What it means to me to be a ‘1 man brand’

As the the preorder for the Finnegan Jacket nears, I thought I’d just write a quick blog on what it means to me, Andrew (founder, owner and designer of Fuzz) to be a ‘1 man brand’.

It’s now 3 years since I launched Fuzz (check out the blog post: STARTING THE BRAND to read more on that). Looking back from the start to this point and how far it’s come, I’m immensely proud. I speak to independent, small brand owners daily and almost all of them, no matter how good it’s going still have crippling doubts and struggles daily to keep going. It’s a tough industry to crack for sure and there’s so much competition, the majority of which have millions of pounds to spend on the business and you have to try and compete with that on your own as regular people, it’s hard.

The Finnegan Jacket represents what I consider to be my crowning achievement so far and it’s been a slog to get it out. 18 months, 12 samples, a ridiculous amount of money and lots of stress later, but I couldn’t be happier with it. If it were to be my swan song and Fuzz were to end tomorrow, I’d be happy with that.

I’m a construction engineer by trade and still work full time as a freelancer. It’s a good job, we live comfortably, nothing fancy, but comfortably. I tried a while back to take a bit of a break from Fuzz to take a holiday, enjoy more family time and have a few quid spare. After a week I was climbing the walls and back to looking at fabric, sketching, planning. I’m just not fulfilled without doing this, I’m far too passionate about it to quit and I’ve worked far too hard to let that happen.

What’s that got to do with being a ‘1 man brand’ you may ask? Well at the end of every week I get paid like most people from my job. With that money I have a dozen brand related things to pay for, but can’t do it all at once. We do live very modestly and well below our means, so it does allow me to spend that money on growing the brand. It is however very slow. Samples and patterns, that’s 2 weeks wages, fabric, that’s a month’s pay, zips, buttons and other trims, that’s another week’s wages. Then we need sewn labels and swing tags, ok that’s another week’s wage. The factory then needs a 50% deposit for production, that’s another 4 weeks money. Now we’ve got a finished sample, but it needs tweaks, so we have to go again at additional cost. 3-4 samples later and we need to do photos, that’s 2 weeks wages to pay for models, photographers and the rest of it. That’s as well as paying bills and living like everyone else so takes longer to save. Then my car breaks down and I have a massive vet bill to pay too out of nowhere, shit that’s going to set me back a month or 2. What I’m trying to say is that it’s very expensive, takes a long time and you have to put a lot of work in to get to a point where you can show a piece off.  Even with what you consider a great design, will anyone actually buy it? If you don’t pay Mark Zuck large amounts of money to advertise in this day and age on social media, no one knows you even exist.

This brings me to why pre-orders are so important to us small brands. The clothing industry moves at a ridiculously fast pace, with new collections every 6 months or less and the big boys being 3-4 seasons ahead with their production and planning. They can do this as they have the money put up front. Although everything is in place for this preorder and the fabric, trims and everything else is paid for, that’s all my money tied up until they’re delivered, meaning everything else is on hold until then. Banks won’t touch you until 3+ years in if you’re lucky enough to be to borrow. Before you know it that seasons over and you’re a year behind. By offering preorders it helps with cash flow and allows me to start working on the next pieces and try to stay in front.

1 man brand? So you do everything yourself then? Well, no.

I work with amazing people and don’t do everything myself and there’s no way I could. There’s a small team who does my patterns and sampling, headed up by the amazing, Fran. Having someone who understands your vision and bringing it to life is so important. Then there’s the companies that produce the fabrics. I’m currently using lots of fabric from a Japanese company I love who produce the kind of stuff I’ve been searching for since starting. It’s very expensive, but it’s quality and what I want to use and I don’t want to compromise on that. There’s the amazing photographers Im lucky to be able to work with and bring my visual concepts to life with. The models I use are all ordinary people.  Lewis is my barber, Joe and Evie I met in the store we first launched in. Uken, I approached on the street as he was leaving work. I saw him as a good fit. Amelia used to work at a restaurant we frequented and asked her through that. There are others too and they have all been great and it’s always lots of  fun working with these people I now call friends. So ‘1 man brand’ isn’t really correct at all, but it’s us the owners taking all the risk, paying for it all and if it all goes belly up, it’s our lives that will be altered. It’s our vision and no one is forcing us to do it, we do it because we love it. If there are mistakes, shit happens, it is what it is, but people still need paying and have families to feed. We have to deal with that, put it right and plod on. There are brands out there that in essence do make everything themselves and do the majority themselves. These are the true 1 person brands, but everyone needs a bit of help from time to time and everyone deserves to be paid, so a proper 1 person brand is extremely rare.

I’m often contacted by agencies and the like who ask to speak to the person in charge of marketing or whatever. They can’t believe it’s just 1 person that runs it all and that’s no accident, I’m not playing at this and I’m working to grow something undeniable for the future that I love doing.

I’d put the Finnegan jacket up against anything out there and back it. Most stuff of this sort of quality will set you back £500+ and still won’t be as good and I’ll stand by that and once you see it, you will too.

My vision has always been to create pieces that are quality, stand out and don’t exploit anyone.  That goes for the supply chain, production, people I work with and the customer. No matter how big this may get (I don’t mind if it never does btw) I will not drift from my principles.

Thanks for reading and the continued support.

Andrew

PS, go buy something from your friends business, go watch their band, use their services without asking for discount. If you can’t afford that, then share, like, comment and show support. That’s costs nothing and means so much to us.