We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Lubna Najjar a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Lubna thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.
In our business, as a boutique brand development agency, we have worked with over 100 different fashion brands across the country and Europe over the last 10 years. The way we see business is not just about the bottom line and about growing the business financially by way of new contracts, we see our success directly tied to our clients’ success. From working with public municipalities to help develop fashion and retail ecosystems to opening up retail stores for clients, IL Moda has developed master tools for all levels of brands.
We pride ourselves in helping businesses create more eco-friendly and environmentally conscious manufacturing practices which is one of core competencies. Although a for profit business, we devote 20% of each of our consultants’ time within the agency to public and philanthropic efforts within our respective cities in which we live and work. We believe that the fashion industry’s growth is directly tied to our community and the environmental conscious practices.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
We are a group of consultants that infuse ourselves with our client businesses in order to help them scale, grow, create new collections, streamline efficiencies across the business as far as import / export practices, merchandising, and product design. We love to see businesses grow, and that in of itself is how our business has been able to sustainably scale over the years. Our clients success is directly tied to ours. We believe in people first and doing work with integrity and excellence.
I am the founder and CEO of the for-profit business, but I am also a doctoral student obtaining my doctorate of business administration currently and looking to change the fashion industry by way of better ethical processes. I am also the co-author of a university textbook focusing on the power of branding in fashion. Currently utilized at the Ohio State University in Columbus Ohio.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
Many people don’t know that journey in which I had to get to this point. I started out in corporate America, working in finance and loving every day of my finance job! I had a passion for fashion and I started a small design line and grew that to a pretty substantial business in the first two years. That business was truly my proof of concept and the reason that I obtained my masters in business administration which allowed me to grow my agency, IL Moda Brands. We help other brands reach the success that I did so quickly which the use of our proprietary master tools. With these 12 tools, we believe we have created the secret sauce to success.
My small boutique line was bootstrapped by my corporate position at the time and financially funded internally. With that, came a lot of challenges financially and a lot of bad deals made with overseas manufacturers. Having lost a lot of time and resources in the first few months of business, I was able to take that as a lesson learned and apply it to some of the agency work we do today, which ultimately helps protect our clients from making the same mistakes we did. Our story of rebuilding and resourced management is one we share often with clients when they are in similar positions.
Can you open up about how you funded your business?
I bootstrapped my initial business and funded everything myself in the first few years. It wasn’t until Covid where I started my new denim line, HER Denim (herdenim.com ) which is an environmentally, conscious women’s denim brand. With that brand mind, I did obtain a small business association loan, and have been paying that back incrementally since then. I was about 10 years into the business before I took out this public loan and although the capital was absolutely necessary to grow the business, this loan created discipline and motivation to grow the business. These funds were used to build inventory as well as higher new teams, to help us scale the business, and get into new stores.
We were also able to obtain a registered trademark for the brand. Which really set it apart from other similar brands.
Contact Info:
- Website: ilmodabrands.com
- Instagram: Instagram.com/Lubna__najjar
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lubnanajjar
- Other: denim.com Instagram.com/shopherdenim Instagram.com/ilmodabrands