So, you want to break into the scene in Dubai?

Ok, so you’re a successful creative and you’re stocked across a range of retailers in the UK and probably also elsewhere but … for whatever reason you’ve not yet made any inroads into Dubai … that shopping mecca for the Gulf!

As luck would have it MyCake founder Sarah Thelwall is just back from a few days there where she was delivering work for the British Council under the delightfully mischievous leadership of Shelagh Wright and Peter Jenkinson. So here’s a few tips to get you started:

1. At first glance it’s all about the malls … because it’s hot, because malls are air-conditioned, because it’s a public place where the youth of both sexes can meet and mingle freely … all sorts of reasons. So it’s worth getting to know what’s in the malls (you can research this online) and finding the multibrand retailers. You’ll find regional multibrand retailers such as Aishti and Aizone there who focus on international brands but you’ll also find independent retailers stocking much smaller and niche brands. Sarah’s favourite in the Mall of the Emirates was Boom & Mellow who clearly look around the globe for interesting brands and makers.
2. If you’re a gem based jeweller it is worth looking specifically at the jewellery retailers as there is such a focus on gem based work. Again you’ll find that the top flight malls have whole sections dedicated to jewellers. To see some innovative jewellery from a UAE designer have a look at the work of the award winning Azza Al Qubaisi
3. There is a local creative and design scene and it’s growing but finding local labels is not as straightforward … they’re not located together in a geographic cluster the way they often are in the UK. For an interesting overview of the Dubai fashion scene get yourself a copy of Sonyia Kirpilani’s film Do Buy. Also have a look at the line up for the Fashion Forward event that’s run annually and showcases local, regional and international talent. You would do well to talk to Khulood Thani as well and you’ll find her at www.binthani.com. For a broader Gulf view on what’s hot and who the key retailers are talk to Marriam Mossalli who runs www.nichearabia.com
4. The contemporary art scene is substantial in Dubai so to start getting your head around it get yourself a copy of the ArtMap and sign up for the art alerts from Art in the City. You might want to talk to a local artist. We say start with Nik Nejad .. you’ll find him on facebook and also at www.niknejad.net … mention Sarah’s name when you say Hi.
5. If you can get out there soon the 6th Sharjah Biennial is utterly superb and a great way to see a combination of Gulf-based and international artists
6. There is a varied music scene, you need to meet a local as we didn’t spend enough time to say a great deal. Fortunately we have one of those to recommend DJ Lobito, you’ll find him on twitter and feel free to say we sent you in his direction

What else can we tell you? What other sorts of people would you like to meet out there? Drop us a line and we’ll do our best to connect you – sarah@mycake.org

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CIDACo’s Creative Capital – the time is now

Last week we welcomed in the launch of Creative Capital – a new Arts Council funded initiative from Yorkshire based consultancy CidaCo who specialise in creativity, innovation and enterprise. The Creative Capital programme is designed to boost the Northern region’s creative sector, as arts organisations across Yorkshire and the surrounding areas experience budget cuts and the need to develop new revenue sources.

Creative Capital was launched on Wednesday 10 April in Sheffield’s Cutler’s Hall a magnificent place that has been around since the 1700′s and contains many a grand room with tall ceilings and a need for sound systems for us mere mortals. Next year they will be celebrating 150 years of Sheffield Steel so the place is looking pretty smart, even the teaspoons used for our teas and coffees were of a higher standard than your average in-house caterers. Very impressive.

In the last week or so I have had a few emails from the CIDACo team to say that the numbers of attendees is going up and up so whilst I am not worrying about being heard at the back I am wondering if we will all fit in such a grand room.

MyCake were invited to talk about how an organisations’s data is useful in the process of change.

Our message is one of building collective intelligence in the sector rather than struggling in isolation. We are incredibly keen for arts organisations to open up more about sharing data and learning from a bigger source of knowledge, not just sharing best practice any longer but gaining powerful insights into where business models have to change and adapt or else pull an institution under. You can see an outline of what Sarah spoke about in the presentation slides on How pooling your data can improve your business model.

The challenge of these sorts of very short sessions (I had a mere 15 minutes) is of course one of engagement … Getting the audience to a point where they understand what ball park we are in intellectually is one thing. Getting them fired up about actually doing benchmarking themselves is another. So the tweak for this session was to take all the public financial data I can find on the invitees and use it to see and show how similar to or different from the national average this group are.

By the time we reach the round table discussions it is clear this approach has really worked as the questions are coming thick and fast …. What benchmarking is included in the programme? How do we get started? What data can we use? What do you think about social impact data? Every one of the six tables comes at the data question from a different angle. This is one highly engaged group of organisations

Perhaps it is that the timing is right for this programme, perhaps the risk of other funders ‘doing a Newcastle’ has really hit home, perhaps it is the energy that Anamaria and her team bring to the topic, perhaps it is the bespoke nature of the support being offered, and the quality of the team CIDA is fielding. Whatever it is this is going to be a programme which can deliver change in both the practice and the performance of the organisations who participate. Data is part of the approach of course as it helps with both diagnostic and goal setting and the interest in social impact data (there are those in the room such as Hoot who have already been working with this framework for a while) should help this group not simply benefit from what’s been done already but add to the body of knowledge on how to use data in the arts better.

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Alternative financing models: re.volution Hack Day 22 February

We are taking our Culture Benchmark data up to Edinburgh this month for Mission Models Money’s re.volution Hack Day event on Friday 22 February. Registration is open and it is free for MMM re.volution members to attend.

In attendance will be a whole host of arts and culture organisations with a desire to change their approach to financial models and revenue. We’re very much looking forward to helping them interrogate tough questions that all arts organisations should be asking this year. Strong data and strong leadership will be the order of the day. We’ll report back on our thoughts of the day soon.

“Here they talked of revolution, here it was they lit the flame.” Gotta love Les Mis! : )

Other articles about our work with Mission Models Money:

Building Collective Intelligence with the MMM re.volution programme

Fuelling collaborative working with creative organisations

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Entrepreneurs, do you really need to lead?

Last night was an opportunity for an excursion from MyCake Towers to a friend’s narrow boat and over a glass or two of good red wine we got chatting about the way we work and the choices we’ve both made not to lead teams of people. It’s not that we can’t, in fact many people consider us leaders and the person to go to to get things done quickly, efficiently, on time and on budget, to bring the rest of a team with us and to help change minds and overcome challenges.

It is of course a great compliment to be regarded in this way but it’s not always the default one wants to assume as someone with a creative brain and a nose for new ideas. So if you don’t always want to lead because it can restrict your freedom to innovate how do you balance needing to deliver successfully so that you can earn your living with the desire for freedom to explore ideas?

One choice is to only work with your peers and not establish a hierarchy. A collaborative approach has two main challenges:

1. being clear on what you define as an equal, what you expect from them, what they can expect from you and articulating this when you talk to potential collaborators (or at least providing a process that allows it to evolve and makes sure you continue to check in to see what’s working for each of you)
2. getting paid well enough as you’re probably not sub-contracting parts of a project to less expensive colleagues/employees and making a profit on this part of a deal

Taking the second one first (it’s simpler and quicker!) the challenge here is how administration and project management is charged for. You and your collaborators might decide that nobody gets paid for it and that you simply divide it up between you. However if the client wants a single point of contact then it’s likely that one of you will be doing more of this sort of liaison and be responsible for getting documents to a client etc so you might need to recognise this in the budget. What doesn’t work is for it to be on the responsibility of one person and them not get paid (or even recognised by the team or client) for the extra work involved.

The challenge of being clear about what you define as an equal is a little more tricky in that it’s much more individual. I’ve been talking to a few clients about this recently as a result of them feeling a bit burnt by collaborations that haven’t worked out as they’d expected and we’ve reviewed what they expected vs. what they communicated. Here’s a few lessons learned:
•    When somebody says ‘it’ll be good for your career’ as a reason for working for free/cheap and for something that delivers them immediate benefit but your benefit is unclear or delayed think hard about the motives from both sides and where appropriate put caveats on the deal … e.g. yes but if it goes further my rate will be higher to compensate for the freebie or if it doesn’t pan out as you planned (ie deliver the later returns you’re expecting) then I’ll bill you this fixed amount instead. That is to say think of ways to share the risk rather  than shoulder all of it
•    If you are both doing unpaid work on a project work out whether you are both putting in equal amounts, whether your day rates are similar etc so that any profits that are made later are split according to the value and amount of time being contributed.
•    Make sure the other person recognises the work you are doing unpaid particularly if it is the kind of work they don’t like doing and especially if they don’t value it as highly as their own contribution/skills/area of work! So if you’ve taken on the project management and the other party is pleased because it means they can focus on delivery then make it clear how much preparation time you are putting in and what that’s saving them or if you’re doing the selling because you have the customer list and they don’t then make sure they value this shortcut that you can bring.
•    If you’re bringing in others and one of you has the existing client contact then be clear about whether this is a client contact that you’re sharing with them going forward ie how would you feel if they approached this client contact about other pieces of work or if the client approached them without including you?
•    You might see the other parties as equals but are they viewing you as an equal as well? Do you really see yourself as their equal or are you offering to do more than half of the running and are they letting you?

The decision to lead people or collaborate with them is an interesting one for the free spirits of the creative sector we all find ourselves in this situation at certain points, as the poet John Donne said “No [wo]man is an island” – choosing the right ways to work with others is a common scenario in creative businesses.

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Do you like your art digital?

Introduced as a revolutionary new way to collect art and ‘enjoy art everywhere’ s[edition] is an online platform for artists to be able to offer digital editions of their work directly to buyers.

With endorsement from well known artists such as Tracey Emin, Isaac Julien, Michael Craig-Martin, and Mat Collishaw is this the new way to collect art? By downloading it onto your computer, smart phone, watching it on the internet through your TV screen or on a projector? Is it an initiative only for the more flashy and adventurous art collectors who embrace the digital world or is it going to enable people who have never collected art before even in the physical world to become collectors of digital art in a big way?

s[edition] has been founded by one of the creators of saatchionline.com and means business in this new age of digital consumption.

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Benchmarking avoidance tactic no 2 – we already know what our finances look like

As we talk to more and more organisations about benchmarking there are a few classic excuses that people give for not adding benchmarking to their to do list. Now don’t get me wrong I’m all in favour of being cautious about what else one chooses to take on but some of the reasons given just don’t stand up to scrutiny so we’re going do a series of posts to to pop a few balloons. Of course if you disagree with us or think there’s something we’ve not considered then we’d love to hear from you.

The second reason given is really a misunderstanding of how benchmarking is useful. In order to benchmark you of course need to enter your own data into the system (it takes about an hour from scratch). One of the immediate pieces of feedback you get as you fill the form in is that it turns your figures in £ into percentages of income allocated to the various different income and expenditure lines on your profit and loss sheet. This is useful because it helps people to remember the ratios of the different income types.

It is however only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what the Culture Benchmark (and also the Charity Benchmark and RFO Benchmark) offer indeed if this was all it did that wouldn’t be worth a lot because of course you do indeed already know what all your data looks like – where the income comes from, how far it goes in terms of the way you spend it.

Benchmarking expands your vision beyond your own data set. Instead of only being able to compare your data to your previous year or having to search out pieces of data from say the Charity Commission, the Culture Benchmark enables you to compare your business model anonymously and confidentially with other organisations like yours. This means that you can look at how the ‘best in class’ do things and use this to set new goals for your own organisation.

For example you might achieve say 5% of your income from trusts & foundations how do you know whether this is better or worse than others in your area of work. If you don’t know this then you might set a target of growing this to say 7% and be pleased when you achieve it. However if the average across your peer group is say 12% and they are aiming to grow to 15% this puts your figures into a very different context doesn’t it?

Alternatively you might be looking to reduce some of your costs and might be considering cutting your marketing spend from 3% of turnover to 2% (excluding marketing staff costs). However if the data shows that the organisations who achieve greatest ticket sales or audience figures are spending say 5% of turnover on marketing then you might think twice about it.

If you benchmark your organisation then not only can you see where your strengths and weaknesses lie but you will also have a much stronger set of messages to communicate to funders and other stakeholders about your successes. It is way more powerful to say that you are quantitatively best in class at A or B than to simply say that you’ve had a good year and A or B have increased/decreased as forecast.

As part of the MMM re.volution programme we’re able to give 50 re.volution peers a free six month subscription to the Culture Benchmark and this also comes with a degree of phone support and you’ll see us at MMM events so we can help you work out which clusters to join and what comparisons to make. For those who are paying subscribers we also offer a degree of support in working this stuff out, after all we want to make sure you get the most out of a subscription.

If you are a part of a non-profit arts organisation that wants to find out more about benchmarking your annual data then we are running free half day workshops in Birmingham on Tuesday 26 June sign up on eventbrite and in London on Monday 2 July also register for your free place on eventbrite.

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The differences between fashion sectors in the UK, Beirut and Saudi

As you may know MyCake spent a bit of time in Saudi in May delivering workshops about finance and marketing to creative entrepreneurs in Dammam, Jeddah and Riyadh. Apart from learning a lot about the nuances of abaya and thobe fashions and the similarities between a bad hair day and a bad hijab day we had the chance to discuss how the fashion sector works in KSA (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) and how this affects the growth options for young Saudi designers.

The growth route for young UK designers is really all pret-a-porter and we’ve seen the substantial growth of mid-range fashion in the likes of LK Bennett and Reiss. This means that young designers are investing substantial sums in sampling their collections before they have any idea of the orders they’ll receive. It is a particularly risky business model but it dominates the UK market. Retail prices for young designers are higher than the price points for top end high street brands such as Reiss and are more likely to be £300 – £1500 per piece depending on the piece.

In contrast in Beirut the dominant model is for young designers to develop a couture atelier and produce ranges of dresses in the $6,000 to $15,000 range with an additional collection of wedding dresses in the $10,000 – $40,000 range. Whilst there are costs associated with producing the gowns for the collection the return on investment is substantial and all the production is carried out in the atelier rather than contract manufactured as is the case for UK pret-a-porter. This model enables a young designer to develop a profitable business somewhat earlier in their career. However this model is largely dependent on the proximity to the Gulf market which is where the demand for the couture dresses is coming from. Whilst there is some pret-a-porter in Beirut (for example Ronald and the designers that the Starch Foundation works with and to some extent the work of Lara Khoury) on the whole Beiruti women don’t buy local designers and key multibrand fashion retailers such as Plum and Aishti don’t stock them. Beiruti’s buy international brands by preference. The growth for young designers therefore is all based on export.

Saudi is different again. Whilst women wear an abaya in all public places and whilst there is a whole separate market for fashionable abayas there is also a thriving fashion sector for Western fashions and fashion adapted to the desire of a section of the market for ‘modest’ designs. The key difference however is the desire, particularly amongst young Saudi women, to have a more individual style. Unlike the Beirutis who wish to demonstrate their wealth by the brands they wear Saudi women assume that everyone knows they are wealthy and could wear Chanel if they chose to (and there’s certainly plenty of wealth display in the handbags they carry). As wealth display is not so important they can focus on their own individual sense of style and the social benefits of championing a young designer by wearing their work. Of course the social benefits give them the kudos of ‘discovering’ a designer and being part of the crowd that brought them to wider awareness and success. This gives young designers the opportunity to deliver a combination of couture work and pret-a-porter to what is initially a cluster of private clients but with the opportunity to expand into their own retail unit once demand increases. There are examples of retail units which stock say four or five young designers and sometimes these will be based on the designers coming together to share the risk, other times it is a visionary Saudi woman (usually it is a woman) setting up a retail unit. Examples include Sofra and Maison Bo-M (both in Jeddah). Multi-brand and concept stores stocking young designers are not yet common but nonetheless worth looking out for.

So as a young designer wondering what part of the world provides best fit to your design style also think about where in the world suits the business model you wish to pursue!

And for those wondering where the image comes from the answer is Souk al Haraj in Riyadh, designer unknown!

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Benchmarking avoidance tactics no 1 – we’re unique, there’s no-one to compare to

image source: http://b4e.si/enjoy/index.php/wallpapers

As we talk to more and more organisations about benchmarking there are a few classic excuses that people give for not adding benchmarking to their to do list. Now don’t get me wrong I’m all in favour of being cautious about what else one chooses to take on but some of the reasons given just don’t stand up to scrutiny so we’re going do a series of posts to pop a few balloons. Of course if you disagree with us or think there’s something we’ve not considered then we’d love to hear from you.

Ok, so at the top of the list is the ‘there’s no-one like us so there’s no-one to compare ourselves to’. Of course if you drill down to the real detail of what you do and how you do it I’d probably agree with you but there are broad similarities either across sectors or across organisations of a similar size and scale. It stands out very clearly in the data and if you’d like to take a look then follow one or more of these links to the data and related analysis (put in the sliced by size, turning point and orchestras posts). In short, it just ain’t true that comparisons can’t be made … indeed if you’d like to challenge us on that we’re always happy to have a look at your report and accounts and offer suggestions for useful comparisons.

The challenge then is determining which facets of your business model you hold in common with enough other organisations to be able to make useful comparisons with them. In the way that we’ve built the Culture Benchmark we’ve tried to make this as easy as possible. For starters we have a growing list of clusters and you can join one or more of them. These clusters correspond to membership organisations such as VAGA, the ITC, the MLA (as was) etc etc. There are about 50 different clusters at the moment and if you think there are key ones missing we’d be happy to set up more.

Once you’ve added your data into the benchmark you can also make comparisons by key lines in the data so for example if you wanted to compare your organisation only to others with a similar level of grant income or a similar number of employees then you could do that.

As part of the MMM re.volution programme we’re able to give 50 re.volution peers a free six month subscription to the Culture Benchmark and this also comes with a degree of phone support and you’ll see us at MMM events so we can help you work out which clusters to join and what comparisons to make. For those who are paying subscribers we also offer a degree of support in working this stuff out, after all we want to make sure you get the most out of a subscription. Check out when we are holding our free workshops to see if we’re coming to a city near you: http://mycakeculturebenchmark.eventbrite.co.uk/

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New currencies and free exchange: Art Barter & virtual VEN

Money makes the world go round but not in every case it seems, especially in the creative industries. During these tough times new ideas for currencies are popping up such as virtual global ones and systems of free exchange.

Art Barter was launched by London-based curators Lauren Jones and Alix Janta in November 2009. Art Barter is a system of exchange that encourages the trade of art for goods and services with no money changing hands. Not an entirely new concept as this is a familiar bargaining method for many famous artists of the past, it is revived for this new era of austerity. The artworks are bartered for at Art Barter shows happening around the world, the shows attract the more unconventional of buyers. The premise is: “What is a piece of art worth? A year of psychotherapy or piano lessons?” We imagine Art Barter shows must turn pretty bizarre in some trade offs.

I first came across the virtual global currency, VEN when reading about what goes on in the co-working communities of shared office spaces, for instance at part of the Hub Culture Network in London. VEN, also emerging in 2009 as a currency online, can be used to buy, share and trade knowledge, goods and services within the Hub Culture network. It is tipped as the only currency to be linked to the environment due to the introduction of carbon to the calculation price.

For years gamers and internet veterans have known about and no doubt traded Bitcoins amongst their peers online, free exchange is going on around us all the time. It would be interesting to see more examples of this trading system coming out of the creative sector.

Are these trends set to mark the end of money as we know it?…

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Are you ready to set up your own retail outlet?

….or is it a better idea to grow sales through other retailers?

Let’s set the scene, you’ve been growing your creative product-based business for a few years. You’ve sorted out the production processes in your studio or atelier and there’s been a steady demand for your work from retailers both in your home country and abroad. However you’re studio isn’t really working at capacity which means that your staff costs are a high percentage of your company’s expenditure and you’re not really reaping enough benefit from this.

If you’re in fashion the equivalent is that you have minimum production volumes with factories that are exceeding your sales levels so you have stock left over. Either way there’s too much supply and not enough demand as things stand at the moment.

You see a couple of options for your growth, both are demanding so you really need to focus on one not do both badly.

Option 1 – grow sales by extending your network of retailers

Option 2 – set up your own retail and sell direct to the customer

What to do? Unsurprisingly there’s no clear cut answer to this question, either could work, it rather depends on the skills and resources available to you and the dynamics of the market. However there are pros and cons to each approach and factors that will affect the success of each that we can look at so that you can work out what’s right for your business.

Option 1 – Growing sales by extending your network of retailers

This strategy requires you to take your brand out into the B2B market, find and pitch your offer to the retailers. You’ll need to spend time researching the retailers to look for the ones whose customer base is the best fit to the products you’re offering. This in turn means that you need to understand the end customer to a reasonable degree so that you can chat knowledgeably to the retailers about market segments, buying behaviour etc. You need to come to understand how buyers work, when they buy, and what criteria they base their buying decisions on. With small retailers the buyer will often be the owner, will spend quite a lot of time on the shop floor and will know their customers by name along with their buying habits. With larger retailers the buying team will be armed with detailed information on the sales successes and failures of different lines and more detailed demographic research about their customers.

It is worth spending time getting to know the buyers individually and if you can then also spend time in their shops and come to know the layout of the store and the mix of products they stock. This also means you’ll become more familiar with how your product works when surrounded by other stock.

How do you win these retailers as clients? Well clearly you can approach them individually but frankly you’ll do better to find a way to meet lots of them in a short space of time. This is of course the reason that trade fairs and fashion weeks are important to the sector as they offer buyers and sellers alike the chance to do a lot of business all in one place. Your challenge is knowing which trade fairs are right for your brand. One way to answer this is to visit any trade fair you’re thinking of taking a stand at at least once before you take space with them. Once you reach the stage of attending several trade fairs a year you should be considering taking on a specialist sales person to manage these relationships with your B2B clients. A proactive sales person will not only do the front of house and deal closing work on a stand but they’ll also spend time suggesting ways for clients to try out your new products, re-order sooner and you will move from being a company that reacts to orders coming through the door to one that goes and seeks new business on a daily basis. The perspective on the range that a sales person brings will also be invaluable as their focus will be satisfying clients rather than the creative pleasure of the design. A great counter balance!

So, what does this route require you to invest beyond your own commitment?

-       research into national and international trade fairs

-       designing and taking a stand several times a year

-       the salary for one or more specialist sales staff

The advantage however is that if you are not quite sure what the demographic is for your products nor how to market to them then working with other retailers is a great way to better understand your customer base.

Option 2 – Setting up your own retail unit and selling direct to the customer

So the challenge here is that you’re putting a lot of eggs in one basket and making quite a long term commitment. You can test things out in the short term of course with pop-up shops which last only a few weeks or a couple of months. This is a great way to get a customer base used to the idea of your own retail concept rather than finding you only online or in other retailers stores. Plus of course you start to get your head around staffing a retail space, epos systems, stock management, store management and store layout.

Let’s look at the long term retail concept in a bit more detail and unpack some of the costs and risks to see if you are ready to take them … after all we can all imagine a rose-tinted upside where there is a queue around the block!

The first challenge is finding a space you can afford. Do you go for somewhere that is already in a key shopping area or do you go for something that will require you to become a destination that people travel to. In reality few young designers can afford prime retail space for their first store. To get around this challenge of high costs per square foot you will find that some will have a combined office/production and retail space such as the work/retail units in the OXO tower or they will head a bit out of the centre either to areas where creatives are already congregating or to a surburban high street. This is a more viable option now that online retail has grown so much. Look at the success of Beyond the Valley, they have one fairly small retail space one street east of Carnaby Street and a flourishing online store. The combination of these two has helped them weather the recession.

It’s worth looking out for areas where other creatives have been congregating because it is often an indicator of cheaper and shorter term rents. The Mar Michael and Port areas in Beirut host a wide variety of independent retailers for exactly this reason … much more fun than the brand names of the Beirut Souks.

So, you’ve found a space, the next trick is negotiating a lease that suits .. the key thing here is a ‘break clause’ … this is your get out of jail free card that allows you to get out of a lease before it has expired … the longer the lease the more important the break-clause becomes.

With these technicalities out of the way you move on to thinking about not just store layout and staff but crucially the mix of stock. How do you work out what mixture of price points? What the likely sales mix between high and low ticket items will be at different times of year? If you can bring in a shop manager at this point i.e. well before you open then so much the better as they can work with you bringing their experience to the cash flow forecasts that you will need to plan your first three years and convince banks and investors that you know what you’re doing. If you’re looking at a blank sheet of paper with no retail expert to help then start by reviewing the patterns in your wholesale orders and use this as the basis for building your sales forecast.

Having built your sales forecast you need to return to the cost base to look at staffing, utilities and all the other costs of running the space. You will find that one of the greatest challenges is that you’ll see yourself spending significant sums before you open and in general there will be quite a delay between spending funds and seeing income. You will probably need a good relationship with your bank! Look at whether you can get an overdraft and plan for the lowest point in your funds/debt.

By now you may be thinking ‘is it worth it?’. Well the up-side is that you will come to know your customer base in much much more detail than by selling wholesale and of course you’re seeing the full retail value not just the wholesale price. So it can definitely be worth it but it’s a question of whether your business is ready for it. If you’re struggling to predict the mix of price points and items that go to make up either a single sale or a monthly turnover then you may not be ready yet and you might be better off pursuing the wholesale route for a few more seasons. If you can put the forecast of income and costs together then the responses of a bank or investor are another acid test. If they don’t think your plans are feasible they’ll tell you.

If you can talk to other creatives who’ve opened their own retail you should definitely do this so you can learn from their successes, failures and take on board their top tips for controlling costs at the early stages.

Some years ago Wendy Malem who at the time ran the Centre for Fashion Enterprise said that you could take a business to a million pounds in sales without your own retail unit but the big challenge is going from one to ten million. Brands such as Chloe and McQueen have benefited from substantial investment from specialist investors such as the LVMH  group who understand the risks of going global. Several such brands have lost money for several years until the retail sales grew into a profit making business.

At the end of the day both routes require considerable commitment and involve the ability to balance risk against return. Your challenge therefore is to develop a strategy appropriate to your business and not just follow the crowd!

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