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Rollie Founder Vince Lebon On Melbourne’s Creative Superpower
After building Rollie from Melbourne to the world, Vince Lebon is bringing the founder’s eye back to the brand. We talk shoes down to the millimetre, why Melbourne makes better room for original ideas, and the coffee he’ll cross town to drink.
Vince Lebon loves New York. He also thinks it can make creative people think like everyone else.
Spend long enough in one of the world’s great creative capitals, he reckons, and the sheer volume of influence starts working against you. Every shopfront, restaurant, gallery, shoe and person on the pavement is telling you something about taste. It can be exhilarating, until some of the thinking has already been done for you. New York, in Lebon’s words, can be “incredibly indoctrinating”. Melbourne has something harder to manufacture: space.
It is a neat inversion of an old Australian creative anxiety, the one that assumes distance from Paris, London or New York automatically puts us a few steps behind. Lebon sees an advantage in it. He grew up in Melbourne’s west, launched Rollie at South Melbourne Market, spent years working internationally, then came home with a sharper sense of what distance can do. Away from the volume, there is room to work out what you actually like.
Even designers living inside that intensity, he points out, often leave it to think, heading elsewhere in search of enough distance to hear themselves again. Australian designers begin with some of that separation built in. It gives them room to arrive at something of their own. The result still has to be good enough to cut through once it meets the rest of the world.
The city suits him for another reason, too. It’s one whose identity resists neat summary. You can eat Mauritian food in North Melbourne, cross town because one coffee is worth the drive, walk Gertrude Street, end up on a beach, then do it differently the following Saturday. Lebon likes those collisions. They show up in the way he dresses, eats, drinks coffee and, increasingly, in the way he wants Rollie to work.
Fourteen years after starting the brand, he is moving closer to it again.
The Founder’s Eye
Lebon is careful with the language around Rollie’s return to founder-led design. He does not see it as a dramatic reset. The original ambition, he says, never changed: make products that leave people feeling more alive. Scale simply made it harder for one person to remain close to every decision.
“As you grow, your focuses and priorities change and you can’t be across everything,” he says. “You’re not the filter of all decisions and the vision can naturally become diluted.”
It is a problem Lebon has met before. During his years in the US, he watched Rollie begin to drift from afar and later traced much of it back to something simple: too much of the brand still lived inside his own head. Its visual language, tone and values had never been fully documented for the people carrying them forward.
That history makes the current move closer feel less like a founder reclaiming territory and more like a designer learning how to translate himself better. Lebon’s answer now is not to make every decision alone. It is to make the vision clear enough that other people can carry it with him.
That matters because so much of his design language lives in details most people will never consciously notice.
Take the new AW26 moccasins. Lebon approached them by going backwards first. Before drawing the Rollie version, he studied the shoe’s centuries-old construction and what each part was originally built to do. If you do not understand why something exists in the first place, his thinking goes, you have little business changing it.
Then things get microscopic. The exact density of the rubber. The thickness of leather around the apron. How it should pleat. How it should pucker once stitched. One factory had never encountered a client specifying rubber density at that level before. Rollie has spent years teaching its manufacturers how the brand builds comfort, so that what sits inside Lebon’s head can survive sampling, production and scale.
And yet the result is not meant to announce all that work.
“When I’m designing, I’m thinking about who’s wearing it, how, where, what it has to go with,” he says. “Shoes for life, not for one moment.” Looking good cannot compensate for feeling bad, and comfort cannot excuse a shoe you do not want to wear. Compromise either side and the whole thing weakens.
Get it right and the shoe disappears. Lebon talks about wearing a pair until it becomes an extension of the body, no longer the focus of the outfit or the day. Years of technical work, material testing and minute decisions, all spent creating something he hopes you will eventually stop thinking about.
Shoes Well Travelled
That philosophy explains why Lebon has always connected Rollie with travel, although his version rarely requires a boarding pass. Travel might be a coffee shop you have never tried. A walk through a different part of the city. A meal. A gallery. Following one good idea into another part of town. “Real life” has not changed much for him since Rollie began, he explains. It is still curiosity about what might be around the next corner.
His Saturdays move in much the same way. Breakfast is either at home, where he jokes that his wife Kat is the family’s “organic chef”, or Hector’s for what he calls a cheat meal. Then coffee, usually Regulars, kids’ basketball, friends and wherever the day goes from there. A beach walk. A library. A book show. Another meal.
Basketball has been around far longer than Rollie. Growing up in Melbourne’s west, Lebon and his brother spent every spare chance on the court, and for a time he thought he might go pro. Design won out in his teens. These days, basketball has found its way back into the Saturday rotation, only now he is there with his kids.
“We’re never standing still,” he says. Not frantically, he clarifies. They are simply “always on”, alert to the next good stop.
Lebon is also the sort of person who can walk past seven nearby coffees and drive elsewhere for the one he wants. Regulars gets the Saturday trip. The previous weekend had taken him to the Lebanese festival at Grazeland. And when he wants to show someone what Melbourne can do at the table, he sends them to Manzé in North Melbourne.
The choice carries another resonance. Lebon is Mauritian-Australian, though he talks about Manzé less through nostalgia than through what happens on the plate. “It’s the infusion and the execution that gets me,” he says. The city can shape a place without swallowing what was there first. “You can go get the best Thai food, the best Mauritian food, it’s inspired by the place but it never loses its soul.”
There is something of Lebon’s own design philosophy in that. He has spent years travelling, looking, learning and absorbing. The harder part is knowing what deserves to come home with you, what should be left alone, and where your own point of view begins.
No Gatekeeping Allowed
Ask Lebon for the Melbourne place he is reluctant to tell everyone about and he does not hesitate.
“I’m the worst at gatekeeping because I just want to support people.”
For Lebon, that instinct is part of running a small creative business. Rollie’s collaborators are rarely drawn from fashion alone. There’s T. Cavallaro & Sons, the Footscray pasticceria the Cavallaro family has run since 1956, still filling Sicilian cannoli from recipes handed down through generations. There’s Yang Thai, whose tiny St Kilda charcoal chicken shop is the work of chef Narit Kimsat, all turmeric and black pepper chicken, sticky rice and som tum, with CDs, Thai cookbooks and WWE memorabilia adding to the restless energy of the room. And there’s Northside Records, the Gertrude Street institution that has spent more than two decades keeping soul, funk, reggae and hip hop spinning through Fitzroy.
Recent Rollie campaigns have drawn each of them into the brand’s orbit, revealing a view of Melbourne shaped as much by food, music and neighbourhood character as it is by design.
His refusal to gatekeep also produces an excellent coffee recommendation: at TONE Coffee Roasters, the Tiger Bomb, an espresso layered with milk, silky cream and fresh orange zest, managed to convert a man who had previously stuck almost exclusively to espresso or macchiato. He now says his weekend starts with the first sip.
“I’ll have either an espresso/macchiato or a Tiger Bomb,” he says. “There’s no in-between.”
He laughs at the similarity to his design taste. Minimalist at one end, maximalist at the other. The middle has never held much interest.
When his creative eye needs waking up, he heads to the NGV, Fitzroy, Gertrude Street and At The Above, the gallery and cultural space where art, fashion and design share the same orbit. There is also RollieX, Rollie’s digital gallery inside its Gertrude Street flagship, where the Artist in Residence program relaunched in July with an open call for Australian artists.
Again, the conversation moves quickly from looking at interesting work to the people responsible for making it.
“It’s not just about being surrounded by good work,” he says. “It’s about supporting the artists behind it.”
That feels central to Lebon’s Melbourne. Taste, in his world, is something to circulate. A coffee worth driving for gets the trip. A restaurant that excites him gets passed on. An artist who deserves an audience gets one.
Melbourne, According To Vince
Coffee worth crossing town for: “We love going to Regulars on Little La Trobe Street on Saturdays.”
Restaurant for showing off Melbourne: “Manzé. It’s Mauritian. It’s the infusion and the execution that gets me.”
Coffee personality: “I’ll have either an espresso / macchiato or a Tiger Bomb at Tone Coffee Roasters. There’s no in-between.”
Where he resets his eye: “NGV, pretty simple. And Fitzroy, Gertrude Street, At The Above.”
Saturday philosophy: “We’re never standing still. We’re not moving at a crazy pace, just ‘always on’.”
Then there is the impossible Melbourne question: when can you say you actually know the city?
For Lebon, the answer could never be one place. Melbourne only makes sense when its opposites are allowed to sit beside each other: north and south, old favourites and new discoveries, Thai and Mauritian, espresso and Tiger Bomb. It is the movement between them that matters.
“If you’re trying to find one spot in Melbourne, you don’t get Melbourne,” he says. “Collingwood isn’t Melbourne without South Yarra.”
Melbourne makes more sense through the people who experience it differently. For another very personal map of the city, follow Steph Claire Smith through the coffee stops, family rituals and neighbourhood favourites shaping her Melbourne motherhood chapter. Then keep things at ground level with our edit of Melbourne’s coolest local shoe labels, from independent makers to homegrown names putting the city on very well-dressed feet.
