Interview with Alex, founder of Ofr

OFR is an institution that’s been around since 1996, you’ve had Raf Simons, Virgil Abloh, Sofia Coppola, Loïc Prigent, and the list goes on… You’re killing it in Korea, Japan, so it’s really global now. I’m walking down the street, I see OFR caps, it’s no joke.

Now that we’ve set the scene, I’d love to hear more about your story, can you tell us about the journey before this huge success that is OFR ?

I talk about it a bit in a book we just released called Open Free and Ready. It’s a book I wrote on Jeju Island, in the south of South Korea. I’m originally from the Parisian suburbs, first from Clichy-sous-Bois in the 93, and then my parents moved to a small town in the Yvelines called Bailly. We still had that 93 reference, you know, the poverty, and I think I immediately had the instinct to invent businesses and make money.

Very young, at just 12 years old, I picked up on an idea. There were scouts who had gone door-to-door asking my parents to sell croissants to fund a trip, but they never came back. So I thought to myself, "Hey, their idea was actually pretty good."One of the guys who ran my football club was also the baker in the neighboring village. In my town, there was no bakery, but in the next village over, there was a baker I knew through football. So, I asked him, "Hey, if I buy a hundred croissants from you, can you give me a special price ?"

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