GRAMMAR NYC: What does it take to be a designer and a business owner?
“In the beginning of creating your brand, I think there can be a lot of self-doubt. It can be an emotional roller coaster. Having your own business is like getting a PhD in yourself.”
The catalyst for starting GRAMMAR came out of misfortune when designer Althea Simon’s apartment building burned down and she lost all of her belongings. The difficulty she felt trying to replace her wardrobe lead her to first apply her eye for detail and nuance to the challenge of creating the perfect white shirt. Her brand has since grown into a beautiful collection of conscious, purposeful and consumer centric garments.
Althea has always shared her knowledge with others who are on their journey of starting a business or becoming a designer or artist. She has so much brilliant insight I am delighted to share some of my favorite bits on sustainability, entrepreneurship, brand values and even internships from her recent interview with writer Callie Smith on www.fashiondesignersurvivalguide.com
ON CREATING:
Callie: Althea, I’ve been so lucky to have you as a friend and mentor during this last year, especially in the face of the ongoing pandemic. Often, I’ve thought back to a conversation we had last March. You talked about the importance of beauty and of creating art as an act of resistance against difficult times. I’d love for you to say more about this.
Althea: Part of what I’ve come to realize during the pandemic is that creating beauty is my purpose and an act of extreme importance and resistance. It's a gift to create; to not create is a tragedy. When you have that calling and that ability, when what you make touches people, it is important to share it—it’s important to them, it's important to you, it's important to the universe. To deny yourself the act of creation is not only hurting yourself, it’s also hurting the world.
ON ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Callie: What are some things you would want students to learn about fashion entrepreneurship?
Althea: There are some practical things and some more existential things. On the practical side, I know for a fact that programs don't teach production in fashion school. Even if you're a designer at a big company, I think you need to know how production works because you will get pushback on your designs from the production team. The questions I ask fashion design interns are: how would you make that? How does that work? I want them to think about how this garment will be constructed, how it will exist physically in the world. There's also the cost of production. You have to know your price point and design for that because otherwise it's not going to get made.
Then, there’s creating the brand; it's all about the brand. You have your product and you have your brand; that's a fashion company. Without a brand you have nothing. You have to know your target audience and you have to design for them. You have to have product-market fit. Half of what I do is marketing.
Callie: What are some of the existential questions or considerations?
Althea: In the beginning of creating your brand, I think there can be a lot of self-doubt. It can be an emotional roller coaster. Having your own business is like getting a PhD in yourself.
Callie: I love that.
Althea: I think many of the psychological and emotional aspects are not something that people think about. You're not just going to your job and then going home at the end of the day. Having a business is intense and never-ending. I don't know if I would say this in a class, but an entrepreneur is sort of a personality type. There are people who want to go to a job and then want to go home and live their lives. There’s nothing wrong with that. But, if you're an entrepreneur, your work is your life—it's what you're doing and thinking about all the time. You have to be obsessed with it.
For me, I think that's a great thing. I feel like life imitates art and art imitates life, and owning GRAMMAR is the kind of life I want to lead. But it's a choice to live for your art and for your business. It has to be both. It can't just be for your art because then you're an artist, which is a different thing and is a totally wonderful way to live. But, if you want to have a business, you also have to think about your market.
There are many ways to approach entrepreneurship. There are also people who start a company with the intention to sell it. You still have to be obsessed with building the brand, but you are a bit more detached. Whereas, for me, GRAMMAR is what I want to do for the rest of my life. It has to work because it's my life. I have to figure it out because there's just nothing else in the world that I want in terms of my career and life path. You have to be driven by this intense, existential desire. Otherwise you're going to quit, because it's really hard.
ON BRANDING
Callie: How do you go about establishing your brand? It seems like such a big thing to need to get right.
Althea: That is such a good question, because the brand is the root of everything. The brand is where you start from and where you always go back to. I have a brand strategy deck that I share with everyone I work with because they have to know the foundation of the brand and its values.
For me, I think your brand has to be something that you believe in personally because, again, you have to be obsessed with it; it has to come from within. But also, because it is a business, it has to fulfill a need in the market. The business aspect also has to be something that you're good at. It’s like that diagram: it has four circles; where the circles overlap is your purpose.
You have to know your purpose which is why owning a business is like getting a PhD in yourself. You have to know yourself really well and know what you love, what your gifts are and why they’re important to the world, and what people are willing to pay you for.
Callie: What are some questions that you asked yourself when creating GRAMMAR? How do you guarantee that you are staying true to the brand as you move forward?
Althea: Great questions! I think the key consideration is: who is my customer? Who am I talking to? Who is this person, or who are these people? On the wall behind me, I have photos and descriptions of my four customer archetypes. I'm always looking at these women when I'm designing, creating language for marketing, and sharing.
Once you’ve identified your customer, you have to understand her and what she wants. Even though I have four archetypes, they all have certain things in common. When I’m designing and communicating, I'm speaking to the best of them from the best in me. This includes being thoughtful, speaking intelligently, and treating everything with extreme care. For me, everything is rooted in our core value of love. I ask myself: do I love this? Are my ladies going to love this? Is this going to add something to their lives? Then I think: is this something that she needs in her closet and that I need in the line? Basically, I’m trying to determine if this is something that needs to exist in the world; is this essential, which is our second core value. Finally, our third core value is the pursuit of perfection: is this the best it could possibly be?
ON SUSTAINABILITY
Callie: Your commitment to sustainability really sets you apart.
Althea: Creating sustainable fashion is an extremely important part of how I do business. It's not something I talk about all the time, which is kind of strange, but I think it's because sustainability is baked into who I am as a person, my core values. I would not have a brand that wasn't sustainable. From GRAMMAR’s beginning, I knew that if I was going to bring something new into the world, I would never want it to be harmful. I want what I create to add something of value and change fashion for the better.
Callie: What made you decide to use GOTS-certified cotton?
Althea: Cotton is a water-intensive crop. Many sustainable brands will give that as a reason for choosing other types of fibers, but I really believe in natural fibers. I love cotton for all of its properties; there's nothing else like it. By using organic cotton, I am pushing, in my small way, the industry towards more organic practices. In the four years since I started the brand, more consumers are demanding organic and sustainable clothing, and so there’s more pressure on the industry to change. I need to look up this statistic, but when I first started less than 1% of all cotton grown in the world was organic. I doubt that it has changed that much yet, but the more demand there is, the more the industry has to change. The change is slow because farming is slow. It takes a long time for farms to switch from conventional to organic. Supporting positive change in the industry is super important to me, and something that I think about with all of our production decisions, especially with anything that we are creating physically in the world like all of our packaging, etc. It's something I always have in my head: how can we do this with less impact? How can we do this better?
To read more about Altheas internship program and her thoughts on entrepreneurship, the entire interview between Callie Smith and Althea Simons can be found here