Monthly Archives: November 2011

Nov 29 2011
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Brand Analysis, Business Basics, Fashion Line Development, The Industry

Brand Analysis: Better Girlswear

The first step in developing a line is knowing the market. In better girlswear, there are a quite a few players, but we’ll look at the following three:

1) Janie and Jack makes clothes for girls and boys 0-12 years of age in the $20 – 100 price range, focusing on fabrics that are typical of adult sportswear, like twills, lawns, and meltons.

Vision In Red Snowflake Wonder Classic Gent

2) Oilily makes European-folklore inspired clothing for girls and boys from 0-adult in the $20-200 range. They tend to use more casual fabrics and combinations of knits and wovens, denims, and prints.

Dot Dress Blue Combo van Oilily kinderkleding Padric Pants Beige van Oilily kinderkleding Tsvetko Jersey Blue van Oilily kinderkleding

3) In the wildcard position, I’m liking the Tea Collection, which makes boys and girlswear for infant through tweens, with an emphasis on ethnic traditions. They use a lot of knits and prints.

  

Some things I notice right off the bat:

1) Children’s’ trends pretty much imitate adult trends

2) In this category, fabrications and trims are about the same quality as their adult counterparts

3) Even though the clothes are smaller (and therefore cheaper to make), the retail prices seem to be in line with adult retail prices

Next post: Trend research!

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Nov 26 2011
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Business Basics, The Industry, Trend Research

Product Development Roulette: Better Girlswear

Every season I draw some category out of a hat to design a collection for the current season in development, which is Fall 2012. This is a category I’ve never designed for so this should be fun. The steps involved are:

Brand analysis: What is the brand we’re developing for, and who are their competitors?

Trend analysis: What are the major trends for Fall 2012

Fabric and color story: What are the colors and fabrics on trend for Fall 2012 in this category, and which ones will we be using in our line

Line development: developing and choosing the designs for our line

Next week: figuring out our brand.

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Nov 22 2011
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About Me, Business Truths

What I do When I Lack Motivation

Dan Ariely says that people are more willing to work for free than to get paid a low wage. This has everything to do with the stories we tell ourselves.

I’m having some motivation issues right now. The short days of winter are sapping my energy, and my hectic holiday schedule is basically making me wish I could just stay in bed with my trend predictive magazines and a hot cup of Scarlet City coffee. I have a couple of client projects on my desk that are not shaping up as quickly as they usually do, and I’m feeling like I need a vacation.

Every time we decide to take on a task, we write a story around it. We ask ourselves, “Am I the kind of person who does this?” Say, for example, if we’re asked to do a low-paying job we think, “Am I the kind of person who works for peanuts?”, or if we’re asked to donate our time for charity we ask, “Am I the kind of person who helps people less fortunate than I am?”

So, who are you? Are you someone who makes excuses and lets things get in your way?

Right now, I’m asking myself “Am I the kind of person who lets a little evening gloom get in the way of doing fabulous work?” What I’m saying, is the answer is no!

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Nov 17 2011
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About Me, Business Truths, The Industry

Your Biggest Problems are the Ones you Don’t Care About Solving

The little issues you don’t really care about fixing are the ones that will hold you back, because they’re the ones you’re least likely to address until they become a big problem. This creates a negative situation that you could have avoided, which is a big waste of time and resources.

I hate to put my work away. I’m the kind of person who has to walk away from a project when it isn’t working out in order to solve it, but I’m also the kind of person who forgets about anything that isn’t right in front of me. The result is that my live work space is a complete cluttered mess. My sewing table is piled high with samples that I haven’t figured out yet, like the denim shorts with the waistband I can’t decide should be contoured or not – from Spring 2010. My coffee table is 3 layers deep with sweaters that should or maybe should not have knitted-on collars or three-quarter sleeves.

This doesn’t really bother me much. I do a pretty good job of keeping the place otherwise sanitary, and I have convinced myself the clutter is part of my creative process. However, in my heart, I know it is not. It is the result of not enjoying the feeling of being paralyzed by a design problem and choosing to ignore it rather than tucking in and doing the boring trial-and-error work of fixing design problems.

I read this blog post on the Harvard Business Review blogs by Michael Schrage about managers putting their most creative people on their most boring problems, and I realized that boring problems require the most creativity to solve if only for the fact that they’re so hard to get motivated to even think about. So maybe thinking of this kind of problem-solving as a chore is the wrong approach, and reframing it as an opportunity for creative thinking is a better way.

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Nov 15 2011
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About Me, Business Basics, The Industry

Business Basics: Don’t Quit Your Day Job

I have spent a lot of time working for startups and small businesses in many different industries over the years, and I’ve paid very close attention to the way they do business. While I do cultivate a small product development practice catering to independent craftspeople and artisans on my own free time, I have a terrific day job working for a small women’s athleticwear company in San Francisco that I do not plan on leaving voluntarily any time soon, for the following reasons:
It brings in a base salary and benefits Until you’ve struck out on your own, it’s hard to imagine how much it costs in terms of time, energy, and revenue to supply for yourself things like health insurance, 401(k) plans, and forget about paid vacation! My day job takes the pressure off me so I can fill my free time with things that are very interesting to me but less lucrative than what I do in my 9-to-5 hours.

It keeps me in the industry Working every day in the industry helps me to remember how important it is to stick to the fundamentals when running a business. It keeps me aware of the state of the industry as it’s happening and how it responds to a changing retail environment. Most importantly, I have the benefit of the friendship and experience of the talented industry professionals I have the pleasure to work with and learn from on a daily basis.

It gets me out of the house Starting a business by yourself can be very isolating, and takes a lot of self-discipline to stay motivated in the face of huge project deadlines or slow- to- nonexistent paying work. Having somewhere to go, getting dressed and interacting with other people and working towards a common goal can do a lot for your mental state and self-image in the face of what may seem like impossible obstacles on your way towards achieving your dreams.

Working on your business model while otherwise employed gives you the freedom to dip your toes into the waters of entrepreneurship without taking the huge risks involved with throwing all your resources at an untested business idea. It takes a lot of discipline and time management, but it’s a good way to go for a lot of first-time businesspeople.

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Nov 11 2011
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Business Basics, Business Truths, The Industry

Business Truth: You Will Never Work for Yourself

Most of the testimonials I read about the advantages of starting your own business talk about the beauty of “working for yourself”: the freedom to set your own schedule, the financial benefits, and the personal satisfaction. This sounds great to anyone who sits in a corporate cubicle for 8-plus hours per day, but it is not quite a complete picture of entrepreneurial life.

No matter what you do for a living, whether it’s working in a giant corporation or a one-person freelance business, we all have an obligation to someone: the person paying us for our goods or services. If you worked for yourself, you would pay yourself, but if you could do that you wouldn’t have to work at all.

If I asked the president (and co-founder) of the company I work for if he “worked for himself”, he’d probably laugh. Most of his job consists of solving problems for and making deals with our company’s customers, vendors, and even our employees. This is his more-than-full-time job. It’s his responsibility to make sure the complicated net of relationships that drive the business forward are in good condition.

If you have the drive to “work for yourself”, you should ask yourself why. If it’s because you have a hard time getting along with people, you should really work on improving your social skills before you make any big decisions. Working for yourself is a full-time job making other people happy.

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Nov 09 2011
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Business Basics, The Industry

Business Basics: Famous Architect Frank Gehry’s Rules for Business

The Harvard Business Review published a short interview with Frank Gehry on his rules for running his successful architecture firm. Gehry has spent his career making hugely important, completely impossible-looking buildings like Disney Hall in Los Angeles and the Experience Music Project in Seattle. His designs go against everything most people know about making buildings, and he had to fight to get people to listen to his ideas. The fact that he has met with such success says a lot about him as a businessman. Here are his rules:

Don’t borrow money I met a venture capitalist in business school who told me that if you could fund your business start-up in any way besides using an investor or borrowing money, you should absolutely do that. Taking money from an investor or borrowing from a bank can, at best, put enormous pressure on your little startup to pay it back with interest, and at worst, can result in you losing your control of the direction of your new company. Banks and investors don’t loan or invest in businesses out of the goodness of their hearts; they expect to make money on their investments. Sometimes, that’s not going to be in your best interest. So, if you ever find yourself needing to take money from outside your company, be very careful about the terms you agree to.

Everyone gets paid Another way to “owe investors” is to allow your friends or family to work for you for free. In the beginning of your business, you will be tempted to do this, and having a friend to work with is a great way to build some fun into the work of starting up and to get some moral support. But they should always be compensated for their time, either through free products, store credit, or a small amount of money if you can swing it. I have personally worked for several business owners who have lost friendships with people who have worked for them without clear compensation plans. This prevents people from feeling exploited, and building resentment.

Don’t work for free, ever When you’re just starting out, the temptation to work for free in the hopes of getting more work is strong, but it hardly ever works out that way. Economists have found that people do not appreciate things they get for free as much as they do things they have paid for. Even if you only charge a token fee, always get paid for your work. Your business is not something you do for fun, it is something you worked hard to perfect and how you support yourself. You should be treated like a professional, and that means getting paid.

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Nov 05 2011
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Business Basics, The Industry, Trend Research

Business Basics: Imagine your Perfect Customer

The first step in any venture (especially the fashion business) is figuring out who your perfect customer is. This may sound strange. You might think the first step is developing a terrific product. However, you must always remember the only way a product makes money is if it fills a need for a customer. Otherwise, nobody will ever buy it, right?

This piece of information may sound like common sense, but a lot of beautiful products are made every year that go unsold because they met no need for any customers, and nobody wants that to happen.

So one of the best uses of time is to visualize your perfect customer from head to toe, as if you were writing a book or movie about that person’s life. Some questions you should be able to answer:

  • Is this customer a man or woman? Remember that a product for children is purchased by an adult!
  • What is the age of this customer?
  • What is the customer’s job? What kind of hours does this customer work? What is this customer’s career goals?
  • What is the customer’s hobbies? How does the customer spend free time?
  • Who is the customer’s friends? What are those friends like?
  • Where does this customer shop?
  • What kind of car do they drive, if they even have one?
  • What colors do they prefer?
  • What is their family like?

Spend a lot of time and energy developing your perfect customer’s story, making them as real as possible. When your perfect customer feels as real to you as your best friend, ask yourself the toughest question: does this type of person exist in real life? More often than not, your answer will be “not really”. If your perfect customer is a 21-year-old girl who lives in New York City, works as a waitress, and buys Prada, the chances are you will not find many people like this in the world, certainly not enough to support an entire business. However, you will be able to find real people similar to your imaginary perfect customer! So the next step is to find where these similar people hang out, and observe how they live their lives for real. How do they spend their money and time for real? 

You will figure out that this takes a lot of time and energy. This is why so many people who start businesses create products for their own friends or family. Who do you know better than your own loved ones?

It’s always better to spend time and energy on research before you spend money on starting a business. This way, you’re starting out with a realistic look at real people who spend actual money, and you can design your product around those things.

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Nov 02 2011
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About Me

2 Reasons I’m Writing this Blog

To let people know what I’m doing with my time When my friends and relatives ask me what I’m up to, I generally just shrug and say, “Oh, you know, working”, because people really don’t want to hear me go in-depth into my garment geekery. However, I do a lot and I want to be able to point people to some place they can see what I do with my time.

To straighten out my own ideas and focus Right now, I have a lot of knowledge and experiences from all the companies and careers I’ve had over the years, and I know all that information can work together to unlock the secret of possibly making a little bit of money in this industry. Hopefully, by writing these blog posts out I can figure out how I can do that.

My vision for this blog is to publish resources for people who are interested in working in the fashion industry, reviewing some of my favorite garment construction and design books, detailing my personal projects, discussing some of my freelance projects, and showing off the things I’ve made that I’m proud of.

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