We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Matt Swinney a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Matt, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today One of the most important things small businesses can do, in our view, is to serve underserved communities that are ignored by giant corporations who often are just creating mass-market, one-size-fits-all solutions. Talk to us about how you serve an underserved community.
The legacy fashion industry is still dominated by primarily white men. It’s counter-intuitive and the general public probably doesn’t even realize it.
However, I’ve found in our 15 years of running Fashion Weeks that emerging brands are generally women-owned, LGBTQ+-owned or BiPOC-owned. Ironically, I’m a middle aged white man. But because of that, we’ve been fully committed to ensuring that our focus as a company has been on inclusion. Not just diversity, but actual INCLUSION.
I’ve done a ton of nonprofit work in the I/DD space (individuals with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities). We have a saying that “diversity” is being invited to the dance but “inclusion” is actually being asked to dance.
Our company has remained diligent in ensuring that everyone is asked to dance. We’ve gone to great lengths to identify and develop relationships with Black designers in particular. In Texas, a huge number of incredibly talented Black designers have come onto the scene in the last 5-7 years. The reality is that a good majority of those designers simply don’t have access to the resources provided to many others in the field. We’ve really tried to shine a light on that community and have a strong plan for growing our commitment over the next 3 years (starting with Austin Fashion Week this Fall!).
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?
I actually came to creating Austin Fashion Week without any fashion background or significant knowledge. I had owned a glossy lifestyle magazine in Austin from 2004-2008 and knew all of the significant players in the local fashion industry from that venture.
When the recession hit in 2007, I created Austin Restaurant Week as a way to support local restaurants but also to create a new revenue stream for the magazine as advertising dollars were dipping. Austin Restaurant Week was incredibly successful and I found I really enjoyed and had a knack for producing large-scale, media-driven events. In late 2008 as the recession worsened, I put the magazine and Austin Restaurant Week up for sale and ultimately ARW allowed me to exit.
A friend of mine and I immediately started a company called Launch787. It was a large-scale event production company where we owned all of the event concepts from start to finish. All lifestyle spaces — fashion, film, music, art, etc. Austin Fashion Week was our first big event in 2009 and we’ve never looked back. Since those early years, I’ve spun AFW and it’s sister events in Dallas and Houston into its own full-fledged company.
Our differentiator is around quality of production but at an affordable price point for independent and emerging designers. The reality is that producing high-quality runway shows is incredibly expensive, but through partnerships, corporate sponsors and the like, we’ve been able to do it while keeping costs down for designers. We want designers to be successful and while we recognize the need for them to have marketing budgets and have some “skin in the game” to participate, we also want to make sure that the value is there.
Finally, we’re willing to take chances on new designers. Early on, I became committed to allowing even the smallest designer with a big dream and some talent to have access to the runway. I don’t believe it’s our job to be the “purveyor of cool.” It’s our job to give small brands and businesses an opportunity and let them elevate themselves.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
Covid. I know it’s been talked about by everyone, but the reality is that we’re a live events business and no matter what was talked about in the media, no industry was hit harder than live events.
We had fully executed all of the planning for Austin Fashion Week Spring 2020 (meant for early April) when Covid struck. On March 13, the United States started to shut down. Through our partnership with Simon Malls and The Domain, we were determined to continue forward with events. At first a postponement until late May and then another until August, and then another and another. Our first true live events were in December 2021.
No business can withstand essentially 2 years without revenue, yet here we are. Yes, PPP loans and government assistance helped, but I personally took on more nonprofit consulting roles and even started a new sports card and collectibles company during the live events down-time. Between the two, I could replace my own income and through some savvy decisions (i.e. closing our office space), the events company could hang in there. Just enough.
Point is, if you want it badly enough, you cry for a day or two. Then you stand up as tall as you can, find all the grit you have, and you make it work.
What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?
It’s not quite enough for my full time business or career, but I started a company mostly for fun with my kids during Covid. It’s called Dad & Kids Breaks. I collected sports cards as a kid and frankly hadn’t thought much about them in 30 years.
My kids and I love to go to baseball games together. We take an annual road trip and have been to 23 of the 30 Major League ballparks and countless minor league ones since 2016.
I started seeing more and more articles about the booming sports card market. I did some research and decided to dip my toes in. The kids and I started a “breaks” company. Basically, we buy unopened boxes of sports cards, sell each team on eBay, make a little profit margin, then open them live on camera through a Facebook group.
What started out as something fun to do and maybe kill a little time during Covid has morphed into a legitimate business that now covers about half of my personal income and it’s growing… quickly. More than anything, it takes pressure off of Austin Fashion Week and helps bring overhead down dramatically for that company as it recovers from Covid.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://fashionbyevents.com
- Instagram: @fashionbyevents
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fashionbyevents
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattswinney/
Image Credits
Todd White
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