Brass Tacks Gold

December sales were not what I hoped they would be. I knew I was taking a risk with the focus on party wear, but I didn’t realize what a small segment of the market I was catering to with those styles - not because only a small segment is interested in party wear, but because those styles don’t necessarily appeal to everyone. I liked the collection though- and it was fun to design styles and put them out there because I wanted them to be a part of the collection, rather than editing them until they “fit in” with the styles that have done well in the past.

From customer feedback and sales, it seemed as if people either really liked the styles in the latest Winter Collection, or they really disliked them. There weren’t many in-betweens. In many ways this is a good thing because it means that the brand has a distinct point of view. However exploring the area of “fashion-forward, niche clothing” has meant catering to a narrower and slightly more high-end customer base – which, aside from the sales perspective, wasn’t really what I set out to do with Brass Tacks. What can I say- I got carried away with designing and forgot to think about commercial appeal!

I want to design creative clothes, but I also want to appeal to a wider, more mainstream customer. Enter new plan: Brass Tacks Gold. In every collection I will have 2 or 3 styles that are a little more adventurous and fashion-forward compared to the usual Brass Tacks collections. These styles can be quirky or glamorous, but they must be visually distinctive. From this past collection French Parfait (with more volume at the hip ruching) and Sculpted Dhoti fall into the Brass Tacks Gold aesthetic. For these styles I will have a small inventory, but these are the styles that will carry the brand image. The rest of the styles in the collection (around 10 styles) will stick to the core Brass Tacks aesthetic: simple, with small twists and tailoring details.

French Parfait (left) and Sculpted Dhoti (right)

2009 has been a difficult year with a lot of lessons learned. Now with the new pricing scheme, a “kurta” quota in every collection, and ‘Brass Tacks Gold’, I’m excited for this year.

Getting Back on Track

For once, hearing multiple opinions about my work has given me clarity and re-affirmed my faith in my original goals. A couple of weekends ago I went to Mumbai and met with fashion boutique owners to get feedback on my collections and design sensibilities. Most of the store owners said they liked my clothes but that it didn't fit in with the rest of the collections in their store. I understand where they are coming from- if someone walked into a high-end store willing to spend upwards of Rs 5000 on a garment, they wouldn’t want something simple looking (no matter how well cut or well tailored). One store owner added that women in Mumbai get put off by cotton!

At first I hid under the shelter of my brand positioning and stereotypes about Mumbai and Delhi (which is that they are into bling and my brand is far from that). Honestly however, there is a lot of creativity out there that has nothing to do with bling in the high-end fashion market. I came back from Mumbai wishing that my clothes were just as creative (rather than safe) and wondering if I should tap into the high-end market to make some money. But the truth of the matter is that Mumbai and Chennai are very different markets, and I am much more excited about designing affordable well-cut clothes made from high-quality handwoven textiles rather than a few high-end pieces. At the same time, I would be lying if I said that making money isn’t starting to become a pressure – hopefully that will change once I earn some!

My trouble and difficulty now lies with being in Chennai and figuring out my initial market here. I’ve talked about this before- how my fabrics appeal to older women who appreciate the textiles of traditional sarees but the cuts and silhouettes appeal to younger women. While I am trying hard to incorporate brighter colours and a good mix of traditional and modern textile designs in my collections, the toughest part is choosing which styles (cuts and silhouettes) to make. I get the feeling that women want something different, but not too different, and figuring out the fine line between Unique and "too different" is a lot tougher than it may seem. The halter dress (Black Orchid from the Monsoon collection) is young in style and many women liked bought it but many also said that it was too dressy and that they don’t have an occasion to wear it to. The sand washed cowl neck tops always do well, but cowl necks have now become a Brass Tacks staple and they are so safe! Snapdragon, one of my personal favourites, has a fitted torso and a wide sleeve and while customers love the fit, they prefer a regular cap sleeve rather than a wide one. What if I had made it with an ordinary cap sleeve though- wouldn’t that have made the top too ordinary?

I’m happy to hear suggestions on how to walk this tightrope, and in the meantime here is a photo of a blue ikat fabric in silk that I bought in Hyderabad to make Black Orchid (in blue).

Drying on my balcony (yes, I washed it myself).

At the store when I bought it.

My Cottage Industry

A recent financial crunch has got me thinking about the future and security of Brass Tacks. I’m not referring to the recession but rather my current bank balance. I’ve been ordering fabric in large quantities to feed my store as well as the Brass Tacks section at Daaram (Hyderabad), but it’s going to take a long time for sales to pick up there and for me to recover those costs. The good news is that the low bank balance has motivated me to think of new sales solutions like the new pricing scheme and the idea of brighter colours for future collections. What I need to focus on next are issue of scale. How viable are some of my measures for quality control as the company grows bigger?

Take, for example, the issue of fabric shrinkage. To guarantee my customers that none of my clothes will shrink I have them all washed once. If a fabric has a loose weave, it is soaked for an hour and then washed. If the shrinkage is very high, it is washed again to shrink a second time. This process also gets rid of surface dyes and any nasty smell that the fabric has absorbed during its long train journey to Chennai. Right now all the fabric is washed by the woman who washes clothes at my parents’ house. It started out with tiny quantities of 30 metres of fabric per week, but as the company has grown the quantities have gone up (I’m embarrassed to admit how much fabric I send home every week). It just doesn’t make sense for me to send all the fabric home- it seems so unprofessional and so cottage industry-ish for a company that wants to operate like a mini industry. However at the moment I don’t have another solution. There must be large industrial machines out there that mimic a “gentle handwash” process for handwoven fabrics, but I haven’t had the time to research them yet.

Until Brass Tacks has more creative solutions for the not-so-easy-to-scale stuff, we’re still washing all our fabric in-house (literally). And since both my parents were out of town last week and none of their domestic help came to work, the next best (and immediate) solution for some kora coloured khadi fabric to be shrunk was for me to wash it. Oh well, at least the dress ("Lady Bird") got made in time for weekend sales.

Big Picture with Little Details

In my most focused moments at work, I am a bit neurotic about little details. I look at a garment and scream when one arm hole looks bigger than the other, and I walk into my store and remind myself to take deep breaths when I see paint peeling off the walls (I’ll never get to the bottom of that annoying leakage problem). I often get annoyed when people tell me that these little details are not important and it’s the big picture that matters. But to me the details are everything and without that you have nothing! Of course when I’m feeling less neurotic or a bit lazy then I’m able to shrug it off (told you not to sweat the small stuff), but of late I’ve realized that it’s not about small details versus the big picture. The two go hand in hand and it is vital to keep switching back and forth to stay on track (and to maintain your sanity).

I don’t know why it took me so long to realize this- it does seem like intuitive common sense after all- but two incidents last week helped me arrive at this conclusion. The first was an exchange between Mala Sinha of Bodhi and me. I wrote a post about Mala last year when I visited her workshop in Baroda. Recently I wanted to place an order with her and I was so impressed to receive these “strike offs” in the print I had asked for with various colour options. I had asked for this print (shown below) in indigo on tussar fabric. Before going into production, Mala sent me a few options including her personal recommendation (indigo on light blue) that ended up looking much nicer than what I had originally ordered. How many printers will take that kind of trouble to show you a different colour options on the fabric you want? Most of them will just tell you that different fabrics absorb colour differently and that you should not expect a 100% colour match.


(Mala's strike offs. The right most one was her recommendation).

Thinking about Mala’s service made me realize that for every one of her buyers who places an order, there must be at least ten others who ask for different colour variations but don’t follow up with an order. Providing that service to everyone must take up a lot of time and effort, however if she didn’t provide that service, then she might not have people like me writing about her or a set of loyal customers who appreciate her consistent good quality. Taking effort over the little details does pay off in this case.

The second incident was a mildly unpleasant experience with a retail store last month after which I realized that if I don’t think about the bigger picture and the long run, then I might be setting myself up for more experiences similar to this one. The experience in question had to do with the retail store not taking enough care about the little details that really matter (like sales statements and listing of inventory with a clear system for summing up totals, calculating commission, etc). At my own store when I see details left out of the accounts book or the inventory book (yes, it’s still handwritten but we’re going electronic in a month) I freak out and make sure my staff corrects the mistakes immediately. But we do have a system in place and my sales assistants know the importance of maintaining these records for our internal checks. How do businesses manage to grow if they are not picky about these little details? So instead of being impatient to make money and retailing in other cities, I need to do more homework and work with someone who gets the little details in the bigger scheme of things. Plus it doesn't hurt to have some terms and conditions agreed upon in writing.

Now that I finally get this big-picture-little-details logic, I need to figure out a way to keep reminding myself of it.

Conforming to Stand Out

In the last couple of months I’ve been going through a lot of self-doubt about my brand; wondering if what I want to do is a viable plan, and if there are enough people out there who share my taste. A lot of the feedback I’ve been hearing of late is that my clothes have cuts and styles that are "very young" but in fabrics that are meant for “old people”.

Ouch, right?

But let's set aside how crushed I feel when I see young women try on my clothes and say “it makes me look like I’m forty”. After all I suppose I can look on the bright side and take some strange comfort in the fact that they can see what I am trying to do at Brass Tacks. The whole point at Brass Tacks is to take handwoven fabrics and give them a makeover in the form of tailored, stylish clothing. However if my target customer still feels that the fabrics are making the overall garment look old, then I’ve not succeeded in my design goal.

One lady told me that the designs look “confused” because they are neither for older women (too tailored and fitted with adventurous cuts) nor are they for younger women (“old” colours and fabrics). Well if I have to be either “here” or “there” to make this for-profit model work, then here are my choices:

Plan A: Continue doing what I do with Brass Tacks designs, but also incorporate more mill made fabrics that are easier to care for, less expensive, and most importantly “young looking”. So for example if I am making an evening dresses in cotton khadi and it does relatively well, I might consider repeating it in mill made silk in a popular colour like magenta or turquoise (you know, colours that really pop). This way I will be able to cater to a wider range of tastes without losing the core ideals and fabrics that I love.

Plan B: Very similar to A, except to keep the brand image intact I need to have the less expensive and more mass appeal range of clothing under a different brand name. This will also allow me to monitor more closely which brand attracts more people or if there is an overlap, but in terms of logistics it’s a bit harder to do at the moment.

And while I figure out which plan to go with for my Winter collection, my team is scrambling to put the Monsoon collection together (sans two tailors who have swine flu). We finally managed to get the pattern right for this halter dress that I am making in a black silk with diamond shaped ikat designs. I tried it on today and breathed a sigh of relief, momentarily forgetting my deadlines, the amount of work I have ahead of me in the next 2 weeks, and all the bills I have to pay.

See I’m not confused. I’m just negotiating new territory on my own terms.

Waiting and Watching

Last week has been exhausting with my launch at Daaram and then a busy week here in Chennai without a break. But it has been worth it and I feel as if I’ve learned a thing or two about myself as well as about Brass Tacks.

Daaram pulls in an interesting crowd. The store is very particular that they retail only handloom products so rather than sharing a common socio-economic background, their customers share a common interest. Having said that, the look and a price of a product does determine your market, and Daaram’s clothes are very straightforward and their prices are low (tops start at Rs 250 and their most expensive kurta is Rs 1100).

The really great thing for me is that the store has a lot of people walking in everyday, and by sheer numbers even if a few of them are interested in Brass Tacks, that’s a good start for me. The feedback I got from many customers was indicative that Daaram and I are yet to reach out to the kind of person who will wear Brass Tacks. Many of the women felt the clothes were “too western” (the tops were too short- i.e. not covering the hip like a kurti), too many of them were sleeveless, or the prices were too high. Still, there were quite a few young women who came in, tried on many pieces and bought a few.

At first my expectations were really high (note to self: stop doing that!) but by the last day I had gone to the other extreme, feeling really skeptical about things sales picking up. I had to remind myself that things were not so different at my own store when I started out. The partners at Daaram seem very confident that Brass Tacks will do well and that there is a demand for that genre of clothing. It’s just a question of time and reaching out to the kind of people who are into tailored clothing with interesting (and sometimes quirky) details. And so much for creating such a strong distinction between a Daaram and a Brass Tacks customer- many women were happy to buy both, which means I am still figuring out who my customer is.

Another interesting thing I noticed is that being surrounded by so much handwoven fabric in subtle colours made me think about designs that are a bit…well, less tailored than the usual Brass Tacks look. I often get inspiration for designs from the fabric itself, and mill made fabrics or handwoven fabrics in mercerized cotton lend themselves very well to crisp, tailored, fitted clothing. But the soft, dull yarn in the fabrics at Daaram made me think of design ideas for shapely but still flowy styles. I’ve ordered some khadi yardage for those styles and hopefully those ideas in my head will evolve into something tangible for my Winter Collection.

Below, some pictures of the Brass Tacks corner at Daaram:

Hyderabad, Show Me Love

For the last 8 months I’ve been working on a project that I am really excited about. It all began around a year ago when I met with the owners of Daaram, a store in Hyderabad, and they expressed an interest in retailing my brand there. Daaram is run by Dastkar Andhra, a non-profit dedicated to promoting handloom fabric, and because of our common passion we immediately got along. Latha, one of the partners at Daaram, seemed really keen on working with me because she felt that I could give her team of designers ideas on what kinds of handloom fabrics would work well for contemporary silhouettes; in the long run that kind of input will help handloom weavers compete with powerloom and mill made fabric suppliers.

In the last 6 months, while working on my Summer and upcoming Monsoon collections, the design team at Dastkar Andhra has been really patient with changing colours, fabric construction and weaves to suit my tastes. I often place orders asking, “Can you make yardage with fabric construction from A, the colours from B but change the green lines to the blue shade from fabric C”. Luckily for me, they oblige me whenever they can (there are rare exceptions like when the weavers of Muramunda refuse to weave in anything but Kora).

So this Thursday, on July 9th, Brass Tacks will launch in Hyderabad at Daaram. I’m nervous about the response, excited to reach out to more people, but mostly thrilled to have this opportunity so early in my business.