They're young, driven, determined and they're making some of the hottest new garms in the country. But they didn't get there by doing everything perfectly. We asked the people behind our Student High Street brands to share their biggest career fail to date, and here's what they said...
“In my early twenties, I worked as a PA for a clothing company director. I was always very organised; I had to be in that role. However, on one occasion my boss was attending an event abroad and I had forgotten to arrange the flight. My boss was absolutely livid and accused me of laughing about it, which of course I wasn't. Anyway, luckily I managed to arrange a last-minute flight (which was really difficult back in the day), but then he didn't speak to me for at least a week afterwards…”
“I failed a major module in my second year of uni and had to redo the whole year. It was partly caused by me trying to kickstart Misemi and going round, doing events, making clothes and not being able to balance that with uni.”
“My biggest career fuck-up was taking out a £4,800 loan for branded packaging. Don't do it. That same year, the business grew an astounding amount and when you grow that quickly, you need a bloody good cash flow to get you through it! I had no money at this point and spent so much time worrying about paying the loan back that I underestimated how many orders we'd have over the Christmas period. To cut a long story short... by the time February 2017 came around, I had refunded thousands of pounds worth of orders and had to take down nearly all of the products from the website because I'd wiped out my own manufacturer’s stock. We lost £15,000 in total because of one silly loan for packaging. But I documented all of it on my YouTube Channel, so you can learn from my mistakes. The moral of the story? Be patient and don't take shortcuts.”
DÊMOS
“When I was started up my label on my own, I was full of confidence because I thought I had a wide range of fashion industry experiences that could help me to handle it... I still can’t believe it, nothing was sold in my first collection in the whole season. But failures didn't put me off at all. They had all been fun to get stuck into, and we'd learned a lot of important lessons.”
"When we first started out, we bought way to much bulk stock and then spent months trying to get rid of it. This affected our growth as there was limited money to spend on marketing, models, photographers and so on, as all our money was tied up. While all this was happening we also didn’t take much notice of money in and money out. This is probably the most important thing because you don’t want to work hard all year to suddenly realise there’s no money in the bank…”
“I guess it’s something all boutique businesses face in, trying to make enough products. I had a dope pop-up lined up and by the time it came around I had no stock left to sell. It’s quite a regular occurrence actually... lol. But it’s great that we’re in demand.”
“The biggest error I can think of was not factoring in fees for currency conversion when working with stockists abroad. Let’s just say our first large international order we lost out on a lot of money... but that will never happen again! In my opinion you can fuck up as much as you like, as long as you learn from your mistake and don’t repeat it. There’s no shame in a fuck-up.”
“As we’re a very new company we've actually not racked up too many major fuck-ups just yet. Personal fails is a different story! They occur on a daily basis.”
“After eight months, I have just handed in my notice for my dream job! This was one of the hardest decisions I have ever made, especially as I felt I had been working towards this for years. It’s a job I could be proud of, working for a Fortune 500 company that really looked after its employees and one that from the outside looked very impressive – but the simple fact is that I didn’t feel satisfied with my role, I felt I could do more and I was not being honest with myself. So I guess you could say I am currently experiencing one of my biggest career fuck-ups, or one of the best decisions I have ever made…only time will tell! If I told you I wasn’t scared I’d be lying, but greatness and success won’t be achieved by doing something you don’t love, or by sitting in your bedroom moaning about how hard the world is.”
