We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Vina Murad. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Vina below.

Vina, appreciate you joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

As a consumer of the style of fashion I do – Larme kei, cottagecore, coquette – it was easy for me to spot gaps in the market, and see where other companies could be doing better, be it styles, fit, ethically manufacturing or offering a wide enough size range. Since I’m basically my own target demographic – women in their 20s and 30s, I was able to understand fairly easily what my audience would want, since they’re things I myself wanted more from in the industry and from the stores I bought from. Having built up my own audience of women interested in fashion through years of being an OOTD influencer, I figured I’d take the leap and fill in those gaps myself. There are many times I’d receive a dress and think, “did a real person ever even try this on?”. All of my styles now are fitted before execution, and nothing gets released before it’s perfect. It takes time to do, but the clothes I make I want people to keep in their wardrobes as long as they’d want to. I want to make well made, well fitted clothing that can be worn for the years to come.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’m a Tokyo based fashion influencer, having been born in Sweden to Iraqi Kurdish immigrant parents and raised in England. From a young age I was raised by a single mother, and so the life of being an influencer/designer seemed impossible growing up, but at the age of 15 I decided I wanted to study abroad, taking part time jobs in fast food, a supermarket, a taxi stand, an eye clinic, until the age of 19 when I’d finally saved up enough to move to Tokyo as a language school student, and eventually a fashion school student. From there, things really snowballed with my social media presence, and I truly believe that if I were born in any other era my life would have been very different. Social media offered me the opportunity to carve my own path outside of the typical finish high school – university – degree related job cycle, and so I took it. Years of Youtube and Instagram later and I was finally able to fully self fund my first release in March of 2022. From there, we have been slowly dropping small releases, focusing on low stock low waste, ethical manufacturing and eventually increasing our size range past the current XXS-2XL. Our clothes focus on dreamy themes, ruffles and frills, tartan check and ribbons anywhere possible. We truly believe that anyone can look cute as long as they feel cute! We want to always make you feel cute, and feel good about where your clothes came from at the same time.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Last year, in November of 2022, we had a preorder that severely flopped. It hardly got any orders. I decided, in order to fulfil the customers’ orders, to just order the stock for the few who ordered and a couple on top in case there were any issues with the preorder customers’ orders. This ended up costing a lot more than the price of the items themselves. It was the start of a difficult year for us, we found a new company to work with, who in hindsight were promising a lot more than they were actually capable of, and screwed up a lot of our preorders and in turn our customers’ trust. It was a difficult few months for us, and I don’t think we made a penny, but I ended up cutting them off and starting over by myself with a newfound confidence. Since our most recent Prep School Idol red check release, every single release has been singlehandedly managed by me, from the design, to getting the pattern commissioned, to the sample process, to the photo shoot, to the release itself. It has been a lot of work, but finally we’re starting to see some revenue, and I feel like the ability to push through the hard times has gotten us to this point. I’m sure there will be many more difficult months, then years, to come, but we will keep pushing.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

You can’t please everyone. When it comes down to it, of course I want to hurry up and make more styles, or hurry up and expand my size range, but the way things are right now, I have to focus on first and foremost on growing the business to a more sustainable level. Manufacturing clothing is so expensive, especially when you vet your factories! You have to be ready to drop huge lump sums of money to the factories whenever you make a bulk order, and we do preorders to help with this, but the preorders barely, if ever, cover the full amount. Then, over time people order what you have in stock, but as such a new and small business, that’s often not a lot of stock to begin with. All this is to say, making money in fashion is so slow and takes so much time, and while we might get slack online for not offering enough of a size range or colour ways people request, for example, we have to take a step back and consider if this is the right time for it, or if we currently have the budget for it. It’s definitely one of our goals, but it’s a goal that will never be fulfilled if we go bankrupt chasing it. People forget we’re less than 2 years old! It takes time, we will get there eventually, but until then, we cannot please everyone. We have to just keep pushing, knowing our limits, and expanding slowly over time.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://vinaofthevalley.com/
• Instagram: brand: vina.of.the.valley / me: mikan.mandarin
• Twitter: vinaofthevalley
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@mikanmandarin
• Tiktok : brand: Vina.of.the.valley / me: mikanmandarin