Day Two was a crash course in organizational planning for up and coming fashion designers and business owners. An Moons helped outline some of the biggest pitfalls that are encountered in the Belgian indpendant design field. As with any creative business, finding capital, not just hard cash but what Bourdieu calls Cultural Capital (creative, commercial {sales, business, marketing, pr}, organizational, technical, R&D, and legal is probably one of the biggest challenges. Not to mention
However,what what can truly make or break a brand is the designer’s willingness to balance the creative design or “symbolic” value (in academic terms) with the garment’s actual functionality. The struggle between business and creative is never ending, but only second to the struggle between designer versus production teams, manufacturers and distribution chain.
My Big Business terminology was given a much-needed refresher as Moons outlined key integration terms from multi-sector and diagonal integration (for cross promotions á la LVMH) to upstream buying (where a manufacturer buys a designer). The concept of how of ‘artificial scarcity’ was touched on. Apparently it takes a lot of power to to create limited short run collections, mostly through ownership of distribution and retail channels. Ain’t that right, Heisenberg? It’s gotta be the blue stuff!
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