We were lucky to catch up with Paul Fields recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Paul thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit and a passion for business within the fashion industry. Having owned and operated my own brands in Australia, I wanted to create a business here in the U.S from which I could help other brands grow their business.

Using past knowledge and skills, I set out to create MVA to focus solely on helping clients develop their brand in the areas of design, production, strategic planning and brand positioning.

I guess I reached a point where doing my own thing, or working for another company wasn’t fulfilling and I realized that helping others was more rewarding.
One of the benefits of working with so many clients across different industries is the excitement I get to experience on each new project and seeing that project come to life during the production phase. There’s never a dull moment!
I treat each client like it’s my own brand, with care and respect and I believe that trickles over to each client. They appreciate the effort and intentionality we put into each project. Caring and kindness goes a long way if you want to succeed in business.

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 grew up in Perth, Australia and spent some time after college traveling in Canada. On one particular bus trip I was pondering my future and had a light bulb moment. I heard an inner voice simply say ‘clothing’ and that set forth a desire and passion to learn with lofty goals to start up my own brand. After returning to Australia, I put myself through fashion school to learn the craft of apparel design and manufacturing. Learning all the different aspects of pattern making, construction, fabrications and manufacturing techniques was invaluable and during my second year I began creating my menswear brand STAND and was successful in stocking it into a number of retail stores in and around Perth. After graduating, I did some work for Rusty surfboards at the HQ in Perth while continuing to build my brand. A year later I focused on STAND full time as the brand grew throughout Australia. I was fortunate enough to showcase at Australian Fashion Week in Sydney several years running and was invited to be a part of the G’Day USA showcase in NY during Fashion week. All the publicity from these events propelled STAND to stores overseas and into the US market before the big Global Financial Crisis hit.
It was quite the rollercoaster ride all those years and every step along the journey was a learning curve.

The lessons I learnt from all those years I now pass onto our clients to ensure they are successful in building their brands here in the US market, and eventually overseas into other countries.
The heart beat of MVA is to provide the best service for all our clients from consulting, to design and manufacturing whether that be screen printing locally, hat production or custom merchandise offshore through our key factories.

Any fun sales or marketing stories?

Starting any brand is a daunting task and the first question most people have is “how do I get my brand into the marketplace and into stores”. My approach when I was starting out was to gather intel from the stores that I wanted my brand to be in. I understood early on that store owners were often difficult to work with and didn’t have time for walk in showings. So to ‘win them over’ I created a list of questions based on market research and I went into each store and asked to speak with the owner. I introduced myself, informed them I was doing research and wanted to learn from them. No store owner turned me down and were more than willing to go into great depth about their store and what they look for when it comes to new brands. Before I left each store I told them I was launching a brand and asked if I could come back to show them my collection during the next showing season, every store owner said yes and I went back several months later and was able to land some accounts. The key take away I learnt from this approach was the importance of establishing a relationship first before trying to sell anything and funnily enough, a lot of those store owners years later became close friends.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

We really don’t do any paid marketing to attract new clients. Growth has always been organic, mainly through word of mouth from existing clients.
I believe if you treat your current clients with honesty and integrity and go that extra mile to deliver quality service and products, they will refer you to others.
Building strong relationships in any business is key!
Treat others as you would want to be treated and the rest will fall into place.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.mvadesignsupply.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mvadesignsupply/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mvadesignsupply

Image Credits
Haggard Pirate Swimbait Underground