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Elena Velez takes an academic approach to the creative process. “I conceptualise a collection the same way I would build a persuasive essay: thesis statement, supporting evidence, primary, secondary research,” she says. “I have a pretty left-brained methodology and find ways to be creative in between the lines. I think this approach is productive for a creative person who has to build commercial architecture first and then make it exciting second.”
The 29-year-old designer devised this approach to survive in an industry that requires those at the helm of brands to adroitly balance creativity and business, but offers very few resources for them to do so. London and New York hang their hats on young designers, which puts pressure on the young founders to put on a show, season after season. Even though a single show puts a huge financial burden on a brand that, more often than not, is already strapped for cash. “I had to raise and make about $1 million at the start of the brand to be able to pay for the costly lessons of simply learning the rules of the game, to even have a remotely informed idea of how to spend the next hypothetical million,” Velez says off the heels of her fourth New York Fashion Week show.
Some of Velez’s methods have drawn criticism. Prior to this past fashion week, she put out a call for an open casting, and drew critique for not paying the models. Velez calls the critique “pretty banal and mundane”, noting that models — or in her case, community members — walking for trade (where models are paid in clothes, rather than cash) is “a pretty standard arrangement for a brand of my size and scale”.
On the last day of last month’s NYFW, nine-year-old brand PH5 put on its first runway show after hosting presentations for the last 10-plus seasons. A huge lift, the prep was far more time- and resource-intensive than they had anticipated, agree founder and CEO Wei Lin and the brand’s designer, Zoe Champion. Would they do it again? Not in a hurry.
PH5 was far from the only brand that struggled to put on a show. Some brands skipped out altogether. Days before her London Fashion Week show, Dilara Fındıkoğlu pulled out entirely because she didn’t have the budget, she told CNN. Others turned to alternative avenues for financing. Collina Strada designed a bag for Cheetos to support her runway show. London’s Aaron Esh was among a group of emerging, London-based designers who created outfits for a Smartwater campaign, and used the profits to help finance his show, he told Vogue Business.
The painstaking process of developing and financing a 15-minute, six-figure show is symptomatic of the larger dilemma emerging designers face. They’re creatives, first and foremost, but they’re also building businesses. As designers grow their brands, many are expected to learn (and master) the ropes of the numbers, strategies and operational skills required to keep a business afloat.
“There��s a lot of romance around fashion business,” says Paula Reid, president of the executive recruitment firm Reid & Co. “There’s the dream and the romance of it, and that’s the emotional part. But, there are a lot of aspects of business that can’t be emotional. They have to be operational; very logical. Bringing those two things together is a challenge.”
And, designers are expected to do so faster and better than ever. “We all get obsessed when we see this new emerging talent,” says Felita Harris, founding member and executive director of Raisefashion, pointing to programmes like the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund and the LVMH Prize. “But, we don’t give emerging designers enough time to nurture that creativity. What we’re not understanding is that there is a mental health crisis underway if we don’t pause and take time to build these ecosystems properly and to allow these creatives a moment to think.”
Designer Phillip Lim echoes this sentiment when sharing words of wisdom for emerging designers: “My advice is to shut out the noise,” he says. “Everyone’s gonna flock around you. You’re the darling — you should do this, you should do that. But they don’t know the nuances of your business.”
Art and science
The creative talent behind a brand isn’t necessarily also a business person, Reid and Harris agree. This can lead to its own set of issues in money and management. “Strategy is king, and financial management is a make or break endeavour,” Harris says. “Otherwise, they risk losing their business.”
Designers should make a point to hire an executive partner early on, experts say. Lim founded his brand with CEO Wen Zhou 18 years ago. “You should not be the same person. You need to be opposite sides of the same coin, to balance each other out,” he says. “I was so fortunate to find someone who shared the same vision, coming from the same background, but with a different speciality.”
PH5 is a unique case in that it was founded by CEO Lin — not the designer. (Champion came on board in 2020 after Lin’s original design partner exited the brand.) Lin worked as a consultant in New York, and got into fashion after growing up around her mother’s knitwear factory in Southern China.
For those starting out on their own, without the funds to hire a full team, Reid & Co’s Reid recommends tapping one employee that can work across the logistical side of the business. “There are times in your business where you hire position players, and there are times in your business where you hire really good athletes,” she says. “A good athlete has the ability to transition into a number of different things.” As the business grows, brands ought to shift to a position player roster, she adds.
If not a hire, a good mentor is a valuable asset, Reid says. “You can really depend on a sounding board — not a board of directors — to help guide you through these challenges so that you're starting out from the right perspective,” she says. “That’s a really critical support system for emerging brands.”
Raisefashion operates with the same belief that access to business expertise is essential. “Designers are balancing who to listen to at what phase of their business,” Raisefashion’s Harris says. “They’re taking the advice and determining what strategies to deploy when they're looking at their DTC versus wholesale; supply chain logistics; SEO strategies, collaboration opportunities. It requires an expert to guide them through.”
To this end, Tania Fares, who founded non-profit Fashion Trust US, did so with a focus on business at the core. “Even if you’re the most talented person in the room, if you can’t run your business, you won’t be able to survive,” she says. It’s for this reason that, when designers apply for Fashion Trust, they have to submit a business plan alongside their designs.
To show or not to show?
“You have to show,” Lim told Vogue Business upon his NYFW return. Now, he qualifies this: “When I say show, I want to preface with: within your capacity.”
PH5 showed for the first time this season — in part, because Champion thought it allowed for better storytelling. However, she also felt pressure from industry insiders to go beyond the presentations PH5 had previously stuck to. “I just felt that presentations weren’t really being taken as seriously by press and by others,” she says. “People want to sit front row at a show, but they’re not necessarily that interested in coming at some point in the hour of a presentation.”
The pair underestimated how much more it would be than a presentation, Champion says, in effort and dollars. It requires more models; more teams behind the scenes; a bigger space.
For Velez, the physical show is worth it. “If I’m so broke, why do I keep doing shows?” she asks. “Simply put, presence at NYFW is essential for inclusion in the discourse.” Velez adds that most of the heavy lifting is done anyway: “The collection is made, why not reinforce that investment by putting it on bodies, before an audience in a space?” (Notably, Velez’s show was mostly sponsored by Nike this season, which made the financial burden lighter than the February show, which set her back approximately $40,000.)
For PH5, the return on holding a show wasn’t as fruitful as they’d hoped, Lin says. “It’s simple maths. If you triple the time, effort, money, budget, you should get triple the outcome,” she says. While she acknowledges that, in practice, this isn’t possible, she’d still hoped for a higher return than a presentation — but hasn’t seen an immediate uptick in brand interest. That said, Lin has no regrets about trying. And, in the long run, she hopes that the show was a step forward in the eyes of buyers and press.
To compromise, PH5 would consider doing a runway show once a year, rather than twice, Champion says. She’s looking to London, where many emerging designers have been experimenting with this approach. “Having done it once, I know that to do it twice a year would be crazy,” she says.
Institutional support
In the UK, the British Fashion Council’s NewGen arm offers brands funding and mentorship. Just ahead of this season’s London Fashion Week, the British government granted NewGen £2 million to amp up its efforts. This was sorely needed, British Fashion Council CEO Caroline Rush says. “Despite the creative industries’ undeniable impact on GDP, they are drastically underfunded by the Government. Early stage businesses operate with small cash reserves, a junior workforce on relatively low salaries, and often have low returns.”
As of now, alongside the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, the CFDA offers support via the Emerging Designer of the Year award at the CFDA Fashion Awards (Rachel Scott of Diotima and Fletcher Kasell of Tanner Fletcher are among the nominees); the Launch Pad Programme, which provides grants and mentorship to three early-phase brand BIPOC female founders; and an AAPI design and innovation grant. It also offers professional and business development to CFDA members.
However, this support doesn’t extend to designers out of the CFDA’s umbrella — even if they’re on the calendar. At NYFW, the PH5 team felt like they were going at it alone. “We got zero support,” Lin says. “Not even the CFDA attending our runway, or sending someone our way. We’re not a CFDA or CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund finalist, but we’ve been very loyal to New York Fashion Week,” she says, noting that she’s grateful to be on the calendar, but that that was the only ‘collaboration’. “Even as a brand that’s not so young, I feel like they didn’t really care about us.” (The CFDA declined to comment for this article.)
As for what support Lin wishes was available? “I don’t even know where to begin,” she says. “Any support would be great.”
There’s a hodgepodge of other resources, if designers look hard. These include a fashion week grant from shipping and logistics company UPS and IMG for HBCU designers. Net-a-Porter’s Vanguard mentorship programme (in partnership with the BFC) supports designers with funding and mentorship opportunities (Christopher John Rogers and Conner Ives are alums). Raisefashion is a key destination for BIPOC brands to seek out pro bono consulting.
Fashion Trust’s Fares was surprised at the level of need in the country after speaking with designers in the US industry. “They said, ‘We need the introductions. We need the exposure. We need the financial support.’ It’s a little bit of everything.”
Industry veterans are working to move the needle. Last week, Sherri McMullen launched her incubator, Beyond M. “As a black female founder, I saw firsthand the hard lessons of being an entrepreneur trying to grow a small business,” she says. “I am in a position to support young brands, mentor them and really partner with them. We want to build a community of allies, supporters, advisors and mentors to help build up the next generation of business leaders in fashion.”
Velez wants actionable advice. “My frustration is that mentorship is either comprised of ‘Fashion Business 101’ or an email intro into the void,” she says. “Designers need action items: comparison metrics, cost ballparks, merchandising strategies, serious critique, follow-up, etcetera. It’s rare to find anyone in the industry, aside from other designers, who will give you specific and actionable information to grow your brand with.”
Change could be both top-down (from industry bodies) and bottom-up (self-initiated community building), says Hannah Phang, founder of talent platform The Now Work. “Emerging designers offer innovation and creativity, which the industry desperately needs, so having support from multiple angles is required,” she says.
Velez is determined to voice the frustrations so many of her peers face. “I don’t want any of this enough not to be true to myself,” the designer says. “I want to be liked and understood but not as much as I want to change these barriers of entry — for the health and vitality of the future industry.”
Correction: The story was updated to reflect the correct funding amount of £2 million.
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