We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Isabelle Mann a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Isabelle, appreciate you joining us today. Before we get into specifics, let’s talk about success more generally. What do you think it takes to be successful?
What I discovered is that persistence is the key factor in the (small) fashion business in your first years. Of course there would be a ton of things I have learnt in the past five years, more than anyone can teach or prepare you for and that would make it easier or quicker to start off now. But in the end you need time to form trust, to build healthy networks and relationships and to make your experiences. A business model must grow along the people profiting from it and there’s no (or very rarely) such thing as a viral product that also survives time and trends. There’s going to be great times and tough times – waves as I call them – and staying atop of them with creative problem solving is my biggest task most of the time.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I come from a design and craft driven family – it’s actually quite funny how half of us is entangled with fashion, graphic and textile design (the women) and the other half with architecture, building engineering and project management (the men). Both sides unite in their interest and passion in craftsmanship. I am a “maker” myself and have always been; my grandmother raised us with a natural understanding of a constant cycle in the textile chain. She would know how to manufacture clothing herself, use and reuse fabrics, knit, embroider, repair and properly care for her belongings and textiles. make old garments into new ones and adapt them. All of this knowledge came from growing up during and just after war with little more than making money by picking potatoes off the fields. This knowledge used to be crucial, nowadays it isn’t. My aim is to keep the tradition of how we used to make and treat textiles back in the days. We use traditional craft such as knitting and crochet or repurpose vintage textiles to make contemporary garments. It’s making craft visible again in our everyday life and putting a mark on the importance of keeping those traditional techniques alive and transfer them to today. To ensure this, we also offer classes in hand and machine knitting and regular knit clubs, as well as constant events to support our network of designers and craftspeople in Hamburg. Naturally, it is very important to us to support a local textile chain. We manufacture most of the garments in our store and studio in Hamburg, with single knitters and small manufacturers based throughout Germany. Our materials are always made from natural resources such as wool, mohair, silk, cashmere and cotton if not reused vintage fabrics.
Our form of manufacturing also allows us to work with small editions and offer designs on demand adapted to our customers needs.
We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.
When I started off, I wanted to make sure we can work in small editions. Even working with vintage textiles and knitwear, fashion is still very volatile and working along the “Zeitgeist” so much, that it is easy to hop on the wrong train. I saw designers having to close down business, simply because they wouldn’t get rid of their stock. Especially in sustainable fashion, the choice of manufacturers producing in comparably small numbers isn’t very big. Sometimes, you would get excited about a manufacturer agreeing to work with you that you do forget producing 50 or 100 per style is a lot of stock to sell. Especially starting off with D2C, it’s extremely risky to set your money on just a few styles that you will then have a lot of. People get bored quickly, then what? I wanted to create a bit of a bigger collection than what I would have been able to do when I worked with manufacturers right from the start. That is why I decided I needed to start with a product that I am an expert in and that I can manufacture in-house, at least for the beginning. Knits it was, we actually even started with hand knitting, meaning my mum and I were the hand knitters. We proceeded to seek women already out of work with excellent knitting skills to push their living standards with some extra money. What you cannot forget is, that every women has their own hand writing in knitting (which can be lovely, but a tricky one) and communication isn’t always the easiest with 10 different women 65+ spread throughout Germany. That is why we then went on to working with knitting machines more. There’s still a ton of knowledge and craftsmanship involved, we can now still employ women working from home but the end product has a bit of a more unified look.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
It’s a tricky one actually, I started of thinking selling Direct to Customer was the way to go, as it allowed me to calculate prices that were more attractive to customers, cutting out the “middle man”. While I am based in Germany and have my main customer base here, the brand is thriving a lot in Japan. I went to exhibit at a B2B fair called project Tokyo in September 2023 and met new business partners and PR agents. It is fascinating how our products do so well in a completely different country with other traditions, culture and language. Since Japan is so deeply rooted in craftsmanship itself, I think we make a really good fit. Now selling in Japan made it very visible to me that going with only one strategy, direct to customer, be it selling via our flagship store or online wouldn’t work and that I need to get partners on board that know their customer base well and understand our product. It’s even more important that future customers can feel the haptics and try on the garments, that is why I needed to start selling B2B even though that would require a higher price to calculate a mark up for the boutiques selling our garments. Most of our clients come from heresay and recommendations of their trusted sellers. It’s super important to be able to show the high quality standard of our production and the materials that we use, something that is very hard to portray via an online shop.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.faibleanfailure.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/faibleandfailure
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/faibleandfailure
- Other: Substack
substack.com/theknitclub
Image Credits
Lisa Knauer, Teresa Enhiak Nanni, Muriel Liebmann