-to-wear brand, which is primarily direct-to-consumer.
Fleur du Mal has named Vanessa Abreu its president, effective Monday, ending two years in which the New York luxury lingerie and ready-to-wear brand worked with fractional contributors rather than a full-time executive in the role. Founder Jennifer Zuccarini announced the hire.
Abreu arrives from Skims, where she was senior vice president and led the strategic expansion of the brand's physical footprint through retail, pop-ups and experiential concepts. Her brief there also covered brand collaborations, strategic partnerships, franchising and wholesale.
Her earlier career took her through leadership roles at Bottega Veneta, Burberry and Rag & Bone, building expertise across commercial strategy, merchandising and international business development. That mix is precisely what Fleur du Mal's next phase calls for.
As president she is charged with steering growth across retail and wholesale, accelerating international expansion and carrying forward a strong e-commerce trajectory. Fleur du Mal's business today is primarily direct-to-consumer, and its key wholesale accounts are Revolve and Saks Fifth Avenue.
The brand operates five freestanding stores, with Dallas set to open soon, alongside a wider network of specialty retailers. Abreu will be based in the company's SoHo office, keeping her close to the brand's home market as the international push begins.
What Abreu brings from Skims
At Skims, Abreu was known for translating a digitally native label into physical retail, a move many direct-to-consumer brands still struggle with. Fleur du Mal faces the same question: how to add stores and wholesale depth without diluting the intimacy that defines the product.
The founding story matters here. Zuccarini built Fleur du Mal around a distinct point of view on lingerie, fashion and femininity, and the brand has grown on the strength of e-commerce rather than a wide store network. Abreu's mandate is to widen that reach without losing the voice.
"I'm thrilled to join Fleur du Mal at such an exciting moment in the brand's evolution," Abreu said. "I look forward to partnering with Jennifer and the talented team to build on the brand's distinctive identity, deepen its connection with customers and unlock new opportunities for growth."
Zuccarini, who retains the chief executive title, framed the hire as a bet on scale. "I see tremendous opportunity to bring our world to a broader audience."
She added that Abreu "brings the experience and vision to help us realize that ambition while staying true to what makes Fleur du Mal special." The pairing of a founder-CEO with an operations president follows a pattern common across luxury's direct-to-consumer labels.
The two-year gap and what it means
A president seat left empty for two years is itself a statement. Fleur du Mal has grown on fractional contributors in that time, a lean arrangement suited to a brand focused on margins. Filling it now signals that the next phase is expansion, not consolidation.
The retail build-out tells the same story. Dallas will be the sixth freestanding store when it opens, and wholesale through Revolve and Saks Fifth Avenue already reaches customers well beyond the five existing doors. International expansion is the explicit next step in the plan.
Abreu's resume maps directly onto that agenda. Bottega Veneta and Burberry gave her luxury house discipline and international reach; Rag & Bone gave her a New York fashion sensibility; Skims gave her the playbook for scaling a DTC brand into physical retail.
The hire also pulls together a management structure that had grown loose. With Zuccarini holding the CEO title and Abreu assuming the president's office, the brand now has a clear division between creative vision and commercial execution, the arrangement most investors want to see.
Fleur du Mal is in a lingerie category where luxury positioning and direct-to-consumer economics are increasingly in tension with wholesale expansion. A president who has run franchising and wholesale at Skims is a deliberate choice for threading that needle.
The appointment lands at a moment when luxury labels across categories are recruiting operations leaders from digitally native and athleisure names, rather than from within couture houses. Abreu's path through Skims and Bottega Veneta makes her a case study in that shift.
What comes next is the store count and the wholesale list. Dallas opens soon, and the brief mentions international expansion without dates or named markets. Abreu's first quarter in the SoHo office will reveal whether that expansion leads with wholesale partnerships or freestanding flagships.
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