Why I Closed Fauxgerty
What started out as my dream career shifted and I had a choice: to be honest with myself or keep going.
To everyone I am close to, it came as a shock when I announced my plan to close Fauxgerty, the sustainable fashion brand I had been building for the previous seven years. Fauxgerty was many parts of myself wrapped up into a business: stylish, environmentally responsible, creative, fun and executed by a team that was tight-knit. My husband was the brand’s COO and together we managed a small team of six based in Saint Louis, Los Angeles, Nashville and New York City.
From the outside, we were on fire. We had just launched a successful wholesale program creating exclusive garments from vintage fabrics for stores across the country, we were gearing up to pitch to my dream retailer, Shopbop, we partnered with a factory that was able to smoothly produce all of our garments and we had finally eclipsed some of challenges that arise in the first few years of a new company. Financially, we were on track to have our highest grossing revenue to date. All in all, we were running smoothly, efficiently and had ample potential.
But, this was our reality in 2019, and reflected nothing of the years prior. For the six years beforehand we were having an identity crisis. We launched in 2012 as a vegan leather outerwear brand, focusing on creating the best version of the motorcycle jacket. Soon after, we opened a retail space in Saint Louis to help broaden our brand awareness and give customers a chance to try on the pieces. Our business strategy pivoted about one hundred times since our launch year while we explored the wholesale market, trade shows, designing basics, utilizing vintage fabric, and pop-up shops. As an entrepreneur there are unavoidable ebb-and-flows and it’s important to try new things, get creative with your revenue streams and allow your company to be fluid to adjust to present times. But, in these beginning years we weren’t being creative with growth opportunities, we actually just didn’t fully grasp who we were, who we were selling to or our strategy to reach our goals.
The struggle of running a brand with the goals I set for Fauxgerty is an ever-present need to keep propelling your vision forward while managing the day-to-day. Running your own business requires us to have thick skin while hearing no constantly, to pivot when things don’t go our way, and to be a leader to your team who is looking to you to steer the ship. These challenges were the parts of Fauxgerty I loved. But, the more I got to know the fashion industry, the more I recognized it may not be the place for me. The calendar of new garment releases is rigorous and the never-ending need to deliver innovative-while-authentic Instagram content wore me out. To be honest, I didn’t care about these things. As the years went on I realized I loved running a business and leading a team more than the fashion side itself.
During this shift, the fashion side of my brand started to feel inauthentic to me. To financially sustain us, we needed to up production on our top selling items, lose garments that weren’t and keep producing something new and exciting to tout about on social media which resulted in more sales. The reality of selling any good is that you have to sell it to live another day. If you’re not in love with what you’re making and committed to being it’s PR rep everyday, you can lose the connection to your business, and that’s what happened to me. I was in love with running my business, I was in love with owning my own business, I was in love with my team, but I was no longer in love with the product.
There was one more main reason we decided to close, and that was a financial one. Building a brand that will compete in the digital market is expensive. My husband and I decided to take on no outside investors and carried the financial burden ourselves. As the years went on and sales goals were missed, this burden wasn’t just on us at work, it came home with us and started to infect our personal lives. We started to ask ourselves, “What are we risking to make this company work?”. Making Fauxgerty a success was a dream, but we had lots of other dreams like paying for our kids’ college and having financial freedom. In the final year, it felt like the brand was beginning to jeopardize these dreams, which were just as, or more important, then our dream of a fashion empire.
The chaos between our launch in 2012 and our close in 2019 is the reason I wanted to write a book. When first starting out, I had no name in the fashion industry, barely any experience, and was 22 years old. There wasn’t a designer or brand executive who gave me a meeting to help nurture my company, so I learned by trial, error and Google. While this method will inevitably be part of your entrepreneurship journey, it should be met with mentors, advisors and planning to minimize your risk and mistakes in those first years. I took the lessons I learned at Fauxgerty and harnessed them into a digital workbook intended for aspiring designers and those who want to start their own brand. Build Your Brand shares stories of my failures, feelings of ‘what the hell am I doing?’ and successes I picked up along the way alongside leadership strategies and my best tips for increasing your chances of success. I hope you will read it and deep dive into your intentions for your company and uncover your most honest goals. In turn, my hope is for Fauxgerty to live on through your brand and help it to flourish.
Build Your Brand is now available for pre-order and launches August 3rd.
