Should You Really Start That Clothing Line?
I followed the advice of the career reinvention guru and self-promotion expert, James Altucher, and chose myself. Actually, I try to follow his advice, but we’ll get to that later. Altucher’s argument is that the American Dream is dying and either you choose yourself by actualizing your dreams or you’re roadkill.
For many children of immigrants (mine are from Nigeria), there’s a playbook and I followed the rules. I remember my father yelling at me as I started college: “You must get a certificate.” His reasoning was that with that piece of paper, I would always be able to make a living and no one could take my certificate from me. Fair enough.
After college, I followed the path of least resistance and went to law school. While practicing, I began nursing a dream. It was so far-fetched. I wanted to start a clothing line that reflected my own bi-furcated identity: I would utilize African prints and design contemporary, western silhouettes. Now this is crazy for a couple of reasons: first, I wanted to dye my own prints, source my fabrics and production from Nigeria; and, second, I was uncertain as to whether there was a market for my product. I knew the prints were beautiful, however, in essence, I was attempting to export and transplant a culture, and I wasn’t sure the average American woman would bite.
I stayed in this limbo of indecision for almost a year. Then, everywhere I went, I saw African prints. The fashion world was in the midst of the unfortunately named “tribal trend” and there was an “African-inspired” piece in almost every magazine. Friends, aware that I had this dream, began forwarding articles about African-influenced fashion lines. I started getting weird anxiety pangs whenever I would get one of these emails. I couldn’t really escape it, so after six years of corporate practice, I folded my cards at the law firm and chose myself.
I’m a doer. I tend to gather the basic information and then figure it out as I go along. Before I left the firm, I had gotten books on starting a fashion line and taken courses at the Fashion Institute of Technology. I just jumped in after that. I put together a collection, put it on my website, and then focused on getting the line into stores.
Fast forward, eight months after choosing myself, I’m seated at a booth at the largest trade show in the world, having spent a ridiculous amount of money to be there, absolutely convinced that the customers will come flooding in. Everyone had tried to prepare me: “Your first trade show is a challenge,” “The buyers don’t know you from Adam,” “They are hesitant to take a chance on a new line.” I thought I was emotionally prepared for disappointment, but there is nothing more soul-crushing than sitting for three days at a trade show, knowing that what you have to offer is beautiful, and leaving with two orders.
The lessons of the entrepreneur path have been fast and furious. In my previous life, failure was not getting the grade I wanted. The challenges of being an entrepreneur require you to risk failure and dissapointment every, single day. In fact, ideally you should crave it (at least that’s what the gurus tell me). I’m so not there yet; I avoid rejection like a plague and yet after the trade show debacle, I thought the only way that I could build my brand was to continue to risk rejection and become a traveling sales woman of sorts, shilling my goods directly to boutiques.
I had no idea how difficult cold calling would be for me. Actually, that’s not true. I had an inclination that it would be rough. I was a telemarketer for the Special Olympics in high school and it was one of the two worst jobs I have ever had. The dread of being hung up on from my Special Olympics days was still with me. All my degrees did nothing to salve that fear. But entrepreneurship requires you to take the bulls by the horn and attempt to shape a version of the world different from the one that you currently inhabit. So after months of canvassing different boutiques in New York City and throughout the country, the line did end up in more stores.
Then I made another expensive mistake: I got a showroom. As a friend jokingly said, “You called someone to sell them your line and you ended up buying their services.” I got a sales representative that promised a litany of deliverables: press mentions, numerous sales and celebrity clients (every small designer’s fantasy), among others. After seven months of paying the sales representative, I ended up with a few more accounts, but nowhere near the accounts that would justify the investment or satisfy my expectations. So I cut the cord and decided to go back to choosing and selling myself.
In retrospect, I see what I did wrong: I kept throwing money at the problem. In confronting the real challenges of scaling any business, money certainly helps, but going to the right trade show or getting that great sales representative is not the only answer. Before going to a fashion trade show, pre-show marketing is everything; reaching out to boutiques beforehand and directly marketing your line to buyers is a requirement. Fashion distribution is complicated as clothing is not a commodity that can be shopped to potential distributors at any time. There is an extremely tight window for selling fashion lines to stores and it is further compounded by seasonal considerations. So if your fall line doesn’t make an impact and sell that season, you are out of luck, goodbye, come back next season.
Upon further reflection, I wonder if I missed the point of my guru. I chose myself and created a product that customers love, however, in trying to get it to the market place, I followed the traditional model of “pick me.” Going to a trade show hoping that a major store “picked me” was the continuation of the very paradigm from which I was attempting to break free. I was choosing myself, yet I was asking to be picked and waiting to be discovered. So once again, I’m back to the drawing board, pivoting and trying again to choose myself in my effort to expand my brand presence in the marketplace.
