While young designers might manage on four to five hours of sleep, they struggle to break free from a wholesale system designed for large fashion conglomerates. Finding new pathways and models in production, wholesale, and selling is crucial for the survival of emerging designers and it’s about time we dive into this conversation.
“I’ve been in some really difficult situations over the last two years and have severed ties with clients because of the impact late payments and late orders had on my capacity to deliver in a timely fashion and deliver the products in the quality needed.” – Sinead O’Dwyer
Emerging designers must navigate production and figure out how to actually fulfil all of their retail orders. This is no easy feat, especially for those taught in an art school context, who typically lack the practical skills to close the gap between design and production. “[In the beginning], I was using techniques that were very un-commercial and I totally underpriced them, though at the same time they were also techniques I should never have been wholesaling as the margins were never going to work for me, the seller, or the consumer as such a small unknown brand,” Sinéad O’Dwyer explains. “I also didn’t know anything about what the different terms meant and just hoped that by starting to sell I’d get opportunities, and that is true in part, but in other ways I wish I’d started off stronger with more knowledge.”
The biggest challenge for those just starting is almost always surpassing the minimum order quantity, or MOQ, set by factories and the resulting cash flow issues that arise. “I’ve been in some really difficult situations over the last two years and have severed ties with clients because of the impact late payments and late orders had on my capacity to deliver in a timely fashion and deliver the products in the quality needed,” Sinéad says. “I think often wholesalers don’t take any responsibility for the knock on effects of late orders, late deposits and late payments on the capacity a small business has to deliver. I’ve definitely paid factories late due to very late payments which makes those relationships strained too. Thankfully I’ve worked with generous production partners who have allowed me to deliver the product before final payment, however it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a negative impact on those businesses too.”
“In the end, if you don’t have a strong financial background to solve some of these issues… It just became all about cash flow, and it was killing everything creatively.” – Amalie Røge
For Danish knitwear label A.Roege Hove, this constant cycle resulted in the brand’s temporary closure last fall. Despite having many promising retail accounts, retailer’s payments–normally a deposit is received, and the rest is paid on delivery–were almost always late, likely due to the fact that retailers are struggling too. Without investors, designer Amalie Røge Hove was constantly digging into her own pockets. “We ended up growing too fast. We put ourselves in too risky a position because we didn’t know any better…” she explained. “In the end, if you don’t have a strong financial background to solve some of these issues… It just became all about cash flow, and it was killing everything creatively.”
UPPFIRST, founded by Arnaud Touret, Ed Diner, Payam Mirtorabi and Carmen Busquets, is a relatively new platform that allows independent designers to bypass the wholesale model altogether in favour of data-driven pre-orders that fund production in advance. This model should help avoid overproduction, which is often a side effect of MOQs for independent designers. In the words of the founders: “Long story short, we call ourselves a sales engine. What we mean by that is we give the tech to sellers to effectively sell or pre-sell their product directly to their audience.”
When used in combination with traditional retail operations, as Ahluwalia, Chet Lo, and Paolina Russo, who’ve already taken to the platform, have done, it allows for maximum profit. Designers have a hard time setting up their own direct-to-consumer, or D2C, e-commerce sites due to a lack of know-how, funds, and time. UPPFIRST tries to address this problem. “We really want to launch an e-comm,” co-founder of Paolina Russo, Lucile Guilmard, explains. “However, we know that an e-comm requires a lot of different operational skills that, if you’re not ready, there’s no way to learn.” These skills could be anything from coding to site management. “You are just thrown into it and have to figure it out as you go.”
With UPPFIRST, the data is yours and yours alone, revealing where those shopping are located geographically, which items they are buying and in what sizes, creating greater transparency in the industry (designers are not typically privy to this information) that can lead to more sustainable production. “Something that’s interesting, also, is that it means people didn’t find us by going to the stores. People found out about the brand and were looking at where they can buy it,” Lucile says. “This is a good way to understand our community. It’s a good barometer.”
If you are an emerging business, here’s everything you need to know about UPPFIRST, according to Arnaud and Ed, including how exactly it works, all the problems it aims to solve and who it might serve best.
In order to get started with UPPFIRST, all you need to do is enter your email. It takes minutes. Then, connect a Stripe account or create one if you don’t have one in order to sell products on the platform. “The reason for that is so that, as a brand, you get paid directly for the products that you sell on your credit card statement.”
Each seller is given their own dedicated online storefront to stock with any and all products that they are selling. These can be items that are already produced and ready to ship or those available for pre-order, with multiple options for delivery windows, minimum orders, deposits and more so that designers can sell with ease – at the click of a button.
“It’s supposed to be as easy and intuitive as social media. You don’t need to code. You don’t need to add HTML to anything. By tonight, you could have a product that you’ve created for sale on a full, working e-comm site.”
Your UPPFIRST site will be completely your own, as the only mention of the platform is in the URL. Take Paolina Russo’s online shop, for example. “You can customise your storefront. You can set your banner image; you can set your logo. You can also theme your page. You can make it a custom experience. You can really make it on-brand.”
This is also reflected in the platform’s payment system. When someone buys your products, it will list your name or your brand’s name on their credit card statement. “If your brand was called 1 Granary, on your customer’s credit card statement, it would say 1 Granary. We’re just the tech in the background that powers all of this. The story is never about us. It’s about the brands, their products, and about putting them first.”
Why should young designers explore alternative selling models?
Because independent designers are not only up against production challenges but cash flow issues in addition to the general collapse of traditional retail, we must continue to look for alternative selling models. “[Emerging designers] should be selling direct-to-consumer first and foremost because wholesale is broken. We’ve seen that with Farfetch, we’ve seen that with Matches, etc. There’s a need for a better model. A different solution.”
Whilst UPPFIRST cannot save the current retail landscape alone, it can make your life easier if you’ve been struggling to set up an e-commerce site. It can also be used alongside the traditional retail system. There is relatively no risk.
The platform can provide a secondary income stream and a place to sell any unsold inventory. “It’s a real, real way for them to de-risk. Because even if you’ve placed orders for wholesale, for your own DTC, you can still pre-sell them, right?”
Because it’s your own e-commerce site and there are truly no rules, you can also use UPPFIRST to sell one-of-one samples, archive pieces or other unique brand ephemera that you might not be able to sell elsewhere.
“We started as a pre-order-only platform, and one of the big pillars behind it was sustainability. A huge portion of clothing ends up in landfills, and the reason for that is overproduction. But overproduction, it’s not the fault of the brands. It’s actually the fault of the wholesalers and the middlemen.”
The pre-order-only model can be used to better inform production, meaning that once a specific order quantity has been reached, the items can be produced. And the designers can put the deposit towards the cost. However, there’s also a data element which has the potential to be revolutionary for independent designers. Not only can you see what is being ordered – which sizes and styles are most popular, and take that into consideration – but you can see where there is interest in your brand. “You keep your customer data, which probably sounds obvious, but when I talk to a brand, and they’re like, ‘What do you mean, I can keep my data? I’ll know who my customer is?’”
If a customer has purchased through your storefront, that means they’ve discovered the brand first and where they can buy it second. Brand awareness is no longer about discovering products in a department store or even, to an extent, on a multi-brand retail platform. By looking at the data, a designer can get a better sense of who makes up their community – where they’re located, what they like about the brand and better cater to them. This makes a brand far more successful in the long run.
The platform has a $9.99-a-month subscription fee, which is waived by Uppfirst until at least this coming January. The transaction fee is 1.5% at the moment.
In today’s world, everything around us is evolving at such a fast pace. There’s no reason why the traditional fashion system can’t evolve, too, but this can only happen if we keep looking for new opportunities and alternative ways of doing things, especially if they can benefit smaller businesses and independent designers who are often excluded from success in the wider industry. We must remember that the playing field is not even, and we must try to change that.
“Just because you’re a designer or someone with creative talent doesn’t mean you know how to set up a website or know how to deal with the payment process. You shouldn’t have to wear all those hats.”