Developing a successful fashion business is notoriously hard. Every spring hundreds of ambitious designers graduate from art schools around the world, visions of catwalk collections dancing in their heads.
Of those graduates, most will go to work at major brands but some will be hit by the glare of media attention, lauded as the Next Big Thing, and encouraged to strike out on their own.
A few years later, struggling to make the jump from fashion start-up to real company, many will go bankrupt. The economics of the business just don’t work in favour of the start-up: you create sample dresses; stores order the dresses; but stores only pay you when you deliver the dresses, so you have to fund their creation, from fabric to seamstresses, by yourself.
Meanwhile, big fabric mills and clothes factories charge small and new designers more for their services than they do big designers (who can afford them).
So two years ago, when a pair of just-out-of-St Andrews University designers called Philip Colbert and Richard Ascott, who had a label called Rodnik, told me about their new fashion business, I was sceptical.
Sure, I liked the product – lacy cashmere scarves – but I wasn’t convinced Phil and Rich (they’re pretty much first-names only, like Ant and Dec) had any idea what they were getting themselves into. They struck me as more of a comic duo than actual designers. I couldn’t see where they would go (except maybe into trading).
There’s a reason I’m a fashion editor and not a fortune teller.
Four seasons into their business, it’s real, and it’s growing. The scarves have become dresses, cardigans and shrugs. Phil and Rich have broken out of England and are about to start moving the company to the next level. How did they do it? I could write about a combination of chutzpah, native intelligence, love of their product, and luck, but decided it would be better to let them tell their story, their way, as it happens.
Following is the first in a monthly series about their adventures in fashion, and their quest to make the jump from launch to fully fledged company. They’re fashion designers, but abstract the product and they’re just young entrepreneurs, struggling to make their company work. And that means there are lessons here for all of us.
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When we first came up with the idea to start a fashion label, we were sitting in a bar by the valley of sin on the final fairway of St Andrews’ old course. Having studied philosophy and art history, we were scarcely equipped to deal with the wild world of cut-throat fashion, but we couldn’t get Pookh out of our heads. And before you ask, no, we’re not talking about a stripper we met on a bawdy weekend or someone’s pet poodle but a unique fabric made from the beard of wise-looking philosopher goats found in the Urals. We’d discovered it wrapped around the neck of a pretty art historian who had bought it on a trip to Moscow and been told it was made of flowers – and to us it said “opportunity”.
A simple plan was formed. We would take a trip to Russia, find the fabric, and bring it to England to replace the very successful but by that time very tired pashmina market. Despite a complete lack of Russian, we were not deterred from doing business with a country 68 times larger than our own, whose alphabet made it impossible to even read a Tube map, let alone a contract. We called our company Rodnik, after a tiny shop started by a Russian princess in 1904, funded it with overdrafts, and (much to our surprise) started taking orders almost immediately – in the UK, at least. But we knew we needed to go further. We needed to crack the USA.
Our American adventure started in London earlier this year. It was Fashion Week, the week when the capital searches its wardrobe for its most outrageous outfit and struts onto the world’s catwalk. The big news was that Anna Wintour, editor in chief of American Vogue, was to attend. Not since before Rodnik began had she made the trip to her home Fashion Week. We decided it would be a brilliant idea to meet her; however, when the week passed, the Bafta film awards arrived and we hadn’t yet achieved our goal, we gave up.
So there we were standing by the sweeping staircase in the Grosvenor Hotel Ball Room thinking about film rather than fashion. Trudging past was a flow of this year’s nominees, some smug, some sour, when all of a sudden – there She was. Oddly enough, the biggest figure in world fashion was alone, so we thought perhaps she wouldn’t mind if we just popped over and said hello, an action which has been met with international disbelief: “You are not supposed to TALK to Anna Wintour!”
As it turned out, she could not have been nicer. She asked about our label, which we described in an over-zealous, enthusiastic, ridiculous manner. But it worked. “I’m on table 20, come find me after dinner.”
Fighting to suppress what would have been a deeply inappropriate high five, off we went to find our table. Dinner proceeded with much talking and little eating, and then, adopting what we thought was a cool, confident saunter, we made our way to table 20. The most exciting moment was when Anna asked if we would like to come to the Vogue Anglomania Ball at the Met in New York on May 1.
Of course, Vogue throws one hell of a party. We trotted along to the Met with specially painted Union Jack parasols and galloped up the red carpet followed by more flashes than we had expected. (We had expected none.)
Perhaps the jet lag had thrown out of synch our already questionable judgment, or perhaps we had crossed the fine line between genius and insanity, but for some reason we became convinced that while in New York, we should throw a party at the John Derian shop on the Lower East Side for all the interesting people we knew. John is a great friend of ours and was glad to help. Meanwhile, we had phoned our friend Meredith Melling-Burke at Vogue and suggested we show her our collection. In a flash she said: “Hold on, I’ll call through to Anna’s office and arrange a meeting.” Day two and our second meeting in as many months with fashion’s first lady. We felt we should come up with a presentation more original than us two with a bag, so we bought and painted a 19th-century trunk with the Rodnik logo.
A meeting with Anna Wintour in the world headquarters of Vogue is one of life’s more intimidating experiences. We were greeted by Meredith and the three of us queued outside the office as though we were still at school.
But the meeting went well. Our story telling was received with smiles and chuckles, which we were later told was a good sign. We had been joined in the spacious office by a series of footmen, only they were women.
As we dug through mountains of tissue paper to find the pieces of our collection, they were swiftly taken from us by the footwomen and displayed in a manner similar to genuflecting merchants showing cloths and fabrics to a queen. When we got to the dress, our hostess mused: “Sally should see this.” Within seconds, and I mean seconds, fashion news/features director Sally Singer materialised among us. She seemed to know an awful lot about us and said immediately: “You have to show this to Jeffrey – shall I e-mail him?”.
We awoke on Wednesday morning to a telephone call from Jeffrey of Jeffrey, asking us to meet him that afternoon. In the morning, we rushed to put the finishing touches to our party, baking cakes, buying champagne and painting parasols, and then we arrived at the flagship store by cab, tipped the driver, dragged our newly named Lucky Trunk from the boot, and climbed the stairs to the first floor.
We were joined immediately by Jeffrey – ex-Barneys – and his equally renowned partner, David Rubenstein, also ex-Barneys. The meeting got off to a flying start when we asked if they would like to come to our party, to which David replied: “I’m already going. My friend Ellen Carey (yet another ex-Barneys and a friend of Rodnik) has invited me to go with her.” Jeffrey decided to place an order: we now had two out of three of the best shops in the world, as Mrs Burstein’s Browns in London had been on our books for two seasons. Barneys so far remained elusive.
The party came and went in a flash of Polaroids. Among the guests was Jane Keltner (Teen Vogue), who said: “You guys have to see Barneys.” Did we suddenly have a chance at the fashion hat trick?
Thursday morning. The phone rings. Barneys on the line: could we come and see them? We explained that we were leaving the next day but this did not seem to put off our caller. The meeting was set for Friday morning.
On Thursday we visited Kate Young, one of American Vogue’s principal stylists, who had just opened a new jeans store with Rogan Gregory. We had a very educational time picking Kate’s brains about what she made of Galliano compared with McQueen or Lagerfeld.
It turned out she had worked with the latter for five years, and we decided she could be the perfect person to give us advice on a dilemma we had been having since the last Chanel show in Paris. By sheer coincidence, the parasols that [Chanel designer] Karl Lagerfeld had given to the front row that season had been almost identical to the ones we had been sporting at parties all week. Karl seemed quite taken by this coincidence and invited us backstage. Somehow we came out of the meeting having made a good impression and he asked us to send him something about ourselves.
Due to a great deal of arguing over exactly what we should be sending, we ended up not sending anything at all. How to redeem ourselves? The answer, from Kate: “Give him the trunk. He arrives in New York in two days.”
Our plan was to take a Polaroid picture of us with our parasols, write a note on the back and put photo and parasols in the trunk that would be placed on his desk ready and waiting for his arrival.
Thursday afternoon was spent in the high-rise office of Nina Garcia, American Elle’s fashion director, who in keeping with the good fortune that was riding on us piggy-back, proclaimed: “We really want to help you guys. Let’s do an article, a feature for September.” If that wasn’t enough, when we told her about our Vogue endorsement for Jeffrey and our meeting the following day, she said: “Do you want me to e-mail Barneys?”
We exited the building, climbed in a taxi and immediately the phone rang. Our friend and the owner of a new store on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Phoebe Cates, wanted us to come and do an interview with W Magazine the following day.
Friday dawned, a stifling New York day. Our schedule: Barneys at 11am, Phoebe’s Blue Tree at 1pm, Karl Lagerfeld HQ at 3pm, then into a taxi and race to the airport in time to catch our flight back to London.
Dressed in limited edition Rodnik Homme, we presented ourselves at the Barneys reception and met a series of buyers, all of whom, to our delight could think of nothing but nice things to say. However, all this enthusiasm was taking up valuable time. Somehow two hours passed and we had to take our leave.
They asked to keep some samples to consider an order. The problem was, at that moment our samples were due uptown for W magazine who were then to forward them to Elle who had requested them the day before – but how could we not help Barneys? The Lucky Trunk opened and closed, and we left promising that we’d figure something out.
Perhaps it was the fact we were identically dressed, perhaps it was Phoebe’s doing, or perhaps from 3,471 miles away our favourite fairy godmother Mrs Burstein had waved her magic wand, but no sooner had we entered the shop than W Magazine’s Vanessa Lau said: “We have to do a shoot.”
The fact that we were due to be leaving in three hours did nothing to put her off. She got on the phone and demanded a photo crew be biked over here immediately.
Three hours to go: with Phoebe as director, clutching our parasols, we climbed over mantlepieces, furniture and the Rodnik Lucky Trunk chased by W’s lens.
Two hours to go: we managed to convince the building security, the receptionist and a personal secretary that we absolutely had to be allowed into Karl’s private office, that we had to leave a metre-long trunk sitting on his desk, and that under no circumstances must it be touched or moved by anyone other than Karl himself.
One hour to go: we sped off towards JFK, the city shimmering gold in our wake. Was it the sun or had we somehow done this?
The American chapter ends here. How did the story pan out? Incredibly, we did score our fashion hat trick: Barneys joined the Rodnik stockist list, and Elle and W wrote their articles.
As the dust settled back in London, we realised we had experienced the beginning of a very small snowball – the size of that first fistful of snow that is rolled around the garden destined to be a snow boulder. We had an infrastructure, we had built ourselves a platform on which to perform, we had created a brand, and we had an identity. But we did not have money.
To become a snow boulder in fashion requires investment more than graduate overdrafts. The challenge was set.
By Richard Ascott and Philip Colbert
Next month: Rodnik’s search for an angel. www.rodnik.co.uk
