On Fashion Entrepreneurship: A Peek Inside the Hustle
A month in the life of a fashion entrepreneur
In this newsletter:
🧐 A reflection on my writing approach—why I chose to focus on personal storytelling over to-do lists, capturing the highs and lows of running a fashion business.
👗 The evolution of Bastet Noir—rethinking product development and making the tough decision to rebrand.
📚 Current reads fueling my curiosity and shapping my view on business—from Savile Row’s tailoring secrets, The World According to Color’s view on the hues’ perception through history, politics and culture to The Ascent of Money, a book that reshaped my perspective on financial literacy.
🤔 A thought-provoking experience in Antwerp—is social entrepreneurship in the West a form of modern slavery? A closer look at the complexities behind refugee labor programs.
📢 Exciting opportunities for fashion entrepreneurs—the JustFashion grant is open for applications, offering up to €100,000 in funding for sustainable fashion SMEs.
Dear readers,
Forgive me, for I have sinned. It’s been two months since my last confession on here and while away several things went through my mind. While contemplating my writing style moving forward I was considering multiple different angles of approach. Should I concentrate on writting investigative pieces, research articles or simply just share tips and tricks for fashion entrepreneurs. The fact is that I would love to dive into research, but writing a thorougly researched article requires a lot of time and if there’s one thing that I don’t have this year is exactly that, time. So while thinking about my next article, I asked myself what do I really want to achieve with this newsletter. Chasing clout has never really been my thing, so making it popular is not my priority, not to mention the huge hassle that comes with the constant pursuit of trying to outsmart the algorithm. To me, the effort is simply not worth it. As everyone considers themselves a writer these days, it seems like Substack is the new platform for influencers to rummage over and as the good old days of discovering new writters are coming to an end (sublimly summarised notion with this article “Who owns Substack?” by
), I couldn’t help but wonder where I fit into all this.When I started this Substack, my idea was to share helpful guidelines and tools for aspiring fashion designers that would enable them to find their way through the maze of an industry which has been notoriously infamous for its nepotism. For someone who has been navigating it for the better part of 11 years, slowly erroding its thick shell with a chisel I have come to realize making a business out of it instead of a hobby, although extremely hard, it’s not impossible and had I had access into half of the resources I’ve gathered throughout this decade, my trajectory of success would have been much different. However, what I realized is that writing a to-do list doesn’t really serve the purpose as much as sharing my stories do which is why I lended on creating a storytelling format where I put into words half developed and sometimes (shockingly) even fully developed thoughts running around my brain like unchained beasts. One minute they’re here, the next, poof they’re gone. Capturing them though is one thing. Domesticating them is something else entirely. Raise your hands in the comment section if anyone relates. This I realized accompanied by a visual diary content will get whoever is reading this newsletter a glimpse into the world of a fashion entrepreneur from both sides: creative and business.
That being said, I have so much to upack and process. These past 2 months I’ve been buried into product development mode. As much as I would love to say that I have had this all figured out before, the sad reality of operating a small label is wearing too many hats to make ends meet will oftentimes impact the way you conceptualize and prioritise tasks. And when the ultimate goal is earning enough to keep your community of women single parents aflot, bad decisions guided by doubt and fear tend to creep in, which leads to a range of products meant for everyone, but not special to anyone in particular. While I do believe in the quality of the items we make, developing a product range is where we fell short, up until now. It was at this point that a thought of full rebrand entered my mind and made its nest there.
While trying to figure out the product range bit, I started thinking in the direction of evolution of style and how the more mature we get, the more we tend to come back to classic silhouettes with modern twists and neutral colors. Which led me to question why is that so? Why is it that as we grow older, neutral colors and classic silhouettes tend to take over? An answer to this question found its way to me a few months ago, as I started reading “The World According to Color: A Cultural History” by James Fox , a book on color and its history. The author goes through the seven primary colors (black, red, yellow, blue, white, purple and green) discussing not just their sociological meaning throughout history, but also the impact they’ve had on artists across different cultures. It turns out that color is much more complex than I thought. Guided by political and social influences, the bond between colors and their meaning is tightly connected to the perception people associate with them. One example is the relationship between white and purity in the west, growing its roots from the church. It’s fascinating how centuries later, this notion is still as relevant today as it was hundreds of years ago. Its stronghold on society is one of the reasons why the west gravitates towards neutral colors. From their on out, white in the west came to symbolise sophistication and power, but the most fascintaing fact for me was that the east had quite the opposite experience with it, altering their interpretation of it and its meaning.
The rise of Scandinavian brands like Toteme, Anine Bing and Acne and the feverish obsession with labels like the Row made me start thinking in the direction of elevated essentials. I, like probably many of you here, love the simplicty of these labels and the refreshed look that comes from the modern unexpected twist of minor details while preserving the classical shapes and honoring comfort. With the success of our Mary Trench model we designed few years ago which is still one of our bestsellers by the way and my desire to turn my attention as a designer towards more utilitarian clothing, I made the decision to steer the label towards that direction. Sadly this means that we’ll no longer have our popular bridesmaid section, which so many of our customers around the world loved. While I’m extremely thankful and greatful for the opportunity to be a part of someone’s special life occasion, I made the concious decision to discontinue this line and replace it with cocktail dresses instead. This decison was not taken lightly believe me, but my wish to turn to more comfortable, everyday fits paired with the lack of high quality deadstock satin led me to dismantle the foundations of Bastet Noir and start building it again from the grounds up with the promise that this time I won’t be designing anything I won’t actually end up wearing myself. From now on my style would be my North Star.
Rewinding back to January, I took a week off everything else and decided to focus on product development instead of planning a line like we used to. What that entailed was putting the focus on the development of categories first and foremost. This line of thought, solidified the decision to make a rebrand, entering an entirely new chapter for Bastet Noir. With that decision in mind, me and my team got busy and started planning the rebrand. While I was working on the product development which included selecting the primary color pallete, figuring out the fabric textures and ultimately deciding on the silhouettes, my team was working on the branding, disecting it into visual and verbal segments. This approach made me also think in a more organized manner, as I began the process of designing with a certain customer in mind, whereas prior to that my design process was a mix of accumulated experiences and sale-driven products. Spending two months on figuring it out and developing, we wrapped this process beginning of March and are now planning the art direction, product photoshoot and the content around it, as well as we’re working on delivering a new experience of the website.
Those of you who are avid readers of this newsletter, have surely read about the year of chaos when everything seemed to be falling apart and the lifeline that saved us from drowning that came in the form of a grant, as part of the sustainability project JustFashion, funded by the EU and led by the University of Antwerp. Now, if you’ve read this far, you deserve to get a little reward. As part of the same project, the consortium is looking for potential fashion SME’s based in Europe to join. The deadline for submissions is 26th of March, so if you’re a founder of a small fashion label or work within fashion tech, get your fingers clicking. Whoever joins will get a funding of up to 100.000EUR, and a chance to be part of a vibrant group of amazing people working towards a better future in the fashion industry. I had the unique privilege of meeting everyone involved during our gathering in Antwerp this February and all I can say is if you decide to join, you’ll be a part of a community that might be on the brink of changing the trajectory of the industry.
This brings me to something I’ve started thinking about ever since I came back from Antwerp.
Social entrepreneurship and whether the introduction of it in the Western World could potentially become a different form of modern slavery.
Before you go ahead and shout “Surely Not” hear me out, as I promise I do have a point here. While in Antwerp, as part of the city tour organized by the university, we visited ReAntwerp, a concept or shall I say a clothing business based on the foundation of social entrepreneurship. Their business model? Not much different than ours. At their core, company’s main goal is to utilize deadstock fabrics discarded by Belgian designers and rework them into a limited collection pieces, produced by refugees and imigrants. At first glimpse, everything looks fine and even feels noble, until you scratch the surface and realize that what they’re essentially doing is using refugees as labor under the pretense that they help them develop new skills, while the sad reality is that not one of those workers end up being paid for the work that they do, because apperantly that’s the law, THEY CAN’T. Hence the thought of social entrepreneurship in the western world and the concept of modern slavery. I don’t know why, but somehow the idea did not sit right with me. What will happen to these workers? Will they end up being hired at the end or will this no-payment policy chew them up and spit them right back to the place they came from when the company no longer needs them? I guess it remains to be seen, but something about this whole concept is just a little bit off, wouldn’t you agree?
Anyway, moving on to lighter topics. Hibernation seemed to be the theme of the past two months—except for my trips to Antwerp and Oslo in January. Come to think of it, I wasn’t really hibernating as much as I thought I was. It’s a good thing I write these things down; otherwise, I’d completely forget what I’ve been up to! This Salad Brain of mine works in mysterious ways. But I digress here, my point was with a home-work-home type of lifestyle these past 2 months, my main passtime activity was read, watch and listen on repeat. I bought two books while in Antwerp and couldn’t wait to get home and start attacking them. One is filled with tailoring concepts developed by the best tailors in the world, the Savile Row best kept secrets on the art of handcrafting a suit and the other traces the history of styling and various historical backgrounds to different style directions. (The Savile Row Suit: The Art of Bespoke Tailoring, The Style Thesaurus). Highly recomment you read them if you’re a fashion designer.
While we’re on the topic of books, there’s one that I’m currently obsessing about, The Ascent of Money. Putting the quintessential truth of learning something from the grounds up aside, I never really thought about money as something that needs to be learnt about. To me money represented a means to an end and it didn’t even occur to me to try and dig deeper into its origin and try and understand its inherantly paradoxical meaning, until I accidentally stumbled upon this book at a quite random book sale last year. By tracing back its history from the golden standard days to the introduction of the paper currency all the way to current times of invisible money, the book’s masterful storytelling takes you through wartimes and precarious political situations to demonstrate how the rich made their fortunes and how the systems we’ve built around it makes us heavily dependent on powerful figures and politicians’ whims to leave their mark on the world. I believe that this book should be a must read in every university, regardless of what you study. My take? It’s only when you attain a financial literacy and begin to understand how money works that you’re able to make more of it.
On that note, I stumbled quite accidentaly on a post on Instagram about entrepreneurship and found the author on Substack. The way it’s composed just sends shivers down my spine every time I read it, so I thought I share it here as well. It’s such a beautifully written love letter from someone who’s been in the trenches to someone who finds themselves right there at this very moment strugling to get ahead.
Hibernation can not go without its fair amount of movie consumption, of course, which included quite a few Hollywood movies whose wierdness made me wonder, have Hollywood lost its spark? Its former ability to evoke emotions into the stories we consume, seems to me like it’s no longer there. Lately whenever I watch a movie, it seems like it’s lacking something and for a long time I couldn’t quite figure out what that was, until I stumbled upon this note on Substack.
Upon reflecting I realized that Hollywood’s eternal obsession with youth has led to a large group of actresses disfiguring their facial features, leading to obscuring emotions that come from facial expressions. That paired with lack of chemistry between casted actors, poor storytelling (which come to think of it, might be actually due to this “ma” concept) leaves little room for me as a spectator to connect and really empathise with on-screen characters like I used to. So, apart from Maria (Angelina Jolie’s new movie, which is 2.5/5 only due to her acting skills, the rest is just terrible), I’m skipping this year’s Oscar movies, replacing them with TV shows instead. At least there’s still something good left there.
Okay, so the time to finish up this rambling of mine has finally arrived. Expect to hear back from me, hopefully end of March. Until then, because sharing is caring, if you know someone who finds this random thoughts and opinions of mine fascinating or even worth while reading, I give you permission to share this with them. You’re welcome 😉.
In all seriousness though, I know time these days is a precious currency, so thank your reading.
Hasta la vista lovelies from my Salad Brain.