We were lucky to catch up with Anthony Smith Chaigneau recently and have shared our conversation below.

Anthony , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Do you wish you had started you own firm sooner?

I started the Uniquium business during the pandemic, but the heart of it goes back to the beginning of the iphone 5. Uniquium is an interesting story because I had been collecting or gathering photos of shop mannequins for years. not understanding the reason behind it, other than everytime I traveled for business I would walk the city streets around my hotel and saw that shop windows were all lit up at night ‘studio-like’ and mannequins were becoming more than just clothes hangers. They were actually becoming more important than the clothes they wore. As well as this, different countries had different mannequins and different fashion and I was fascinated. I photographed many hundreds or more over the years. Then one evening during the lockdown I suddenly had an epiphany. I could use them in fashion and started looking at how. I had already made a couple of self publish cofee-table books with them but books are hard to sell by yourself and a lot of people thought I was weird – You do get some funny looks sometimes when taking the pictures.

During the pandemic there was so much down-time available in the evenings, and weekends, which gave everyone time to get their creative juices flowing. I was excited to have found the ‘why’ so my wife and I set about all of the necesarry steps to create the LLC, build the website and start the process of go-to-market and www.uniquium.com was borne.

I think there is a time and place for everything and that hindsight is obviously something we all have and can reflect on. In this case the time was right – there was time to work on it and we were not pressured to get things done too quickly, despite it being an online business. I wasnt ready earlier and the idea hadnt popped up. Equally the technology available to launch Uniquium was mature. So there you have it – and it is really only the beginning of the venture, because we went live on my birthday in March 2022.

Anthony , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am a right brain – left brain balanced person so I have a flair for engineering and also a flair for creativity. This can sometimes be a burden as the two sides pull for attention. When I was younger I was very creative and thought that I would go to art-college and go on to be an artist, however I was in a military family and eventually, due to poor high-school results from constantly changing schools I went into the military at the tender age of 16 1/2. In the military there was no ‘creative’ roles, so I plumped for electronics and avionics. While spending 15 years serving Her Majesty the Queen (UK Royal Air Force) I carefully nurtured my art, creativity and took classes in graphic design, cartooning and watercolour painting.

Once a proper wage was coming in the door and life got in the way I stayed in the technical profesion but went from engineer to business development, public relations and marketing. I am a businessman for an international organisation and in my spare time a semi-professional artist/cartoonist/designer and author. My work is eclectic, yet recogniseable.(except for the fashion, which is very left field).

I revel in experimentation and have a zest for creativity that I like to share with the world. e.g. The Uniquium logo was designed in a Scottsdale cafe, as a family of quails ran past in the garden they so intrigued me I scribbled on the napkin. I had drawn the Q for Quail and then played around with the imagery. It is hard to come up with an original name and I felt that the ‘Fashion on Fashion’ was unique so Uniquium became the word I chose. I felt that would give it some sophistication. I was lucky that the domain name was available. (One of the hardest parts of starting a brand – very hard to come up with something that has not been used already.)

Uniquium is really a unique story as the mannequins that are captured no longer exist in that location. Unlike the shop/mall/market where they stand each week they change clothes, change positions or simply disappear to be replaced (or not many times). So these images cannot ever be replicated. They come from as far away as Seoul = South Korea to Oslo in Norway and a healthy part from France, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy. Fashion Square offers up plenty of opportunity too. I just photographed some in Punta Cana on my holiday over Xmas.

One of the hardest aspects with todays vribrant online marketplace is actually cutting through the noise on social media and so a huge amount of effort needs to go into marketing and getting known. I am hoping the brand speaks for itself and am presently still in the weeds of all of that.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

After 15 years in the military I decided that I should look to see a different world. I had been there from the age of 16 1/2 as an apprentice. I was a military electronics engineer on paper and while I was technically competent I was very naive in the ways of business in the real world and office politics. There is very little if any politics in the military, but in civilian life I saw the ugliest of personlaities and saw a real dog-eat-dog mentality.

Eventually there was an opportunity to go to a start-up in the digital delivery music back in the 1990s and I jumped in. My life saw me interact with a very creative bunch and my life quickly pivoted from engineer to jack of all trades because in a start-up you often have to get your hands dirty – have to sweep the floors, make the coffee, woo the investors, work on a shoestring and then put on your suit and tie to try to win the million-dollar deals.

That changed my life enormously and my creativity took of from there. We are talking going from CDs to electronic streaming and internet at modem speeds of a couple of hudred kilobytes a second … so that was a long time back for even a lot of your readers, I imagine.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I had to learn that not all people tell the truth in business and there are a lot of charlatans/and liars out there – which is sad to say. I unlearnt ‘trust’ the blind and instant trust of superiors that I had learned in the military.

Here is one story to highlight this: One day I was invited into the boardroom of the start-up I was at by one of the founders. He and I sat at one side of the table, while on the other sat a spectacled ginger-haired jacketed gentleman, a man who dressed a little like Steve Jobs, and another man in a three-piece pin-striped suit. The ginger-haired man was the founder of a chain of famous UK CD music stores and the other gentleman was the Head of Corporate Finance for Merril-Lynch. The Steve Jobs like man was from the music lable Polydor. They were there to make us an offer on franchising our electronic music distribution kiosk business for the UK. My commission was going to be 5% of the deal. I was part of the team that brought them in and British, so the founder who was Swiss thought it would be a good idea if I was in the room for credibility and negotiations. I trusted him and his position as a founder.

After some presentations by the three gentlemen regarding their capability in the UK and the music industry the man from Merril-Lynch opened his briefcase took out a check and slid it across the table, face down, to the founder. The founder picked it up looked at it briefly, laid it face down and slid it over to me. I picked it up and looked at the numbers – 17,000.000 GBP. Gulp! I nearly fell off my chair. Slowly I placed the check face down, and slid it back to the founder who picked it up. looked at it again, then ripped it in two.

The faces of the three men and mine must have been a sight to behold. The founder then stood up said, “gentlemen, that is insufficient – the price is 30,000,000 GBP .” He then left the room with me in it.

It was the biggest sum of money I had ever seen or handled and it would have set the company on the road to success. I would have been handsomely compensated. The meeting ended, as I could not fathom why the founder had made this move. No deal was done. They all flew back to London.

I soon found out that the company technology and business plan was weak and that the reason he made it impossible to take such an offer was that due-diligence would have followed and the house of cards would have come crumbling down. The founder was using other lessor investors money to support a lavish lifestyle – it was all a scam. The money ran out and the company was liquidated.

I had been lied to by people who I had trusted and who had entrusted me to open doors and bring in clients, knowing full-well that they had nothing. I was hoodwinked into believing that all that was on sale was for real, when in fact it wasnt. My trust and faith in people was shattered.

Eventually the company went into liquidation and I picked up my socks and went hunting a new job.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.uniquium.com
• Instagram: @uniquium.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Uniquium
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melancholic-mannequins-b2915024a/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/uniquium