The next stage

It feels weird now that the semester is ending (only 1 accounting final left!). But now it's on to greater and better things - I've slowly realized that I'm a workaholic. I think many people can attest to that.

Anyhoo, I've been playing around with the idea of going into production with some of the pieces I made for the fashion show. Many people gave me great feedback and comments (thank you so much!) and some wanted to buy the pieces off me. However, after talking to people and doing some research online, I decided that it'll be really hard to go into production. This is because I'll only be in New York for 5 or 6 more months before I go back to Singapore for good. The amount of money that has to go into pattern and sample making just doesn't seem quite worth it at this point and I'm completely risk averse. Haha. I'll probably start doing something more large-scale once I'm back in Asia and closer to cheaper production facilities.

In the meantime, I'll try to bring my samples to Henri Bendel's open calls if I can to see if I can get a lucky break. Basically what happens is that the buyers hold open calls for designers once in a while and if they like your stuff, they order them from you on the spot. And then you go into production. They've kicked off the careers of Anna Sui and many others so it's an amazing opportunity. But then the line is always round the block for the whole day and out of hundreds, only a couple of designs are chosen each time. We'll see how that goes :)

Also, last night I decided to scale down my designs and focus on cotton and jersey stretch dresses and tops for sale instead. I plan to buy a serger (a machine that creates finished seams and makes the job much faster) and start making simple nice designs to sell. This way I can do things in my free time and sell dresses to raise funds for the orphanage in Africa I volunteered at in the summer. Starting small seems much less daunting and more manageable for me.