Jaded London Co-Founders: Jade & Grant Goulden – Disruption, the London Look, & Building a Fashion Brand Without a Business Plan

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0:51The Gstaad Guy:Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. Who had the idea first? it was actually a friend of mine yeah um we were at dinner one night and I was like oh I'm gonna set up a brand with my brother what shall we call it and she was like um what about jaded and I was like oh that sounds quite cool just throw an ed on the end and I was just like it's not ideal for me but that's just it sounded right you know when you just sort of say something and we just sort of thought let's just go with it just go for it that's cool yeah but now i don't even think about it i actually never thought about it on yeah yeah this very second yeah it's very cool around the world with your host the stard guy we welcome you back to the stard guy podcast sharing stories of excellence with those in the know for those who just know thanks well grant and jade thank you so much for being here thanks for having us thank you for being here i've had some comments that we look alike in the past yeah i was hoping you brought that up same initials gg yeah grant golden and stadga yeah and one of the first brands to reach out to me early in my career i think a few months in you guys reached out and gifted me some stuff and I wore it in lots of videos for a while so I really appreciate that early love and support I'll never forget it pleasure and I think like that's kind of yeah in an essence what we do we're always looking for like who's the next talent and I remember sitting with my creative team and having you on a mood board and on a on a tiny screen in our old office like which was horrible at the time when we were first sort of starting and we thought this guy's got something very different so we hit you up and the rest is history i love that i appreciate it i love that we recently had a guest on the show called nick tran who was a cmo of tiktok and cmo of hulu and his whole thing is marketing at the speed of culture and i think you guys have always been innovating at the speed of culture where I see a trend just barely on Instagram and I see people just barely getting into it buying vintage of that certain silhouette and a certain product and next thing I know Jaded actually has an entire collection around that moment in culture I'd love to start there and unpack both of your awareness of culture and what that means to you I think what's key is that we hire our customer so you know at the end of the day Grant and I are really talent spotters that's what I think that is our real niche at doing so we'll you know always be looking for like who's the most great on TikTok and who can direct the trends and what designers like up and coming out of Central St Martins or London College of Passion and it's those people that you know sit in our office and we mix the marketing team with the design team and they sit and they constantly we have this very much fluid hot desk environment and you know the head of brand will sit with the head of design and and they'll just constantly talk about you know who's the who's the coolest latest like or you know up and coming person on tiktok or instagram or what trend is coming through and we were saying before that we feel like that indie sleaze era of like 2006 to 2014 when it was like the Lindsay Lohan you know Britney Spears Paris Hilton all hanging out together going clubbing that vibe is very much on trend at the moment and obviously they're all designing around that era right now and then it will move on to something else but just jumping in like you know how one of my favorite restaurants is entrecot right and you know their secret sauce no one can get hold of it without sounding really cringe i genuinely think part of our secret sauce has been this kind of unusual structure that we set up our team whereas most design most brands most creative studios would have as jade mentioned a separate design team to a separate marketing team to a separate econ team.

5:30We keep it very fluid and it's one team, one creative team, all on one floor within our office and it becomes a conversation. So when we spot trends, it's never led by a certain kind of department who give their view and then somebody gives their view. it's it's a conversation of inspiration of pictures genuinely sent in on whatsapp we our business is like everything on whatsapp everything you shouldn't do we do you know what i mean so like everyone's like go and get slack because it's better and it's more formal and it doesn't work for us like we even whatsapp obviously the gen z consumer are kind of whatsapp is a huge part of their lives you know they're always on it they're sending they need to be like in a party in a rave there and then in the toilet taking a picture of the girl in the toilet that's at the rave that's in the cool crowd and what's she wearing and sending it into the design chat so it's that is literally how it's become an ever kind of it's never on and off it's just an eve it's just an ever-moving conversation on whatsapp of inspiration and that comes up that just leads to to the best trends that we kind of identify and that's ultimately what the product that you see on our website or and i would say like being disruptive is really key like you know someone presents us an idea if it's not disruptive enough and it doesn't make enough noise that we feel you know in this competitive environment then we just don't roll with it it just has to be a bit for sure you know disruptive i love you yeah completely yeah i love the mention of whatsapp i rarely have

7:26The Gstaad Guy:a strong no to my team off the bat i'll usually just try to even if i feel no i'll try to you know do the song and dance to explain why no but recently my co-founder messaged me actually She messaged a team chat saying, hey, we're migrating to Slack because WhatsApp is becoming complex. And I was like, this is not happening. This is a massive no. And I'm a huge fan of Virgil. And I feel like Virgil paved the way for so much of what I and my peers do and what we do. And he ran most of his projects on WhatsApp. And I just love scribbling on a picture any time of the day, as you're saying. I try not to send pictures in the bathroom because I think it's a bad place to send the pictures.

8:12The Gstaad Guy:But I love what you're saying about anytime, anyplace, just send it. And I think that that's the way you have to move quickly. You have to just, when you have an idea, turn it into an action quickly. And I see that being your reality just based on the idea to production cycle based on the pace of culture that i see as a customer i have a question for you guys when you have an idea how long is it before a customer can have it in their hands on average i would say three months yeah because obviously we want things to still you know be tested and make sure the quality is brilliant and make sure the print's brilliant and the fit's right and we've shot it on an in-house model to check that we were we're happy with the vibe so it's not it's not like we're in this kind of rat race of gotta get it online gotta get you know and compromise anything just to get the trend in like we we have certain standards but just going back to your original question it's in order to be so on like on the on the money in terms of delivering that because we we don't just have to identify that trend but it's got to arrive on our platform in our world at the time when the customer wants it so you can use an example just to give you a live example but like drummer jackets which is kind of what i'm wearing these military jackets which were huge trends in the early 2000s we actually had them on our website last summer wow and only kind of in the last q4 q4 of this year come you know list and hypebeast and all these kind of platforms have been saying you know there's huge surges in traffic for this kind of product so you know there's always that balance of we're kind of you don't want to be too early but then you don't want to miss the trend yeah fine yeah i want to go back in time to that conversation with your friend when you wanted to start a fashion brand, you decided to start Jaded.

10:25The Gstaad Guy:Because today, I think, particularly among late teens, early 20s, if a girl has a wildflower phone case, and likes Sydney and Devin Carlson, or if a guy loves Playboy Cardi and follows his opium finsta, they have Jaded in their wardrobe on both sides especially if they're Londoners and living this urban life and the parents are aware of it too because they're a lot of the times buying it for their kids of course there is that older age group but I see a lot of that relevance existing among youth culture which is really important and that's where a lot of conversation starts is that an accurate depiction yeah absolutely and I've actually got some kind of just to give more context behind that the reason why we started jaded was because me and my five best friends went to watch kanya and jay-z watch the throne at the o2 came out of the concert feeling so inspired i think at the time ricardo t she was giovanni she created director and he did the the leather skirt and the leather pants and the rottweiler t and we all came away from that concert and everybody felt so hyped like it was the thick of hypebeast culture and they were like I've got to wear this stuff where can I get it and obviously it was at such an interesting time where luxury had started to show street wear for the first time but they were offering at it at their luxury price point so like six hundred dollars for a tee you know thousand dollars for for pants so they kind of looked to me my friends who kind of knew I was always into fashion and said like there's a there's a bit of an angle here there's a niche here like we want to wear this kind of streetwear look and it was also the unisex trend because that you know back then it was very much you go to the ladies wear department or you go to the men's wear department and it was mixing that up and breaking boundaries and the guy wears the girls and the girl wears the guys And I think that's really what we do better than anyone on the high street right now.

12:44Yeah. Nobody was doing it at that affordable price point. Yeah. So that was kind of the backstory of how we even got to the brand in the first place. It was like it was obviously a very current musician who was killing it at the top of his game. But you couldn't get that look. And that's where we came in.

13:04The Gstaad Guy:I remember that Watch the Throne tour era. The look was Balmain biker jeans. Balenciaga arenas. Yeah. Maybe Maison Margiela Futures with the strap. Yeah. Givenchy shark tee. Yeah. Skirts. But that's cool now. Is it cool now? Is the whole look cool now? We're not quite there yet. Yeah. I feel like we're in kind of 2010. We're at 2010. We're in Tumblr era. We're not at 2012. yet we're not there yet but but if you think about the influence of like that album and the effect it had on you know i remember that tour that you had to go to it and it was just hypebeast and all these platforms were just dominated by that album um but yeah that was i love that fashion era that was amazing is that the look you emulated as your first collection I think it was very much like it was it was the first kind of street it was street yeah the term streetwear became this like and heavily printed like real over the top prints yeah that's how we started like head to toe co-ord Rihanna at that time was obviously like one of the biggest musicians at the time and and I remember like the the the Jonathan Ross show where like you know you'd watch on tv and kind of see these amazing kind of global superstars and she once turned up in a tracksuit which was so wrong you know to turn up to a kind of formal event in a tracksuit and that was kind of at the time of watch the throne we thought there's something here there's some angle that we can deliver um so we set we set it up in that september uh 2013 and at the time you know to get turnover we had to sell to wholesale so we went out on linkedin and getting contacts and took selfridges and urban outfitters and top shot concessions at the time when it was in oxford street and they wanted because we were so on the money with the trend they wanted us to deliver pre-christmas so we had to design we designed it basically and shot it in september and we had to deliver it pre-december wow um but yeah we managed to do it but now obviously it's i think your placement now as well is a bit more premium right yeah it's more premium than where we started yeah what's the if you don't mind me asking what's the average order value today the average order value if you take a blend across because just to give you a snapshot so we're about 85 percent d2c yeah so it's our main channel that's great and of that website our aov is about 130 pounds so for those who don't know d2c means direct to consumer direct to consumer so that means we're selling direct to our consumer on our own website so we're talking to the customer selling to the customer awesome and then the remaining 15 we do wholesale where we've kind of stuck with our key partners such as selfridges revolve nice those guys and your customers mainly in the uk no no so really interesting stat is that 40 of our revenue is us we're actually bigger in america than we are in the uk even though we have no up to now where we just launched a new york temporary store we don't have an office we don't have any team well we're an english brand but we're actually bigger in America.

16:42But they buy into that London look. So they love, you know, how it's made in London. Not made here, but it's designed here, the culture about it.

16:53The Gstaad Guy:The aesthetic is very London. Yeah. I think this is actually a great conversation on how the culture has shifted because I think right around that Watch the Throne period, let's call it 2010, 2012, to me at least, there was this crazy curiosity of people in london people in the uk and actually people in europe being very u.s curious everyone wanted to make it out to la everyone wanted to go to coachella for the first time i think it's i think it's flipped too yeah and i think stad guy and my following is a a nice other case study to talk about because 40 of my followers are in the u.s and my largest majority of followers are the u.s who are very curious about the European life of a Stad guy.

17:43The Gstaad Guy:And I think rappers like Central C and his freestyle that he did where he explains like UK slang. There were early signs of that with Stormzy, for example, and Skepta. But I think now more than ever, European culture and UK culture is actually leading in a lot of categories. and i'm so happy to see that this is the case for you in the u.s with no physical footprint at all yeah i just think there's london and england has amazing talent i think we kind of don't talk about it enough there's some of our creative teams through to our merchandisers through to our econ team there's just brilliant there's there's there's kind of like a london look that you can't you can't kind of emulate around the world and i think it's we're all about kind of empowering and making sure you know we're always hiring always on the lookout for embracing like the new who's the new up and coming creatives that can ultimately talk to this global consumer because like you say people there is a lot of value in being british right yeah i'd actually love to define what you think stands out aesthetically as a London look to me a lot of it has to do with like nonchalance yeah and effortless like putting in effort like automatically becomes lame to a UK consumer to a London consumer in particular to me but I'd love to know what you you think yeah it's a bit disheveled and i mean i'm obviously focused on like east london vibe yeah because obviously the territories around london are so different to what people wear yeah obviously our focus is very much that kind of shoreditch dulse like if you came into our office vibe it would that would be the answer if you just sat and had a look at our creative team it's like if you could draw a pyramid and you said you know top of the funnel is our most aspirational kind of direction of look of where we're going that is our creative floor in our office it's like everyone kind of looks like it's funny we get a lot of nostalgia because obviously we're older than them we're not our customer but we're making sure our brand and our people our team is the customer and we're looking at their outfits and we're getting the style doing oh my god i remember when i grew up as like vintage and vintage hollister and i would say like charlie xcx is a good example of someone who's just like the complete london vibe you know she's just a bit unpolished and says what she thinks and just looks great and doesn't wear much makeup and happy to smoke 10 cigarettes in a row and like that's the cool gritty and i think that's why everyone bought into that brat summer because taylor say i don't think it would work if she was an american um artist yeah it's very it's very uk you're right and it's always been the case even if you watch older movies yeah it's london rock and roll carelessness even when people do care to just look like they don't has always been what's cool here yeah i think in the u.s there's just a natural kind of they're often very behind the curve with trend and so for example we find what we sell here isn't the same at what we sell in the u.s they're often almost a year behind no way yeah so i think it's it's got a bit shorter reason if you look at kind of for example denim is our best-selling category right fine it fluctuates but on the whole it's our best-selling category and baggy jeans have been enormous for us they've been the best seller for the last three years and you got baggier and baggier every year baggy and baggy super xl double xl we've got a star called the colossus jean and we now run an xl colossus yeah and it's enormous and the tiktok consumer wants to pull it out and show this enormous silhouette they wear something tight on top yeah us are still buying very much into that and have kind of like only just adopted it whereas the uk kind of scene is moving more towards a boot cut but that boot cut hasn't really kind of got to the us yet so it's quite interesting to although we're very disruptive and creative and niche at our storytelling you still have to make sure you're commercial commercial and kind of serving all customers for sure how quickly did you figure out that you both needed help with the pace of culture and realizing you know what we're actually a few years older than our customer let's hire the customer instead of owning that creative decision I don't know I feel like we just at the beginning obviously as you're reinvesting into the business and you need a wider team we would just go to these art we'd literally go ourselves to the art fairs and the graduate fairs and spot the next talent and I think it just came like naturally really in hiring people that had a similar vision to us and then obviously as we're getting older and there's more and more social media platforms like snapchat for example i don't even use snapchat you have to have you know people that are watching that all the time i'm on tiktok and i get the trends and i can easily direct the trends but in terms of you know it's getting younger and younger and a lot of people have said to us why haven't you you know you could have gone the other way and made the brand get older and older and target the millennials and an old audience but I just think just Gen Z I think that was just our niche that just evolved.

24:10We were never you know front facing founders like we don't do these kind of things that often yeah when it's on the business aside we like to come and you know like this kind of conversation and talk about our journey but you'll never see us as you'll never see us on our insta like we we know we're not the customer and we put our faith and trust in our team and key individuals who are bringing in their world so instead of kind of us recruiting and looking for the next who's the next brilliant creative we we're kind of sitting with our team and saying who do you think is kind of going to serve the new look to the new world to the new but it goes with model scouting as well so often you know we could hire regular models who you know just brilliant and look amazing in the product but we'll go a step further and we'll hire a model who's got a following that they're a professional model but they've you know they've got that look they've also got their own proper they're in the scene and they're in the scene and it goes back to tapping into the culture always with every decision we're always thinking you know who's we're never just taking something at face value it's always got to be for example we did a collaboration or just thinking out loud with a with a film called um kids by larry clark and that was because the imagery from the film was resurfacing and being shared on pinterest and tiktok and all these platforms so we never kind of on our decision making never comes from a monetary purpose it comes from how can we tap into the culture that's trending right now and kind of the the monetary side and everything that comes with it is the byproduct of that so who is the customer today who's the jaded guy and who's the jaded girl so the girl i would say so i run women's and grant runs men's wear and that's why i'm always answering cool from a women's perspective but so i'd say the girl is between like 18 to 28 30 it's slightly older than the men's customer okay you know she's like she's into dresses at night really ultra sexy product and then in the day we'll wear like joggers and a cool tea during the day and into her beauty products and going out and going to places like Ibiza and that kind of girl and on the jaded man side it can start off from a 15 year old all the way through to 25 26 but it's definitely we use our jaded man platform which has got close to a million across insta and tiktok we're definitely targeting a much younger customer but as an overall business and brand you know with we're we've got quite a wide spread and and unisex going back to like watch the throne and that whole kind of conversation unisex is our fastest growing area of our business where it's quite interesting but our men's design team is designing some of the best-selling product on women's wear well and then women's team shoot it wow and that's happened completely organically because i think the girl the kind of girls are buying into that oversized oversized like boyfriend look yeah are the guys also wearing some of the women's stuff yes what so our brand is we want our brand to to be very kind of encompassing we want it to be gender fluid and we feel that kind of gone with the day of like going into a retail store and you know the the person running the store be like where's you know the men's over here and the women's over here our brand if you go to our new york store which we opened in september during fashion week it's visual merchandised in a completely kind of free way there's no men's section yeah we actually have you know made sure the store staff are aware

28:24The Gstaad Guy:of that fluid it's fluid yeah that's it's very cool yeah i actually walked by the store and there was a really long line at the door and because i thought we liked to hear yeah it was amazing I don't know if you guys identify as a family business but it kind of is no we do you do yeah okay great so Jade you're in women's Grant you run you run men's was that always the intention from day one yeah I couldn't run men's and vice versa like we're very it stems from our passion so pre-starting the brand we were always into fashion you know our grandfather was a tailor in notting hill where he would kind of always look amazing every day wear a suit and a tie whatever the whatever was going on in his life and i think when we'd go on vacation you know our parents also worked in the industry and they would make us go shopping we wouldn't go to the beach we'd go to the mall and we'd walk around and we were touching feeling clothes and that then almost it was second nature so it became a passion more so than you know a purpose of like let's start a business and I just love men's wear and Jade love women's wear but I think that's that kind of backstory is really important just applying that to a business where you know it's like what you do I'm sure you don't it doesn't come across like it's a business or a chore it's like you're you're tapped in you're you're very culturally in the know and that's what it is for us it's it's a passion it's not really a nine to five it's like if we weren't in the fashion business we would still want to dress the coolest or like follow the coolest trends we're just into it and what's it like to do that as siblings we always get that question yeah like i've said this on another podcast that we did but it's good because if you're with a friend or you know someone that you've just been put together as colleagues you're nervous what to say around them or you're treading on eggshells and you know you're not worried about their feelings and I don't know whether it's the way we've been brought up or we're very much like we just say whatever there's no boundaries like we can just get past we can go to an interview with someone and within five seconds we're on the same way so we know whether that we're going to hire them or not like we just know and it's like good to have that person like if you're unsure on something i'll be like oh girl come and meet so and so or like can you have a look at this range and do you think i've got enough options and it's just i think it just works nicely as having the emotional part and the psychological part that involves a decision making is removed so there's no filter so it's like posting on instagram without changing it to paris you know there's like you just go for your decision remember going back to your original point you said how do we have to how do we stay so culturally relevant at such a pace we we couldn't do it any otherwise like we have to be making fast decision making and going with our gut and i think when it's your when it's your sibling you you know if you have a fight in a few hours it will be resolved you know so i think we remove that kind of emotional yeah i mean i think that's very cool because i'm sure many of the listeners today have a hard time even having lunch with a sibling yeah let alone starting a business with their sibling yes it's a whole different thing other than separating women's wear and men's wear do you also have skill sets that are different but complementary yeah i mean we co-ceo the business and obviously it's getting bigger and it's difficult you know we're at about 85 people now wow and grant very much is better at like the e-com digital marketing finance side and then I have so many collections because obviously women's wear 60 % of the business so you have swimwear as well and more way more drops I have to do way more product discussions with the team and fit sessions so we basically split it like that where we just know each other's roles um but I mean when if we're hiring someone or you know we're doing something like this like we'll always come together I think it's you know there's people kind of you ask that question and I get why you ask it but it would be very hard to to achieve what we've achieved with doing it alone because you need you know in a creative world you kind of need that soundboard to to bounce and to kind of see what's going see that see a different perspective at pace so I I if you know if if somebody's out there and wants to start a business and feels they are unsure of who they should partner should it be a friend should it be a colleague should it be a sibling i just think trust is the key thing do you trust that person because there's going to be plenty of bad times where you know you feel like you want to give up and something's happened that you think your business is over and you need that person to kind of bring you back up i love that the trust is not even questioned between the two of you it's a beautiful thing so the pillar of your partnership as founders is that trust beyond finding the name and deciding to embark on this mission together what were the first few steps you took before that first drop you had to do by december you mentioned you had the idea in september and you were selling by december so obviously grant went to the concert I was working at ASOS Grant was at university and we thought let's just start a brand and just see what happens so what were you doing at ASOS I was in the buying department nice and um our dad it is in manufacturing and he was doing men's shirts for private label and so he taught us you know margin how to work out the margin the costings um with sourcing at the beginning and we thought we'll make it in the UK and we'll just do sweats joggers t-shirts unisex sizing and we literally rang our friend and said we don't have any money can you shoot it and we shot it in a skate park on models that were friends as well and it was very amateur like there wasn't shopify i don't even think there was instagram shout out to harley i don't think there was um instagram it was it was just starting it was facebook like you had to set up a facebook it was very early days influencer wasn't a thing this is 2012 yeah and so we literally put a sample range together and we shot it on our friends and we produced this look book and we went on linkedin and we found contacts at selfridges and all these places i mentioned before and they wanted it we couldn't believe oh my god they want it how are we going to make it that was the next thing how are we actually going to produce it we don't have garment text we don't know how to do the specs the grading all of that anyway we managed to do it i don't even know how like pulling in favors from friends and then it just what what we i feel like we're known for is that we we've very gradually because it's been going for 12 years we've evolved it very organically so you know it's still a family business we don't have any outside investment we don't put like we don't put loads of money on like ads and facebook and tiktok ads you know everything it's we try and keep it super organic just making sure we're on the hottest people and because the product is so out there and it's very like visual when you want to photograph it we're lucky we don't have to you're not we're not selling a white t-shirt they want to show it off on instagram so i think it just gradually evolved and then it was covid and we were like oh my god what we're gonna do you know we've got all these wholesale orders everyone's cancelling and because we were quick lead time factories we worked with factories just in Europe and um we'd started working with China we we were quick to adapt basically and we put together like a jogger tracksuit you know loungewear because that's what everyone wanted everyone was sitting at home and from then we we actually designed the parachute pant and that was a good story yeah so we like that story the parachute pant is the one with all the zip ties on it cargo it's a utility baggy um military inspired pant that kind of it was amazing story basically we sent our design team to notting hill they went on a you know looking at military surplus vintage and somebody looked at and sort of found this uh old military i think it was from one i'm not sure what war i'm not a historian but they came back and we felt a vibe we just were like something's right here it was kind of in the you know we were referencing like vintage beckham in the early 2000s that were like circulating on pinterest so we designed this parachute pan and we thought how can we make it that just kind of put our extra we've got this term in our business called elevate i know it's really cringe but it's actually like on a massive poster and in our office but we always want every creative decision to be elevated so we'll never just design something at face value it's always got to have that jaded like next level elevation so one of my designers was like look i'm gonna i think we should add an airpod pocket because airpods have just blown up this was like pre you know everyone's now wearing the like old wire thing but um so they designed this airpod pocket added it on and we brought in these pants and we kind of like trialed them that's what we do a lot on our business we do a test and repeat model so we never go big with something we get a read we buy a small quantity put it on the site see the conversion see the orders and then we then we react but it was like crazy crazy and then we had hayley bieber kylie jenner kaya garber was this gift thing or shopping a mix a mix oh oh no it was it's like it was stylists ringing us up saying we've got to have these we've got to have every color we've got to have every size i've got to yeah it was crazy so that was a big game changer for you yeah to the point kylie jenner's stylist was like i need them for 9 a.m tomorrow in la at this address and basically i just so happened to be in la because we were launching our pop-up store it was actually our first pop-up store and i turned up and she hadn't put the code to the gate so i turned out and it was this amazing house, but it wasn't Kylie's.

40:35It was her stylist. I'm ringing on the door. Nobody's answering. I can only imagine they're crazy busy or the stylist on a shoot and she's not answering the door. I finally kind of get myself into the driveway to deliver this parachute pant bang on time at 9am. I remember it was like 35 degrees in LA and I hadn't put sun cream on and I was like in a terrible way, but I would do anything it takes to get this style to her of course next thing you know i dropped it off she took it from me and she was like look i've got to jump back onto a shoot so like are we good and i was like yeah we're good i i had i didn't know the gate code to get out of the gate is this the famous video yeah this is where you're climbing the gate so i'm so my wife who was my girlfriend at the time is kind of i'm lifting her up trying to climb this 10 foot gate i've seen this video now i'm thinking like this would make the most incredible tiktok video but it was kind of pre-tiktok yeah it wasn't um but um i guess where i'm going with that is we'll do anything hustle you have to hustle because there's so much supply in the world there's so many brands and it's like you but if you've got that right product they find it and that's something that we've always kind of kept inherent in our dna is organic like invest and make the best product and do the best marketing and the rest will sort of sales out we're not into like you don't see much logo you never really see jaded on our clothes you you know we we want but that that's where you where we started the conversations like how we started we didn't have a business plan like a lot of people come to me and they say what's your three-year business plan and how i want to be an entrepreneur and what how do i do it and i want to start this new i don't know this new product but we didn't have a business plan it was very much like just go with your gut and we just make decisions like every now you know as they can it goes back to the whole thing of we've done it the wrong way yeah we've kind of got to where we are and i think in this environment we live in things are changing quicker than ever there's you know there's so much going on with politics and you know different social media channels and different ways to sell you've kind of just got to remain super agile absolutely and that's what and i think that's where the corporates are suffering where they need 10 meetings to sign off one top whereas someone will come into my office tomorrow and they'll show oh jay look at this sample it's amazing i'll be like books 500 it's just quick yeah and we have to remain quick yeah otherwise you'll lose the race this podcast is brought to

43:30The Gstaad Guy:you by Poubelle, bringing you interchangeable charm jewelry hand-painted with enamel on styling silver, allowing you to celebrate all the things you love and all the things you might question through interchangeable styling silver bracelets, bangles, whoop, charms, mini charm, bracelets, rings, cufflings, and much more, and all customizable through or 3D Builder on poubelle.com. That is poubelle, P-O-U-B-E-L, dot com. Thank you so much for watching. And now back to the podcast. I love that you're talking about this agility and this hustle. I'm blessed to know lots of entrepreneurs now, especially with this podcast.

44:15The Gstaad Guy:I get to talk to a lot of them. And there's one thing I realized recently that first of all, there's no real home run moment. I think there's many small moments that lead to a home run and they compound over time. But the key thing is with all those moments is are the founders or the operators or people involved, as they work, are they waiting for the moment to slow down? Are they waiting for a break to relax? Or are they waiting for a moment to run? and the way they see the weeks ahead and the months ahead tells me so much about how likely that person is to succeed because based on the story you told me with Kylie we need the trousers 9 a.m tomorrow a founder and operator who's waiting for a moment to relax would say 9 a.m tomorrow you know next time and next time compounds and it leads to not as many good things happening but you ran you're waiting for the moment to run and whether or not that worked that moment it happened to work and that's amazing I really do think that those good behaviors compound and when people are always waiting to run just waiting for an opportunity that's very much what we're like to just jump in like do that for a month two months let alone 10 years good things always happen so I love that you're talking about that because I find that really important yeah and I think it goes back to sort of not being afraid you kind of have to talk to anyone talk to anyone except that you're going to be turned away you know they're going to be kind of embarrassing moments but we're kind of um we're shameless as sad as that is but i don't think there's another way to do it i agree because you just have to seize the moment otherwise someone else will take that opportunity yeah for sure and you know like I remember like I'd gone holiday and I love celebrities it's sad it's sad but I I would always you know if I was I'm a big Chelsea football club supporter and if I bumped into on in on holiday or somewhere you know I'll never forget like Didier Drogba scored like the winner in the Champions League final and I I was walking in kensington and i literally saw him and my friends like you can't go up to him and i was like are you joking like i can't wait to go up to him so i think it's always come from but i think our parents have have kind of made us like that because our our mom is very shameless yeah i love she has her critics yeah i mean i think actually the the gray area is the worst part where people are not shameless and they go up to someone that they actually admire and they try to play it cool and play this nonchalant game where they're like, hey, maybe I know you from somewhere.

47:17The Gstaad Guy:And they end up wasting the person's time for 10 minutes because they want to be perceived as cool. Yeah. Versus just being genuine. Yeah. Saying, hey, listen, don't want to bother you too much. I know I have 10 seconds of your time. I love you. I admire you. I have a business called Jaded. Please check it out. Yeah. Bye. Yeah. But even like in the office, there's there's there's this culture now of even if the person's sitting next to you they'll email and i'm very much like in person i love in-person interactions or calling a factory like yeah you can speak to them a hundred times on whatsapp or i don't know a supplier of your shipping boxes anything or dhl is like i feel we're good at like calling and doing the old fashion that's good negotiation over the phone and schmoozing and but it's like even this conversation like what how we here today because i reached out to you you you probably thought to yourself this guy supported me in the early days like i'll stay i'll keep talking to him and then we kind of just ended up here so people and relationships are the foundation behind anything even in such a digital world and I think that linking that to our business now we're you know we we've pretty much grown in the last 12 years through being an online platform but there's so much saturation there's so many brands selling online we feel jaded needs to have more IRL and be have a physical footprint so as I mentioned earlier we launched a New York store in Soho and it's done incredibly and you know what we were a bit afraid because it was kind of like unknown territory for us where we kind of felt comfortable in our online you know we've got this website we sell globally but retail was just such a different kind of animal but the customer people want to connect like i think the pandemic really kind of disrupted people's lives people want events they want to see the latest coolest musician performing they want free tattoos in store you know and these are kind of the experiences that we're trying to bring into the brand so looking forward you're we're gonna do way more um physical marketing and physical events I think it's for the next few years need.

49:44The Gstaad Guy:Yeah. You reached out to me when I barely had followers and I've seen you collaborate with different creators and creatives to stay on the ball with what's trending but also to put the product in the right places. How important have collaborations and influencer marketing been to your business? I think that the influencer marketing kind of category was something that you know going back to Jade's earlier point our product is always been visual it's always been loud and our consumer who who we almost are encouraging to buy our product we want them to kind of be expressive and show off their personality through our clothes so that kind of always led us to have quite a to cut through the noise on social and to kind of have our own pov and stand out from the crowd and i think that's done us really well when approaching influencer marketing but i have to say like we're very selective on who we give product to so there's brands out there that just because someone's got a hundred thousand followers they'll get the product whereas our team in house a super you know they make a curated list of people who they feel that are on brand that can give you like the best possible content because you know we still want to hold back of course and ensure that it's desirable we don't need to be so reliant on the influencer marketing model because ultimately it goes back to if you make the best product that they want it's more of an organic conversation where there's a lot of inbound where they'll come to us saying love this outfit any chance you know i can exchange content whatever whereas there's brands out there who are you know kind of going down that more obvious path of here's a paid placement can you produce me x amount of content and it doesn't feel genuine whereas with us we only kind of will work with them if they genuinely like yeah if they genuinely like the product because that kind of makes the best content and i think the consumer is so savvy these days they can see through what's simply an ad and what's like a genuine synergy between the talent and the brand i think a good example of that genuine synergy is when you worked with sydney carlson and i think she had her own designs with you guys right yeah oh it was so collaborative like every week we'd have a design meeting and she was so passionate about it and we went back and forth all the designs and the fits and awesome we want to do something like that again definitely yeah it did really well right yeah really well yeah and even with yourself like just laura piana and yourself is the most perfect alignment of kind of synergy and i think that was so it it so refreshing and it's so genuine and it's you know nobody's looking that as as a money play it's like a it's almost like a Laura Piana tapping into the culture but through someone that's kind of gets it gets it yeah yeah I appreciate that have you done many collaborations like the Sydney one with collaborations that's another talking point and I think every minute of every day you go on social and there's the next collaboration and even that's looking quite saturated so going back to our decision making with everything creative it's what is tapping into the culture we would you know part we've been offered from the biggest brands in the world to do a real massive collaboration with a big corporate in the US that you know you could you could imagine wants to tap into Gen Z wants our spin on things we won't do it it has to be relevant relevant and authentic authentic and micro or if we're working with someone big like that we want to tap into their archive yeah we'll never yeah you'll never see us on like in their stores in the front window you know it has to be and if you know you know um so collaborations has been a great part of our journey but it's not it's not something that we'd ever want our business to like be relied on whereas i think there's a lot of brands out there uh who purely sell collaborations and then their main line kind of suffers i think good collaborations usually come from a necessity where if that person or that other brand brings something to the table that i don't necessarily so let's work together to build this whole other thing on your side it sounds like the team in-house has the tools needed to actually stay at par with culture so you don't actually need to keep churning out these collabs or it's like a product so you know we're not huge on footwear so ultimately that would be a great product collab to use someone who's super strong in the footwear area absolutely we always want to disrupt so even when we're doing collab we want it to be it can be really hard because we're obviously so agile so nimble whereas we're dealing with businesses that don't have our same kind of structure and they want to do 2028 or we can't work like that during next week yeah it needs to be now what is relevant now and let's make it happen um and i think going back to virgil like he was the biggest inspiration for us we you know what he did was nike and the you know the air force and everything is just so relevant and organic and kind of whatsapp driven and it's so it just feels so right for this yeah it does that's true generation so while we talk about the jaded customer who's let's say 18 to 28 that window yeah can you walk us through a timeline of the trends and like fashion silhouettes that you've gone through since inception up to today and where you see the next few months going it's quite funny because looking back at stuff yeah but fashion so cyclical that we're starting to see some of the same trends come around from when we first started wow so you can actually play the archive game yeah so we've got a bit of an archive it's like product and i'm like oh that looks good again let's just bring it back in a new color or but i mean the catsuit era i can't look at those what's a catsuit oh just these lycra all-in-one catsuits that people used wear to festivals they're awful and then on men's like the shirt and short co-ord you know they're like short short with hawaiian shirt the matching kind of casablanka i didn't want to say the name but that that vibe um but not that vibe no more more kind of i see it yeah that world and then he's the final boss outfit yeah yeah yes yes then it kind of god i mean it was awful um i'm just gonna name like key things but like jorts like jorts have been enormous for us like charlie xcx wore ours last year to a converse event but like that was a huge trend baggy jeans but that's still going yeah um and today where where are we today in your opinion well i we're doing bandage dresses so that whole 2010 bodycon which i never thought would come back but it's come back bodycon means it's like a tight dress tight yeah and on men's it's all about it's it's indie sleeves it's like skinny skinny jean tumbler um you know drama jackets baby tees um straightened hair you know it's that whole rock and roll yeah yeah yeah that's cool and what what do you see coming next in the next six to 12 months can't tell you 12 months because our brains have been wired to we're three we're three to four months out yeah the world cup is gonna be a huge influence in summer yeah so we're like the football trend and girls wearing like the cute football tees and we did ages ago we did like a football brazil bikini that went viral but putting that football spin on something that's not meant to have football is like where we come in so like a hot pant with football on the bum or like cute lace upsides like that's our niche like it goes back to like elevate so you know everyone's got their take on a football jersey we're we're thinking maybe we should not look at football so literal let's look at it kind of off duty we're never kind of on the field we're off the field that's cool yeah urban rather than yeah yeah for the listeners today that may be studying fashion and admire the work you've done admire the business you've built and want to get into this world either as a member of a team or actually as entrepreneurs starting their own brand would you happen to have any advice for someone just about to step into this world I would say that it it can't be I mean obviously when you're initially starting out and you don't have the funding and you need to keep your regular full-time job you know that's a given but it can't be a side hustle like a side project you have to anything you do you have to be like fully into it so I mean you know we're 12 years we still work like 20 hours a day we're constantly if we're on holiday you know I'm not switched off I'm constantly looking and it has to be a passion something you genuinely love and like really want to work in I don't think you could work in I personally couldn't work in something that I'm not passionate about because you're doing it every day so I think that's my advice and I would also say when I was younger and I started this in my 20s I was 23 I would get so emotionally involved in you know if god forbid if customer didn't like something or someone put something horrible on Instagram I would like cry and be so involved whereas now obviously I'm older and I have to take a step back and you just become i don't know more like how to explain you just become i'm i'm emotionally invested but i would i think i saw this cheesy tiktok post that said and never gets easier you just get used to it yeah yeah exactly so right yeah and that's that's Yeah, I just think we don't live in a nine to five era and in terms of our brand and what we're trying to do, we're trying to tap into the culture, stay relevant at all times.

1:01:50That doesn't just happen at those times of the day. You've got to always be on and you can manage that. you know you do there's times where you can step out of it and you know we travel a lot we get a lot of inspiration from that and we we reflect and we look back but you're ultimately just you're on this train that's kind of like never stopping and you just got to kind of find the angles find the moments remain agile you know be disruptive cut through the noise because let's be honest that it there is so much saturation there's so much supply there's very very low barriers to entry to start a brand you know shopify wasn't around when we started so in order to get eyeballs on our brand we had to put our brand onto other third-party platforms and that kind of gave us the kind of reach and visibility but nowadays you know there's some amazingly successful people who like didn't haven't even been haven't gone to university not particularly educated but have just gone with their passion started something set up a shopify store and the next thing you know they're they're making a lot of money so i think it's a two-fold thing where there's lower barrister entry which makes it much easier to start but because of that there's obviously more competition than ever whereas one would say we probably didn't have as many competitors but the same principles still apply you know yes you need a side hustle to keep to keep you know finances in check but you're never going to be successful unless you throw everything at it and I don't know a business out there where you know you can simply just kind of dip in and out and be treat it like a hobby yeah because the world is just so fast and you've got it's radical and you've just got to constantly constantly be staying ahead of the competition you started this a while ago but if you were

1:04:02The Gstaad Guy:starting today are there things you would do differently yeah i think our product has always been the focus and i would never change that no we we are so obsessed with product you know sometimes we'll have a meeting with our cfo and you know he you know it's a really important management meeting but at the same time there's like a new gene that we really love and and and models in to try it on and they need to make a decision on whether and whether and whether you're putting buttons we'll go to that meeting we'll go to that because that meeting pays the bills that that's it all goes back to product so i think there's an over obsession to be great at marketing and like you know because of the social media kind of variances and all the different apps that there is everyone's so obsessed with marketing and they don't look at the product nobody really looks at the product so great you'll get a first order you can create some amazing campaign people will buy it but they won't come back so i think going back to your question product has to be the focus and hiring the best i mean once you know you've got the turnover coming in and you can reinvest in the business hiring people that are better than you at everything that's not product so i mean obviously designers but you know e-com digital customer care logistics all those avenues that we don't have a clear about making sure you've got a solid team so you can focus on the product are there any things that you wish could be different about your industry i wish it would slow down a bit uh slow down as in like the consumer wanting i feel like yeah i mean once they see it on instagram and tiktok it's almost over and then you've got to move on to the next thing because they're watching so much all the time and the attention span is getting shorter and shorter so you've got to reinvent the wheel constantly so you know if you invented i don't know a toothpaste brand at least you know you just change a few flavors and that's your product whereas fashion that's the only thing about fashion is like you you have to keep reinventing you can't be left behind that's true unless you're playing the essentials game yeah so i think you you do a bit of we do we do but even that's a fashion you know like that that was obviously huge during lockdown and people did very well but then there's too much supply of it and you have to move it on so i think it's just part and parcel you have to just accept that you're on this ever-changing journey and you're just, you've got to stay relevant and just constantly move.

1:07:09Yeah, absolutely.

1:07:12The Gstaad Guy:On this podcast, we always play a game of à la poubelle versus fantastique. So things you'd like to change in your industry or in the world around you, you can throw à la poubelle and things you want to celebrate and see more of, you call fantastique. I know the pace and crazy demands of consumers sometimes to just want more and more and more let's call it like consumer greed is an epubel are there any others you can share i think like it's so public these days consumers can have their voice and give an opinion so publicly so which can obviously you know all it takes is one tiktok that that if a zip break yeah and you know you've sold like like wisdom k and muumia yeah exactly so you've sold 200 000 units and you just one style has a zip that broke breaks and all of a sudden it gets a million views on tiktok and the world hates you yeah for five minutes yeah i think that's something that obviously didn't exist pre-social media but it makes that's what i found difficult in the beginning was you know not getting so personally attached i felt like it was a personal attack but i'm you know it's just as it yeah you have to step out of it so i think and also just whilst on that topic it's is you know you want to grow a brand everyone's aim is to make the brand bigger and have stores and have different kind of points of sale and do cool events but with that success comes hate yeah and i just i i think it's something you just have to kind of accept and kind of shrug off and just move on because we're all want to just make i mean our goal is just to make the most relevant product and build the coolest community and target the gen z who who love our brand that's all we're trying to do in the end of the day but i appreciate selling more means more exposure to kind of criticism and stuff so i think it goes back to just everything being so public there's no privacy i agree with that yeah so what about the things you find in the words of fantastique travel opening stores in china and korea and japan and seeing thousands of people queue up in a totally different culture and it's like how do you even know about us you know it's amazing coming from like my house and my kids in london and i go in the taxi and then i'm in like shanghai or you have kids yeah so cool i'd love to talk about that you're a mom as well i've got two kids two kids you have kids no in the making no okay sorry we'll cut that i've got a cat okay two kids and a cat i mean being a founder of a of a fashion fashion brand and an e-commerce business fashion brand and being a mom i've got a good husband sounds like it yeah yeah no it's so hard like i miss loads of things that my friends go to like music classes and you know things at the school but i'm building something where hopefully she'll they'll be proud of and i get to do get to travel with them and get to show them the world and get to give them nice things and good education so but it is a baby it we've got my third kid yeah three kids yeah yeah called ralph because of ralph lorette he's a big inspiration cute nice okay that's fantastic how about on your side i think people often ask us like why do you do what you do and what what do you kind of what why what do you get most fulfillment out of and it goes back to jade's point when you see the work and witness what went into designing a particular style such as the parachute pant and then you're seeing that person post it on instagram to their hundreds of millions of followers or even turning up to you know you go out for dinner one night and there's a group of really cool people and they're wearing jaded that is the most fulfilling thing it there's there's such an emotional attachment that went into designing that you know you know you knew the designer who designed that product you knew who fitted it you knew the model you knew the shoot what it forms a story behind yeah and ultimately we're selling a story so i think there's a huge emotional connection between uh seeing a product in in the wild say to call it well thank you both so much for being here thank you so much thank you for taking the time full circle moments seven years later thank you for showing me love and supporting me so early on thank you for listening to this episode of the Stardguy podcast if you're keen to learn more please follow along by engaging with our social channels on Instagram, TikTok, Spotify, YouTube and Apple Podcasts and we look forward to seeing you next week Merci beaucoup, à la prochaine, and a big hug from the Start Guy.