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Jul 18 2012
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Business Truths, Trend Research

Economics: The 0.01 Percent

 

In the issue 98 of Textile View, David Shah said:

The world’s biggest luxury goods purveyors enjoyed a record-breaking 2011. … this is a reflection of a new economic reality. We are not talking about recession here: we are talking about the polarization of wealth and the arrival of a very small, but fabulously wealthy stratum of society that has created a new, super luxury niche market.

 

So how are your couture sewing skills? Sounds like we’ll all have to take our opportunities where we can get them.

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May 12 2012
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Business Basics, Business Truths, Fashion Line Development, Inspiration

Rekindling the Creative Spark

I have had my head down developing some new freelance projects and haven’t had a lot of time to think about much else. Also, my sister is getting married in a few weeks so there’s that.

I have been thinking a lot about creativity, specifically my own creativity and how I seem to have misplaced that spark in the day to day work of keeping food on the table and a roof over my head. Even though I now work in a field that is supposedly more creative, the work I’m doing is just as administrative as ever. I think Thomas Edison meant this when he said,”Success is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.”

When I’m in a rut I go back and read Hugh MacLeod’s manifesto “How to be Creative”, which lays out the process very well. But at the beginning of any creative venture, there’s the terrifying moment of facing the empty dot paper. David Seah calls this “The Blankness” and I think everyone is intimidated by this.

The only strategy I have ever been able to successfully implement in this area is doing whatever I feel like doing to get warmed up. This usually takes the form of improv piecing, which I can do without thinking and is very relaxing. Breaking free of the pressure to do something of value helps clear my mind and find a little more direction.

An old friend of mine used to say “write drunk, edit sober”, which is a short way of saying “just get started”. Getting started is the most challenging part.

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Apr 18 2012
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Business Truths, The Industry, Trend Research

Retail Trends: The end of Big Box?

I haven’t posted lately, because work life has been … interesting.

Bloomberg as well as other outlets are reporting the end of the big box store (Wal-Mart, Target, K-Mart) era. It seems that schemes like Amazon Prime are offering people convenience and greater savings.

What does this mean for the fashion business?

This means that since people are shifting their focus to online buying, small labels with an e-commerce presence will be able to compete at a global level with even the big brands to a certain extent. This will make small producers even more competitive.

Maybe we’re seeing the beginning of the age of dominance of retailers like Shabby Apple!

Shabby Apple S12

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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 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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