Spring '10 Shoot

I’ve been complaining a lot of late and feeling annoyed with small problems that every business faces. I’ve been letting it get to me too, taking my frustration out on those around me and feeling resentful (“how could the world let this happen to me?”) But in truth, I am so unbelievably lucky: lucky that I had my parents’ support to start my own business, lucky to have found some amazing staff at my production unit who understand creativity and quality, lucky to have a patient and kind husband who has faith in what I do, and lucky to have come so far in a tough industry. I think if you can find something you love doing, and it pays you well, you have to consider yourself very fortunate. I’m still working on the “pays you well” part, but I know it’s not far away, and in the meanwhile I have people helping me on my journey.

Suchitra Karthik Kumar, a radio show host and singer, was at my store shopping a few months ago and we started chatting about my website and the collection photos. A few conversations later she offered to model for Brass Tacks! I was flattered, and it's always great to have someone who understands Brass Tacks to model because they immediately feel comfortable in the clothes. Plus having a well-known singer like Suchi model can only help publicize my brand. Suchi also put me on to Joseph Daniel, a commercial photographer in Chennai, and Joe spent a lot of time with me trying to understand the concept behind my brand and the inspiration behind the Spring 2010 collection.

As always I wanted an outdoor feel for the creative shots, and I remember visiting theVastrakala office sometime last year and thinking how great it would be for a photoshoot. I ran into the director, Sandeep, who is also my parents’ neighbor, a couple of weeks before the shoot and asked him if we could shoot there. His office gave us a huge room to work from and we got to shoot in their gorgeous garden.

I love when things fall into place like that. Organizing everything took a lot of time and effort, but in the end it worked out. I have to say though, I can’t wait for the day when I can just hire someone to execute my creative ideas. Making those paper props took forever, and being accommodating of everyone's tastes and opinions during a shoot isn't easy either. In the end the creative shots with the props didn’t quite turn out like I had envisioned, but I am really happy with them. In any case you can never really force an image during a photo shoot.

I made this paper "stole" out of paper shapes that folded into squares, and used colours that complemented the ikat colours on the dress.

The cubes I made were used as earrings in this shot. I wish I had managed to make these origami shoulder-pad-looking things out of paper, but they just didn't turn out well.

The cubes I had intended for juggling didn't make a great "fashion shot", so for this outfit we didn't end up using a prop at all.

New Staff More Problems

You always hope when you start a business that one day the business will have grown big enough that you can have assistants and managers at every level in each department to handle daily crises. I’m sure I will get there, but right now I’m the manager at almost every department and it can be pretty exhausting to handle every day issues while also stepping back to look at the bigger picture.

Right now I have a sales staff problem, and I’m wondering if there is some annual trend to this. Last year, around this time, both my sales staff did a no-show for a few days. It was exactly two weeks before my wedding, and I was working on the Spring Collection launch for 2009. I found it stressful to manage the store by myself, plan the photoshoot and send out press kits and mailers, and spend time with my wedding guests who were starting to arrive. I promised myself I would rather bear the cost of hiring extra staff than go through that stress again.

So I went and hired more sales staff, because even though my store is just 250 square feet small, I need to account for absenteeism and hope that on any given day at least 2 of them will show up for work. Accepting the overhead cost (this includes a fee that the recruitment agency charges every time I hire a new sales person through them) is not the hardest part. The tough part is training, and re-training, and trying to maintain some standards without staying in the shop myself. And just when I think my staff have understood me and my nit-picky ways, just when I get comfortable spending just a couple of hours in the store everyday and devoting the rest of my time to production, designing and marketing ideas, 3 out of my 5 sales staff decide to quit on me.

One of them is getting married, and her family demands that she go home right away to prepare for the wedding that is two months away. One of them joined work only two months ago and she has to leave because her parents cannot take care of her 18 month old child while she is at work. The third one actually joined in December, took a 3 week sick leave on her first day of work to recover from typhoid, and now has to quit because her father is unwell and she has to go home to look after him. This is a woman’s life in most families I suppose: if you are not answerable to your father, then it’s your husband and then your kids and then again your parents.

I had a 3 day vacation planned for my husband and I (it’s our first year anniversary and I think a few vacations days in a year is not too much to ask for) and now instead of focusing all my energies on marketing and press for my latest Spring Collection before my vacation, I have to interview new candidates for a sales position and train them too before I take off for 3 days.

Is there any real solution to this problem? The recruitment agency who sends me candidates says that every store has this same issue and that retail doesn’t have the same power of retention that an office job has. I realize it when I interview candidates too- very few of them hold one job for more than a year before jumping on to the next one. One candidate I interviewed but did not hire told me she loved all her jobs but she left because she wanted to move on to something better. I asked why I should hire her, spend time training her when she is going to move onto “something better” after a year. She answered saying, “how else can I get a salary increase and better my life”? Would she rather jump from job to job (telling her new employer what her old salary was so that she starts off the new job with a higher pay) than stick with the old one and keep earning raises and promotions?

It’s all a big mystery to me and I hope that I come back from my vacation rejuvenated enough to start the whole process of training again. But first, I have two candidates lined up for interviews this morning.

Analysis Paralysis

In a post a few weeks ago I had talked about creating Brass Tacks Gold, a higher end line where I could be more creative with handwoven fabrics without having to think of practical things like sales. My regular line, Brass Tacks (madras), would have a wider price range and potentially more mass appeal because I would keep in mind a variety of customers with different needs, different body types and different budgets for shopping.

Then I made the foolish mistake of talking to knowledgeable people in the business of retail and fashion! I’m joking of course- I am grateful for their time and generosity. The only problem is that I’m confused now. Below are the different options in front of me:

Option 1: Making Brass Tacks Madras a lower-end line with more appeal to a wider (and younger) segment of the market.

One person suggested that my lower end line (Brass Tacks Madras) should be produced in slightly larger volumes and sold everywhere. He also made a good argument for why I should be willing to make ideological compromises on the lower end line in order to appeal to a wider age and income group; Brass Tacks currently appeals to such a tiny niche and that’s not enough for me to keep this financially viable. A mass appeal line would mean using blends of polyester with cotton, or prints that aren’t particularly unusual but still very popular. I would still make well-cut clothes for this lower end line, but the inexpensive fabrics would allow me to price the garments in the range of Rs 400 to Rs 1000.

The big plus of this option is that I could potentially reach out to younger women who are still in their last year of college or first few years of work, and once they are used to the cuts and tailoring quality of my brand, they might slowly gravitate towards the higher-end, hand-woven line. The downside is that I’d have to expand my production capacity and given my perennial tailor problems, that’s a daunting task.

Option 2: Making the brand appeal to a wider (and older) segment of the market
I recently invited a partner of a high-end designer boutique in Chennai over to my store to give me some feedback. He strongly felt that I should be focusing on older women who have more spending power and catering to them by designing more comfortable, looser silhouettes and perhaps also including a line of sarees and stoles in my store. It’s really hard for me to think creatively when it comes to loose, flowing kurtas, and although I do love sarees I’m not sure that’s a great idea since one of the best sari stores in Chennai (Shilpi) is located right opposite the street from my store. The idea of designing a few styles that I can sell at higher prices is very appealing however. It would be nice to make the money I need to sustain this business through smaller volumes. Also, I could stick to handwoven and natural fabrics.

Option 3: Incorporate a high-end party wear line into Brass Tacks Gold

Last week I went to another designer boutique, and I noticed many evening dresses that were very similar to a lot of my evening dresses like Epiphyte and Black Orchid, except these dresses were made in fabrics like chiffon and georgette, with a habotai silk lining and sometimes a little elastic at the empire line to hold the dress together. In other words, those dresses have a wider mass appeal just because of the fabrics used – Chiffon and georgette silks are a lot more fluid and crush a lot less compared to Tussar silk or hand-woven mulberry silk. Perhaps by designing a higher end line of dresses in more mass appeal fabrics I will be able to reach out to more women in the demographic that I want to target – women who have spending power but who are currently not Brass Tacks customers because the fabrics don’t appeal to them.

Paralyzed and clearly still analyzing, I think I am inclined towards trying all of the above, without categorizing them into any brand label for now. I’ll add a few cotton-lycra pants, a couple of looser kurta styles, and I have to try at least one printed chiffon dress (I know just which print to use already). And then I’ll take it from there but in the meantime I’d love to hear thoughts and suggestions.

Trial and Error Learning

Learning by doing can be fun (and some would argue it’s the only way to learn), but the downside is that if you do it wrong, you have to find a solution to make it work. In my case here, I need to find a solution very fast.

A couple of months ago I went to Mumbai and saw this gorgeous Maheshwari organza silk fabric at the Women Weave office. Anyone who knows my taste in textiles knows that I love woven designs more than printed ones, whether it’s ikat or woven checks or jamdaani. When I saw this beautiful fabric with the subtle colour combinations, I knew I had to incorporate into the Spring Collection for 2010.

These photos are taken with the fabric folded over itself in layers

What I didn’t realize, until a few days ago when I received the fabric, was how the checks and the light green colours don’t show up very well in a single layer. This error on my part was probably due to my excitement over the fabric as a whole (the texture, the body, the depth) during the ordering stage, as opposed to thinking practically about how it would work in a garment. It’s tough though: when you’re in an office placing orders you can’t always imagine how that fabric will lend itself to the garment you have in mind.

Before the fabric arrived I thought I’d make a strappy dress with slight gathers or ruching at the side seam. I had a goldish-tussar coloured silk lining in mind for the green organza. But yesterday when I put it against the lining the green organza looked so drowned out in a single layer.

This is what the fabric looks like in a single layer placed over a gold-tussar coloured silk

The colour of the organza by itself is gorgeous- perfect, in my opinion, for a spring collection. I just need to figure out, very quickly, what lining is going to bring out the colours best, or if I should change the style completely to use two layers of the organza (which means a more expensive dress).

The Fatigue of Being Switched On

A few days ago I was in one of those moods- the kind when anything mildly unpleasant would inspire a long rant in my head. In the last few weeks I’ve felt over-worked (almost all my sales staff got typhoid one after the other and one of them quit with just 3 days notice before New Years), and I’ve had a couple of incidents with customers asking for discounts or telling me why my clothes aren’t nice. Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t spend too much energy thinking about these, but I’ve been over-worked and short staffed. Context is important, right?

When I go to work every day, and especially at my store, I try to be “switched on”. This means immersing myself in my work and trying to treat each person and situation with the best attitude. However, being switched on can be exhausting. It is exhausting because it requires so much energy to be constantly enthusiastic and lively and energetic about your work and your interactions. Even if you happen to be totally hyper and cheerful by nature I’m sure many hours of being switched on at work will take a lot out of you.

Being switched on brings out the best in me but since it leaves me so drained, my “switched off” state doesn’t always showcase my best side. Take for example the case of customers giving me feedback I don’t like hearing. I actually happen to ask pretty much anyone who walks into my store for feedback (maybe at some deep, sub-conscious level I’m begging for flattery), so I shouldn’t resent it when they tell me what they really think. When I’m “switched on”, I am really receptive to feedback. I know what to listen to and what to tune out, and sometimes it can be a really interesting exercise to try and analyze why that customer feels a certain way about my garments. When I’m not switched on (and during these times I really shouldn’t be at the store but like I said, we’re short staffed right now), constant negative feedback hurts. It can be difficult to listen to, and in my mind I start off with my sarcastic, funny come-backs. Hey, don’t judge me for being human, and at least I don’t say them out loud!

Another example: customers asking for discounts at the store. I’ve grown to learn that regular customers want to feel appreciated in some way for giving me business over time, and first time customers- well, let’s face it, most people love a good deal. When I’m switched on, I apologize for not being able to give a discount. I tell customers very politely that I can understand their point of view but to please also consider that I am struggling to make this company swim and I still haven’t reached a point where I can give out discounts. When I’m tired and completely out of it, these requests feel like I’m being taken advantage of. For all my politeness and great service and free alterations (yes, that’s right) I have to lose money as well? That just can’t be fair!

So aside from the negative consequence of saving my worst side (and no, it’s not a conscious decision) for my “switched off” state- which my family and close friends have to put up with- there is another more frustrating problem: I am never allowed to be switched off. You see, once you’ve set a certain standard, it’s too much to expect people to put up with anything but the “switched on” state. Sometimes I feel I have to walk this really fine line with little margin for error. I am never allowed to have an off day when I’m feeling low on energy or just grumpy. Take this blog post for example: a few days ago I wrote a post about specific incidents with customers- it was more of a hilarious rant rather than an angry vent, but then I decided not to post it because there’s my reputation and the store’s reputation at stake. People who have only seen my switched on side might get offended.

Sadly, the switched on state is limiting. I am not allowed to be who I really am (funny, sarcastic, impatient, goofy, honest, up-front). If I’m interacting with someone on my wavelength then I do let my guard down a little, but most people who come to a store are not looking to get chatty with the owner on a personal level, and keeping everything on a business level means that I have to shun my goofy, sarcastic side lest I offend anyone. And when I’m not at the store, I still have to stay switched on because a customer may have my cell number, or a customer will ask the store to call me- I have to be prepared at all times for requests about custom-tailoring, discounts, and once in a while a screaming session about something that went wrong at the store.

This post is a plea to all my customers: understand that it takes so much effort to do what I do only because I put my whole heart into it. If I wasn’t this passionate and caring about my work, it really would require a lot less energy. My intention is to give you the best possible shopping experience, and to learn from you- what you buy as well as what you don’t buy. How else will my business grow? But also understand that it can be exhausting to do this without being myself once in a while, or bringing in some humour to keep things light. In fact, I would even argue that it’s the only thing that will keep me sane.