Episode Details

Have you wondered about what the costs are involved in starting a fashion business or what you should be doing first? Today on Start Scale Succeed Nicole is chatting with Alison Lewy MBE, founder of Fashion Angel, mentor, consultant, and author of ‘Design Create Sell – a guide to starting and running a successful fashion business’.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Fashion Angel is a fashion industry support service offering business mentoring, events and access to funding, to fashion start-ups and established fashion business entrepreneurs. Their mission is to give fashion designers and entrepreneurs the tools to enable them to connect their creativity with the entrepreneurial skills they need, to start up and grow sustainable fashion businesses.
• A lot of people come into fashion thinking it's quite a sexy, glamorous industry and they don't realise what goes on behind the scenes and that you need quite deep pockets to make it work.
• Things don't happen by accident, so you need to have a really clear purpose for what you are trying to do. A strong, unique selling point for what, whatever your brand is and you need to research the market and understand where your brand is going to sit amongst your competitors.
• A business plan doesn't need to be war and peace, but there are certain key sections that you would always be thinking about. What is the unique selling point of what you're trying to do? What is the purpose of it? Can you explain it in a couple of sentences because you've got to get your message over really quickly.
• For a fashion brand, the biggest cost to start with will be your sampling development, to create your new styles, patterns, and prototypes that can be very costly. What is your budget for your initial stock?
• When it comes to sustainability, you often have amazing ideas and you've got a particular idea of how you want to do something. But then when you try and source that sustainably, that can be challenging.

BEST MOMENTS 

‘I realised that there was some amazing talent out there and lots of people with great ideas, but there was a big gap between the creative bit and the business side’

‘So many brands we come across just literally run out of money before they really get anywhere because they haven't done the planning’

‘People don’t buy products, they buy stories behind brands’

‘Product and marketing costs are the two biggest ones’

EPISODE RESOURCES

Fashion Angel

ABOUT THE GUEST

Alison Lewy is a social entrepreneur and founder of Fashion Angel. Alison ran her own design and manufacturing business for 15 years producing under her own label as well as consulting on sourcing and production for designers including Matthew Williamson and Preen.

Alison became the Commercial Director of the Fashion and Textile Museum in 2006 which she positioned as a hub for the fashion and textile sector, and continued to run mentoring and business support programmes as part of the museum’s offer, as well as setting up the Shop@FTM to showcase new designers.

In 2016 Alison was awarded an MBE for founding Fashion Angel and in recognition of her services to the fashion industry. She is also the best-selling author of Design Create Sell – a guide to starting and running a successful fashion business.

ABOUT THE HOST

Buying & retail expert Nicole Higgins spent the last 18 years working for companies such as Primark, M&S, Debenhams and Asda, sourcing & developing products from all over the world, building strategies for blue chip businesses, and increasing bottom line sales and profit, add