Entrepreneurial success in the traditional startup playbook \u2014 be it for beauty, consumer goods or tech \u2014 usually looks like scaling a business, gaining external investment and eventually exiting after it\u2019s acquired. This pathway is less common (and harder) in creative industries. But experts and investors agree that small to medium-sized fashion brands have a thing or two to learn from the startup world.<\/p>\n
The typical pathway for a designer starting a brand includes graduating from fashion school, doing an internship or two, launching a label, and scaling it through a combination of wholesale, fashion show press, and mentorship via talent incubators. But the struggles of independent fashion brands are by now well documented. In January, beloved avant-garde label Y\/Project closed<\/a> after struggling to find a buyer without designer Glenn Martens<\/a> at the helm. In 2024, there were a series of closures across independent brands<\/a> including Dion Lee, The Vampire\u2019s Wife and Calvin Luo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Entrepreneurial success in the traditional startup playbook \u2014 be it for beauty, consumer goods or tech \u2014 usually…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":104451,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[8390,64,67339,607,525,67338,4313,268,8709,5510,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-104450","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-acquisitions","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-emerging-designers","11":"tag-entrepreneurship","12":"tag-finance","13":"tag-independent-designers","14":"tag-investing","15":"tag-investment","16":"tag-investors","17":"tag-latest","18":"tag-united-states","19":"tag-unitedstates","20":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114941492306637643","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104450\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}