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I'm living my dream as a fashion designer, all without losing my
shirt. My secret: simply making my products myself!
It’s hard to believe, even for me, that I started this venture with
no knowledge of sewing or the rag trade, and without even knowing much about business. It was not
without blunders, but the pieces of a puzzle fell into place. My business is working! I'm at a point now, where I can start sharing what I have learned.
If you dream of owning your own clothing label, I want to help
you do it the sustainable and ethical way. Follow this blog, and be part of the locally-made revolution in fashion.
Today’s Post
How do you equip yourself with garment manufacturing skills, when you don’t
even know how to sew? The first answer that might come to mind, if your mind
was conditioned like mine was, is education. I don’t mean “education” in the
simple sense, of learning something you needed to know. I mean capital-E Educational,
with its certificates, diplomas and degrees.
Speaking as someone with three degrees (a PhD included), and fifteen years
in executive and academic positions at institutions established to confer these
awards, I can tell you without bias, that no paper qualification can ever
qualify you as a manufacturer, at least not of clothing, and probably not
anything else. I mean, show me a factory, with frames on the walls, displaying degrees!
But what if educational institutions, have skills and knowledge you’re
wanting to learn? Is there any way of extracting that knowledge, without paying
extra for some useless award? As a former insider, and cunning student, I’m
going to answer that question right now.
Robin Hood Claim
Courses are front-loaded with teaching
The first thing to know about most courses, is that their first one or two
thirds (e.g., the first 4 to 8 weeks of a 12-week program of teaching) contains
all their best lectures, tutorials and demonstrations. Toward the end, teachers—like
their students—begin to fatigue. But even teachers whose energy is boundless,
switch focus near the end of a course, from teaching their students, to assessing
what their students have learned.
If you’re doing a course to gain skills, in order to run your own business, you should
ask yourself if you have any interest in being assessed. You’re not going to go
into business, telling your customers they’re lucky to be buying from you,
because you're someone who scored excellent grades. In fact, unless you’re studying fashion at
the Institut Français de la Mode, or some school like that in Paris, you’re
unlikely to have cause to tell customers, that you graduated at all.
So why graduate? Honestly: why even finish a course? Why not take the
learning component, then flee?
The way I see it, mature-age students, scooping up skills to start their own
businesses, rather than chasing degrees, have more important things to be doing
with their time, than seeing courses through to the end. The end is the bit with
no teaching, just judgement from irrelevant judges. Perhaps even more
importantly, for those saving their pennies to get start-ups through those first
vulnerable years, is that the last few weeks of most courses, are the weeks that
cost the most to attend.
Courses are back-loaded with fees.
This brings me to the second thing to know about courses, which is that enrolment
prices can more than double, per session, beyond certain cut-off dates. Students
who are there for pieces of paper, never look at those dates. Students with no
interest in paper, who are there purely to learn, should have those dates
blazoned all over their homes.
I’ll start with the example of New South Wales technical colleges. Their students
are billed half the cost of their courses at the beginning of Week-1, and the remaining
half at the beginning of Week-13. (Though I haven't looked beyong my own state, I would not be surprised if this billing sequence were common).
From the institution’s point of view, waiting until week 13 would make sense, if courses went
for 26 weeks. They don’t though. Courses are 18 weeks in duration. That means students
pay just as much to attend in the final 6 weeks (when class time is mostly
assessment), as they pay for Weeks-1 to 12 (when class time is devoted to
learning). The student who remembers to withdraw at the end of Week-12, enjoys
nearly all of the learning contained in a course, for half that course’s
advertised price.
As for Australian universities, they’re even easier to wrangle. Students who
play their cards right, can take the best, leave the worst, and not pay a cent
for the privilege. The trick is to always withdraw, at the end of Week 4.
Bills for university courses only get issued to students who are enrolled on
the first day of Week 5. Students who withdraw on or after that day, are liable
for the full course fee. Students who withdraw at the end of Week-4, are liable
for no fee at all.
If four weeks doesn't seem like a enough, keep in mind, lectures in most courses only run for 12 weeks. 4 weeks is one third! When you consider that all the best lectures come at the start, 4 weeks starts looking like a half or two thirds.
If there is a university in your city with vocational courses, that you believe will help you with your business, you should enrol in as many as you possibly can. Greedily devour every lecture and
tutorial, and schedule face-to-face meetings with teachers. Just remember, to “withdraw
without penalty”, at the end of Week 4.
There is every likelihood you will be able to keep in there, as a high
maintenance student—putting your hand up during lectures with personal
questions, and knocking on lecturers’ doors—right up until the end of semester.
That is because staff aren’t on the lookout for people like you. Their usual
concern are students who just want a degree, but who would skip every class if they could. Someone
whose priority is learning, who wouldn’t want the degree even for wrapping their
chips in, would be such an enigma, that some universities might never wise up to
their continuing participation in courses from which they have withdrawn.
That said, you might not want to hang around after Week-4, when you realise
you have heard the best lectures. The first 4 lectures are usually the ones that got prepared in advance, before courses got started. The remaining 8 lecturers,
are often prepared on the fly.
What I Did, and Could Still Do.
I did the first 12 weeks of a fashion certificate, and pulled out before
paying the remaining half of the course fee. I wasn’t going to pay double, for
the honour of being assessed, or hang about for another 6 weeks, when the first
12 weeks were the weeks that had all the instruction.
The last 6 weeks looked like they were going to be torture. The first 12
were everything I could have possibly hoped for. I got 36 days of incredible
instruction, from expert teachers, in a room kitted with all manner of
industrial sewing machines.
As someone who had never touched any kind of sewing machine before this, I
can’t imagine achieving what I have in these years, without the learning I
acquired during the first two-thirds of that course. As well as learning many
of the basics of sewing, cutting, design-drawing, pattern making, and industry
standards, I learned how to speak with suppliers, with the right jargon, so
they would not see me as someone who they could rip off.
I would like to do another such course, in a technical college, but next
time would like to manipulate the welfare system, to get the course totally
free. Whatever tasks I was set, I would complicate or bend them, knowing that tinkering
with fabric and sewing machines, can often result in new products. I would
expect, too, that new skills and techniques that I would otherwise not even try to
acquire, could be brought to the design of new swimsuits. As well as being open
to design innovation, I would be open to what relationships with classmates or
teachers might bring me. You never know when you might be talking to your next business partner!
Something else I would like to do, if ever I were living in Melbourne, is
enrol in courses in fashion, at RMIT. No doubt I would be left yawning at a lot
of the ideological madness. Amidst that though, I expect there could be some
real food for thought, for someone who likes thinking, like I do. As long as I
kept my promise to myself, to withdraw by the end of Week-4, I could get a lot
from the first four weeks of a few dozen RMIT fashion courses.
The Wrap
Feel free to dismiss that last paragraph, as a swipe at universities, by a disgruntled
former academic. What you shouldn’t dismiss, is your opportunity to infiltrate
universities, for knowledge, networks, connections, or simply cheap drinks on
Wednesday evenings in town (those student I.D. cards are issued before you
become liable to pay fees).
Technical colleges have more useful instruction, that you will need to pay
for, but if you follow my advice, you can get it half price.
What no educational institution will teach you, is how to manufacture
garments for sale. As a for-instance, they will have you sewing with pins, something
you will later only do when prototyping or making bespoke pieces, but would
rarely do when repeatedly making garments, or mass-producing garments, for
sale.
Neither are they able to teach you highly specialised or recent techniques,
that may be expected in the niche you are planning to enter. The technical college
where I studied, could not have taught me how to tape seams in rainwear, make sportswear
or intimates with welded seams, meter rubber in swimwear, or even do flat
locking, a technique that is ubiquitous in the activewear market.
I didn’t get the skills I required to make quality swimwear, without a lot of smooth talking, a lot of tips from suppliers, a year of trial and error, and touch of industrial espionage. If you are reading Man and Sewing Machine, because you want to start a fashion venture, and be your own manufacturing partner, my tricks that worked, and that failed, will be the subjects of following blog posts.
Also find me:
- Online at Prideswim
- on Instragram
- on TikTok
- on YouTube
- on 500px
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