The Business of Fashion Founder & CEO: Imran Amed – Following a Feeling, Being a Pioneer, & Building the Voice of an Industry

34:44And so you saw like the fully blown version of the original idea that we could create community events in person and stream them to the world. You saw that like how that's developed into voices now. But so much of that innovation that I did in the early days was inspired by like what Nick was doing. I mean, he was so consequential. um i think of natalie massonet as a like an incredible pioneer in fact that series was called fashion pioneers now that i think of it jefferson natalie and and nick because i looked at what those three were doing and i was like this is this is where it's this is where it's going you know and they were much more established very highly respected figures in the industry but I think what I also learned from them is they all really took an interest in me you know and I think that's what I try to role model in my own behavior now is like all the innovation that's happened that's why I was so excited to meet you you know anyone who's doing interesting new things like I want to know them because I can learn from them too you know and I learned from Natalie and Nick and Jefferson and you know I think they learned from from me as well And so like it's that, that's the cycle of innovation, you know, constantly keeping in touch with the change that's happening.

36:06The Gstaad Guy:One thing you did that was incredibly innovative, I assume, to solve a big problem in the industry, which was middle and lower management, per se, of these fashion houses were incredibly culturally aware and in tune with what was happening and what was cool. while senior management often wasn't. They were in the numbers and they were far away from that. And they would often hire these consulting firms to help them figure these things out. And the consulting firms would have a strong idea of numbers and operations, but a weaker idea on culture. Here comes Imran with Business of Fashion and McKinsey to start The State of Fashion, which is a book of case studies, I think bridging culture, business, and the entire hierarchy of these businesses.

37:06The Gstaad Guy:I had the pleasure of being featured in the 2024 State of Fashion. Hockenberg reached out to me and very kindly connected us and included me, which was very cool. um i'd love to know more about that and that side of so we were about to start voices and i'd had this idea for a new kind of industry gathering you know the fashion industry has lots of gatherings we gather a lot in fashion it's true we gather at shows we gather at dinners we gathered conferences. There were so many places where industry people meet. You could be busy all year. You could go out every single day and gather. And there were a lot of industry conferences where people would get on stage and spout off a lot of bullshit PR.

38:04And everyone in the audience would sit there and nod their heads. And essentially it was fashion people talking to fashion people about fashion it was an echo chamber so my thing was like bof should definitely do an in-person gathering because i i felt it right from those first fashion pioneers events we did which would be like 100 people for like one talk you know streamed on the internet there was something magic about that but if we were going to do something i wanted it to feel really disruptive, informative, authentic, honest, and human. Because most of the, most fashion gatherings don't feel that way or didn't feel that way at the time.

38:58They felt formulaic. They felt fake. They felt fleeting. like you go and you forget. I wanted to create something where people will come and feel transformed. And when we talk about events at BOF, a lot of what I taught to our team, I was how do we want people to feel? You know? So part of that was what industry insight can we inject into the conversation? So I contacted three, consulting firms, Bain, BCG, and McKinsey. And so I'm going to do this event called Voices. Actually, I don't even think I have the name for it yet, but I'm going to do this event, and I want to inject some really, really smart industry analysis that becomes the must read every year for everyone in fashion.

39:57I was very inspired by this publication that The Economist does called The World Ahead. Every year in December, The Economist published this thing called The World Ahead. It was a separate thing. And at Christmas time, I would read it on the beach and I would read it cover to cover. And I wanted the state of fashion to be that for people working in fashion.

40:19The Gstaad Guy:I've seen it at every CEO's office I've been to. Good. Yeah. I'm glad to hear that every fashion c yeah i'm glad to hear that and so it was akim who took my call seriously and you know he took a bet because voices didn't exist bof was very early in its journey but i think i don't know you'd have to ask him why he agreed to it and why he bought into it But, you know, I'm really grateful to him for having been so receptive to the idea. And, you know, that has, you know, we just published our 10th edition of the State of Fashion. Wow. 10 years it's been going. That's our longest partnership at BOF.

41:06And it really has stood the test of time because what McKinsey brings is a level of analytical rigor, firepower. I mean the team that they are able to bring to the table is very complimentary to the team we are able to bring to the table. And together we create something that neither party could create on its own. That's what makes it valuable. And yeah, we're really proud of that report. because in 10 years, it's become a really established part of the industry's knowledge base.

41:46The Gstaad Guy:It's cited coursework in lots of universities. Yeah, I mean, we have a big student readership at BOF. That's this whole thing about helping people who are not in the industry yet find their way in. What roles would you say BOF plays and McKinsey plays in the state of fashion? Well, the whole report is built around these 10 themes. And so a lot of the initial discussion, you know, when we start putting together the report, it's like, what are the themes for next year? And both parties bring themes to the table. um sometimes it's really clear that something is a theme uh like this year luxury recalibrated both of us were like this is a theme you know and then sometimes there's themes that you know we'll suggest or they'll suggest that maybe wouldn't have occurred to the other person um i remember you know there there have been some debates let's say but you know it's really good it's like one of the best things about working at mckinsey were these like problem solving sessions where you know we'd get a a team of people that were working for a client together in a room and you just put your heads together you're like like really debate stuff and uh Yeah, we get into it, you know, and there's violent sometimes, but polite disagreement on things, you know, and we really are quite rigorous about it.

43:19And any theme, therefore, needs to be backed up by evidence. Sometimes that's data. Sometimes that's interviews with experts. More and more, we're using AI to help back up some of the themes that we put out there. so you know we both bring the themes and then you know bof takes the lead on design and presentation and the visuals because that's one of our strengths they take the lead on like this thing called the mckinsey global fashion index which is just a quite rigorous database of you know the performance of publicly traded companies so yeah like we we all bring something to the table and it's very much a joint effort.

44:06I think you're playing in the media space,

44:11The Gstaad Guy:but within media, of course, there's so many different lanes people can play in. And I think you are very much playing in the knowledge transfer part of media. I don't see entertainment or any of the other forms of media applying to what you do, particularly when it comes to all the different partnerships, real-life events, and pieces of writing you've worked on. So I think the core of everything you've done and what we've spoken about in this episode so far is spreading knowledge and turning that consumer into a prosumer or turning teams within fashion houses into more knowledgeable teams who can act in ways that service the world or consumers or other businesses in better ways.

45:09The Gstaad Guy:We spoke about this briefly at Voices and we spoke about it as well in our fun prep call. We said people are getting smarter while products are getting dumber. And consumers are turning into prosumers thanks to media-like business of fashion. I think this is a very interesting time to have this conversation. Because I do feel very strongly that people are more knowledgeable than ever. I love it. I'd love to know, as someone who's seen both sides of that coin, what has the impact of knowledge been over the years? When you uncover a truth or you spread a truth, how does that impact businesses, the consumer, and the fashion world in general?

46:05Well, I think fundamentally it comes down to the issue of controlling the narrative. That's the big thing that's changed.

46:19So when I was first starting out, I had no experience in pitching stories stories or navigating publicists you know my whole ethos because i was like a bonafide outsider like i i just said what i really thought you know and what i learned was that was refreshing to people you know that someone would say the unvarnished truth not polished up for some PR purpose or objective. And it turns out that that was very difficult for people in the industry to swallow at first. I mean, the idea that some guy was sitting on his sofa at night, you know, writing some of the stuff that I used to write, I mean, it brought me into some pretty serious conflict with powerful figures in the industry who were not comfortable with or used to other people challenging the conventional wisdom.

47:36there was probably the most notable time for me when this happened was when Hedy Slimane took over at Saint Laurent and I got this like really curious

47:56communication from the PR team there and they contacted me and said well can you edit your tweet and at the time tweets weren't editable first of all but second of all they were asking me to edit the tweet because i had i hadn't mentioned the brand in the way that they thought the brand should be mentioned and i and i had this kind of quite direct dialogue with them saying well i'm not here to write what you want i'm here to write what i think and that whole idea of being able like this big powerful fashion company coming up against this like little old me and that i was standing my ground like they were really unhappy with that and we had written a story about how the Saint Laurent brand had been rebranded the eve had been taken off the logo had turned into a sans serif font there were all of these rules about how you had to write the brand how you referenced the brand, how you mentioned the designer and when I

49:15analyzed how that was being done and some of the peculiarities around how it was done, I got banned from the show.

49:27And I think back in the day it was me and Kathy Horan that got banned from that show, but I snuck into the show. A friend of mine had an extra ticket, so I snuck in and I ended up writing a whole piece around my experience with the brand and why brands in fashion trying to control the narrative from some ivory tower in Paris. Like, this is over. And that was probably the first BOF story that went properly viral. And I remember walking into whatever show happened the next day, and I could kind of feel the energy just focus.

50:11The Gstaad Guy:The outsider became the insider. that was a moment where something something shifted no i didn't be that wasn't the outsider becoming the insider that was the outsider taking his rightful place in the industry you know and i remember feeling really nervous when i pressed publish on that article and my editor vikram you know he and i went over that piece a lot just to make sure like we were really buttoned down about it as he and i still do from time to time on stories that i write like we go back and forth and we like really debate things. But to get to your original question, for me, it's about the lack of ability to control the narrative that's changed.

50:55And so when the internet arrived and those polished brand narratives were no longer sacrosanct, when they were accompanied by narratives that someone like you or someone like me or someone like anybody who has a smartphone and an experience with a brand or a story about a brand and they can share that, that really broke the whole fashion communication system down. And so now we're in a situation where there's many voices, millions of voices, quite literally, of people who can talk about your brand. And the biggest thing that we started saying to brands is like, you can't sit in your ivory tower trying to control the narrative.

51:42you need to get into a conversation with this community of people talking about your brand. Because if you don't participate in that conversation, you have no influence at all in that conversation. It's up to you to be listening and responding and engaging. Unfortunately, I think where we've ended up is a lot of the kind of original voices, the really brave voices in the industry the creator economy we talked about this on that prep call so much of it is now co-opted by brand control and there's a lot of tension in the creator economy right now we heard that on stage at the talk at voices as well actually that you know this struggle between the brand narrative and the consumer narrative or the outsider narrative, there's still this tension.

52:41And I still, when I meet with creators, and I'm lucky to meet with creators, and they're getting all these offers from brands or getting offers from big media companies, I'm like, don't lose your voice. If you lose your voice, you lose everything. You have to stay true to that voice because it's that voice that made you who you are. It's that voice that is the reason that people follow you. And it's for that reason, by the way, that we've chosen at BOF to prioritize a model where the people who pay us the most money are the people who read our content. I mean, I get lots of complaints all the time in my Instagram.

53:25I'm like, why do you have a paywall? We have a paywall because we want to be accountable to our readers. We're not here to be accountable to brands. we're here to be accountable to our readers. And so our business model is based on being accountable to the people who pay to read our stuff because it makes them smarter about the industry. So yeah, it comes with challenges even now. And almost every week I have someone who's blowing up my WhatsApp or calling me and getting upset about something. But I've kind of accepted that it's part of my job. And I've decided, by the way, that for the people who yell at me or send me like really toxic messages on what, I just stop replying.

54:12The Gstaad Guy:This podcast is brought to you by Kubel, 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 our 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 what do the relationships look like that you celebrate the ones that allow bof to be its best self while also collaborating and doing the best work for a brand well listen first of all if someone calls me and says you've made an error you made a mistake this isn't accurate and we made a mistake i mean we hold our hands up and say we're sorry we made a mistake and we'll we'll correct it and we'll note that we've had to correct it so there's a audit trail that we had to change something.

55:30The best relationships of media are like any good relationship where there's mutual respect and trust. So if you're my friend and I know what your values are and you know what my values are, we respect each other's values. And I think we've preferred to take a route in the industry where we're not going to throw rocks from outside and criticize blindly. Because I don't see that as being constructive. Like from the beginning, BOF was built as a fearless but constructive brand. And fearless and constructive journalism means you need to have constructive relationships with the people that you write about.

56:18And that means you have to be respectful of what they do. you have to really do your best to understand what they do. And they need to respect what your role is in the industry. You know, our role is to help people navigate an extremely complicated, challenging, always disrupted world. I mean, everything is constantly changing. So like BOF is here to be a guide for industry leaders, for students, for prosumers, for anyone who's interested in fashion. We want to be that guide. And in order to be that guide, we need to have constructive relationships with the companies we write about we won't entertain gossip and i think there's like a epidemic of gossip now online in fashion which i don't think is constructive either so you know we really want to ground ourselves in facts information and expertise and the really good relationships we have are where people respect us for that and you know now we've been around for a while like people understand what BOF is about they understand what stories to approach us about what stories not to approach us about um and I think you know it took some time

57:34The Gstaad Guy:but I think people get it now I love what you're saying and I have been interchanging the word BOF for a creator, even myself, as you're walking us through this. Because that mutual respect and the respect for a brand's values, but also your own values as a media entity, can be interchanged with a creator's relationship with that same brand. Where whenever those limitations are put in place, the content is not there, the respect and credibility from the audience between the audience and the content creator starts to fall apart and the tower of cards just slowly falls away but when a brand approaches a creator and says we want you to do your best work here's the product or the thing we want you to speak about in your own tone of voice because we can't speak about it in our own I think that's when things go really well versus trying to impose their way of speaking which lets that disagreement you had as well so i think that that mutual respect and understanding of okay you're you and i'm me and here's how you can do you thing while i can do my thing in parallel and not try to do the same thing is what i've seen be the big difference between successful campaigns and and bad campaigns for creators.

59:11The Gstaad Guy:I think at one point the consumer was trying to keep up with the brands and now the brands are trying to keep up with the consumer in terms of that storytelling and that transfer of knowledge. The brands used to be able to control the narrative and now culture controls the narrative. Are there particular examples of ways you've seen brands actually keep up with culture and the storytelling around their brand in a very healthy way. I mean, I think the brands that tell the best stories are the brands that are just really connected with what makes them who they are. I mean, I think Prada does an incredible job at that.

59:50I really respected what Mr. Guerra said on stage at POF Voices because he was talking about Prada's connection to culture. And Prada only does things in culture that are genuinely connected to what Prada's about. So the Fondazione Prada is so intrinsically linked to what Mrs. Prada built the brand on. Whenever they do things, it just feels like Prada. And you see if another brand tried to do what Prada does, it wouldn't feel real. I think Chanel has been, when Carl was there, Chanel was really part of culture and then it kind of dissipated for a while. and I think it's really been interesting to see how Mathieu is trying to bring it more back into like the cultural conversation which is I think a big part of what his job is so you know brands have ups and downs you know that's I think the creative director of a brand plays such a big part and kind of trying to figure out like well what is our connection or what is our authentic connection to what's happening in culture at the moment so although

1:00:59The Gstaad Guy:I met BOF online a few years ago I only met Imran a few months ago which was a very warm introduction to an intimidating industry and even publication yeah you know it's it's as I was saying earlier this this sort of Michelin stamp and reputation and when you realize it's founded by a very friendly human it's a whole different thing you see the whole thing very differently so I'm very happy that we can hear the Imran story as well as the business of fashion story but I'd love to know more about Imran and the man behind the business of fashion you now collaborate with McKinsey on your 10th edition of the state of fashion and you once worked there full time yeah i'd love to know more about that leap of faith that you took to leave them and become an entrepreneur that now collaborates with them it's pretty crazy yeah it was like a real full circle moment i mean when i was graduating from undergraduate in canada mcgill mcgill yeah uh we got this i think mckinsey had just started recruiting at mcgill okay i was just like deeply deeply deeply insecure 22 year old trying to figure out what to do with my life um may I ask you what those insecurities were if that's appropriate everything I didn't think I was smart enough I didn't think I was cool enough I didn't think I was tall enough you know at the time I was not sure about my own sexuality.

1:02:55I was struggling. I mean, there was so many things, right? And I think anyone who's 22 is struggling with that question of like, who am I really? What's important to me? What do I want out of my life?

1:03:16The Gstaad Guy:It was a very crazy age. Yeah, it's such a formative age And I was really lucky because on the one hand, I was at McGill.

1:03:31And, you know, growing up, I grew up in Calgary, which is like near the Rocky Mountains. And...

1:03:40It was hard for me there. You know, it was pretty conservative. It was very safe and I grew up in a very loving home. But it wasn't, I just never, I never fit in there. And I was trying to, but I just couldn't. And it wasn't until I moved to Montreal that I felt a little bit free. and Montreal is just, I think it's one of the most underrated cities on the planet. It is about three and a half, four million people. So it's not a big city, but it's big enough that you have a critical mass. There's a lot of universities and colleges. There's tons of students. It's super global. And McGill was like right downtown Montreal and everything was accessible.

1:04:35museums nightlife culture theater it was bilingual French and English and I felt really safe there to be myself but when it was all coming to an end like I guess I was still kind of programmed to think that my value and my worth was based on the brand names I put on my CV. And so when I heard about McKinsey, I was like, oh my God, like this is what I need to do. Not because necessarily I was interested in the work. And I think I was. But more because I thought it gave me some kind of validation. And the way I learned about McKinsey is they approach the faculty of management where I was studying and they wanted to, they were starting to recruit at McGill and they wanted some guinea pig students to test their interview process.

1:05:43I don't know, I don't remember exactly how I got selected to be part of this process, but I did. And the McKinsey interview process is, yeah, it's a whole thing. It's like quite rigorous. Anyway, so I did this dummy round of interviews. And the more I learned about McKinsey, the more I was like, I have to work at this company. And I ended up doing the first round of interviews, the real interviews, the first round of real interviews. And I flew to Toronto for the final round of interviews. And they called me back and they said, we're not sure about you. So can you come and do another round of interviews?

1:06:25So I did two interviews, then five interviews, and then another five interviews. Plus, I'd done those dummy interviews. I think, all told, I did like 15 interviews with them. And then the senior partner that I was dealing with called me. He was very kind, but he said to me, we'd rather make a type 2 statistical error because we're still not sure about you. And a type 2 statistical error, if I'm remembering my statistics correctly. is they'd rather have a false negative than a false positive. And so they rejected me. And I was devastated. I just, I'd like wrapped up my whole self-worth in getting this job.

1:07:14I didn't get that job. I ended up getting a few other jobs. But that was the one that was like the gold standard job. And after the way they made me feel, I swore I would never work for that company. I was like, how can you interview someone so many times and not be sure? You just tell me I'm not good enough. But they were still saying like, we're not sure. And it was kind of like this message. It's kind of reinforced my own insecurities about my life. So I ended up working at another consulting firm, which is part of Deloitte. That's a firm that enabled me to move to London. and then I was applying to business school, got into business school.

1:07:57You went to HBS, right? Harvard Business School. Yeah. That was a whole other thing. So when I got into HBS, I really wanted to work in a creative industry. In fact, all of my essays were about, like, how I was going to use HBS as a launch pad to work in the music industry or the fashion industry. And when I arrived at HBS, it was the start of the dot-com bubble so there were no jobs you know in fact when we were graduating a good portion of my class didn't have jobs but mckinsey's london office contacted me and i was like really they always come back well i don't i don't like i don't know and so i found myself interviewing with McKinsey again.

1:08:48The Gstaad Guy:How did it feel the second time around? I think I was a bit traumatized from the first time. And I don't know, maybe there was a little part of me that was like, still looking for that validation. So they hired me to be a summer associate. And that summer, they hired 20 summer associates. And the dot com bubble was getting worse. And usually in the summer, they would hire 20 people and almost all of them would get an offer to come back. And in my summer, I think three of us got an offer to come back. That was one of those three people. I worked with this incredible woman named Auslag Magnus Dottir.

1:09:30What a name. Icelandic, HBS, lawyer, actually was one of the founders of Moda Operandi. and this guy named Alex Emery. And the two of them really took me under their wing and they made me feel like I was good enough. And so I had an offer from McKinsey and I had an offer from BCG. I ended up taking the McKinsey offer because I wanted to move back to London and the BCG offer was in New York. And then the next four years from McKinsey were just like a whirlwind, you know? And this company I had dreamed about working for, when I got into the inside, some of it exceeded my expectations. I worked in South Africa.

1:10:18I worked in Australia. I worked with an orchestra conductor. I worked with a woman who used to manage a Toyota manufacturing plant. I worked with the brainiest, smartest people.

1:10:31The Gstaad Guy:For those listening who may not know the mechanics of a consulting firm, can you explain why and how you work with all those different people? The whole philosophy of McKinsey was, and I think continues to be, that if you bring really smart people who think differently, who come from different backgrounds, who come from different educational backgrounds, who come from different nationalities, just diversity writ large. If you bring them all together and you put them in a room, they can solve some of the world's biggest problems. That's kind of the philosophy. But very soon my experience was that they were trying to make all of these people the same.

1:11:20And that's where it really started to cause me pain, really. Like I just felt like i was going into that office and i was having to pretend and you're working like 80 90 100 hours a week and you're traveling all the time and you're solving like really interesting problems but i wasn't solving problems that were interesting to me in industries i cared about and And so this dissonance started, I started to feel this like internal tension. So in December 2004, I was 29, about to turn 30. And I was in India and I was meeting my parents in India. and as soon as they saw me they were like what's wrong?

1:12:24Are you okay? And I was carrying around this responsibility because my parents had worked extremely hard as immigrants from East Africa to give me this education, to give me the opportunities that they gave me to ensure that I had the kind of financial security that they never had and all of a sudden I was I'd kind of done all the things and got all those stamps and I wasn't feeling happy about it. And I just felt this like tension between kind of pleasing other people and proving myself, my validity. So if I met someone at a dinner or at a party or something, people ask you, like, what do you do?

1:13:13I work at McKinsey. I think I took some kind of pride in that because I didn't feel just valid in being me. But inside, I knew I was really struggling because I just didn't feel happy. Even though I was good at the job, I just didn't feel happy. So I came back from that holiday. I was on my way actually from New Delhi to Dhaka in Bangladesh. and I was at the airport and this was the time of the Blackberry so my Blackberry and this like this man came up to me in the airport and he said he had this big bright orange turban and he's like I need to talk to you about your life

1:14:02The Gstaad Guy:you don't know this man and I was in this mindset where I thought everyone wanted something from me and I said to him I go, I don't have any money. You know, I'm leaving India. I'm going to Dhaka. So, you know, just, and he's like, I'm going to Dhaka too. And then literally, it's like out of a movie, the intercom of the airport comes on and, you know, the flight to Dhaka has been delayed by two hours. And he says, now, will you talk to me?

1:14:42I sit down with this guy and he's saying all this stuff and asking me all these questions. He's like, you're not listening to me.

1:14:53So he rips off a piece of paper. He scribbles something down on a piece of paper. He crumples it up and he puts it in my hand. And he asks me three questions. What's your favorite color? And in my head, my internal dialogue is, I don't have a favorite color. What's the point of a favorite color? McKinsey wants me to wear blue shirts. So I said blue. What's your favorite flower? I don't have a favorite flower. My cousin's wife had lilies in her bouquet. So I said lily. Then he wrote my name down on a piece of paper. I-M-R-A-N. And he put numbers on top. One, two, three, four, five. He said pick a number.

1:15:40and I picked three because I really like symmetry and balance so I like picked the middle he said open your hand and I opened that paper and it said blue lily three and I it was like a lightning bolt woke me up something happened I don't I don't have the words to describe what happened in that moment. And he turned to me, he's like, now will you listen to me? And I listened and he spoke to me for an hour. And the final message he gave me was, you need to go practice meditation. And meditation is part of my culture. My grandfather used to practice a form of meditation every day at four in the morning because it's part of our religious practice.

1:16:34No one ever taught me how to meditate. But he said to me, he's like, your mind is so busy. I've been seeing you on your device. And I can see it all over your face. You're holding so much noise and there's so much going on inside of your head. If you continue to live your life this way, you're going to lead a life of deep, deep, deep unhappiness. The only way you're going to find what you need is if you calm all of that down.

1:17:06So I flew to Dhaka. I met up with a friend of mine from McGill who was there at a fellowship. I flew back to London and I wrote a memo to McKinsey because everything that they did there was in these like structured memos. And I wrote a memo about why I needed three months off. They were already trying to groom me to become an associate partner. And I was 29. And I was like fast forwarding my life thinking like, I don't know if I want to be a partner at McKinsey. Like, I don't know if this is what I want. And I said to them, like, I need this time off to just really figure out what I want. So I flew to New York to wrap up a project and I met up with a friend of mine from HBS.

1:17:52And she also asked me, she's like, what's going on with you? and as I told her this everything was happening she was like have you considered meditation I was like it's so strange that you asked this I'm like why are you asking me this so I told her the story about the guy in the airport and she's like have you heard of Vipassana meditation

1:18:14The Gstaad Guy:is that silent retreat it's 10 days no reading no writing no eye contact no music nothing thing so Taz tells me about this Vipassana meditation and she's like Imran it is really hard but it's the best thing I ever did a few weeks later um I get an email from a friend in South Africa and she's just come out of a meditation retreat and she's actually not even my friend she's really my friend's sister Shiri and Shiri writes to me Shiri's in. And she's like, I just came out of this meditation retreat in South Africa. I couldn't stop thinking about you. And I wrote her back. I was like, well, what meditation retreat?

1:19:04And she said, Vipassana meditation. So this is now the third signal from the universe. I need to go do this meditation. So I'd already signed up for meditation in Italy, but because of Shiri, I changed my meditation, my Vipassana retreat to South Africa, which is a country I love. And I'd spent time working there as a consultant. And I'd spent time there on holiday because my parents were in Nairobi. So I went into this retreat. And it was in that 10 days of silence, the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, that I finally built the confidence to let go of this life of labels and CVs and brands and really just try to figure out a way to do what I want.

1:19:52And I flew back to London. Well, first I flew to Nairobi, actually, and told my parents I was going to quit my job.

1:19:58The Gstaad Guy:How did they feel? They were worried about me. But I was really honest with them, probably more honest with them than I've ever been in my life, that I was so unhappy and that I worked really hard to do everything. But it was my life. and they gave me that life. But if I was going to do something really meaningful with my life, then I needed to find my own path. And the foundation, by the way, that they gave me, I couldn't do anything that I do now without that foundation. The analytical skills from McKinsey, the CV that enables me to get into the room and have credibility with these sometimes very close-minded CEOs.

1:20:45the ability to stand on stage and hold an audience and bring people together that I learned in all those years studying theater all that was given to my parents I just needed to focus it on something I actually cared about so I flew to London quit my job worked on one final project and then a few months later started the incubator and that's how it all began well yeah

1:21:13The Gstaad Guy:Yeah. Have you been on any more silent retreats since? I signed up to go on one this year because this year I turned 50. Wow. And I was thinking a lot about what happened 20 years ago, and I kind of think I need to go on another one, but sadly I had to cancel it. I haven't been since. But I think that experience back then rewired the whole way my body works. It sounds like a very intimidating experience, 10 days of... You have no idea. I really recommend, I mean, I think to be silent and be with yourself with no external stimuli, it's the most... You can't lie to yourself anymore. You can't distract yourself with devices or superficial conversation.

1:22:15after your mind calms down, you're like staring starkly into the mirror with yourself. And there's nothing more frightening,

1:22:33challenging than that. I assume that when you became an entrepreneur, that also had its own challenges and it wasn't all butterflies compared to the struggles you faced at McKinsey. Can you talk to us about the different feelings felt

1:22:57The Gstaad Guy:as an entrepreneur versus as part of that bigger team? I mean, I think anyone who starts a business, you almost have to be irrationally optimistic. Otherwise you'd never do it. And in 2013 when we decided to raise some money and try to make it work, like you had to be, I mean, so many, I mean, like over 100 investors, most of them were like, this is never going to work. Media doesn't scale. You know, we need like unicorns and, you know, it's just like all this stuff. and so like entrepreneurship requires this like irrational belief that there's something question there's something in what you're doing but the question is where do you get that for a highly rational person like myself is like very logical how do you know you're onto something and it comes down to this like really i think my search which began with that Vipassana meditation retreat was really a search for purpose.

1:24:12And when along the way, the universe gives you little signals like Judy Tobias on the plane or like my different friends telling me to meditate or even now things that happen which saying you're going in the right direction. You just have to like be able to have a calm enough mind, a clear enough mind to be able to see those signals and to understand how to follow them because the path as an entrepreneur is like it's you don't know six months from now what's going to happen and you have to be okay with that and you have to be guided by the little lights and signals and information that you're gathering along the way to to help you figure out what the path is.

1:24:58And when you look backward and when people tell your story, it seems like, oh, it was all a strategy. It was all a plan. But in reality, you can't plan for what's happened to me. You just have to really be able to figure it out as you go along. And you have to have this irrational optimism because so many people are going to tell you it's not going to work. So many people are going to tell you it's going to fail. And there will be so many things that come up in your way, which if you don't have that irrational optimism, it will overcome you.

1:25:37The Gstaad Guy:Can I ask you more about that optimism? Is the optimism for you a belief in a future version of yourself or a belief in the thing you're building? Neither. It's a belief that I'm here because I was meant to do something with meaning and purpose. And that that journey of discovering my purpose and evolving that purpose over time and figuring out that actually

1:26:19your purpose in life is about serving something that's bigger than you. and serving a group of people. It could be a micro group, your family, your friends, your immediate community, or it could be like you and me, where we're talking to millions of people in a niche, not at a mass market level. But you know, when I'm walking down the street in Tokyo or New York or London, and someone stops me and says, thank you for BOF. It helped me so much. It helps me so much. It helped me figure out that I could make a career in fashion. It helped me start my business. I watched your lessons. It helps you realize that you're on the right path.

1:27:17It's those signals of purpose that keep you going. you know that's i still don't know what's going to happen six months from now who knows but i know i'm on the right track on this podcast we always play a game of a la poubelle versus fantastique a la poubelle where guests fantastique celebrate things they

1:27:37The Gstaad Guy:love and call them fantastique could be in their industry could be in the lives they lead and things they'd like to change and throw away that are a la poubelle can you share one or two things from the world around you you'd love to throw à la poubelle and one or two things you'd like to celebrate and call fantastique à la poubelle overproduction in our industry I mean there's still so much waste I mean we talk a lot about sustainability in fashion but like actually the meaningful change will come mostly from reducing waste. We can do things better. We can make things with better materials in a more sustainable way, but we also, if we just create less waste, and that is so stark when you see the kind of thing that we showed our voices this year with the tentacle of waste that had shown up on the shores of the ocean in Ghana and delivered to Oxfordshire.

1:28:52It was really stark for me.

1:28:54The Gstaad Guy:It was right in the entrance. It was in the entrance, and then we had it on the stage when Liz and Bobby and Javier were doing their talk. So à la poubelle is overproduction. Do you have any shout-outs to people that are doing a great job at tackling that, or businesses? I think most of the work is being done by activists creating awareness, which is why we gave the Orr Foundation and Bobby the platform to really, you know, she brought that tentacle with her from Ghana in a big container and it's filthy. That to me set up. She said, should I bring the tentacle? I was like, please bring the tentacle.

1:29:36Because when you see something like that, It just kind of like, even if you haven't been on those beaches or in those, in the largest secondhand market in the world, you're like, wow.

1:29:46The Gstaad Guy:That was a bold message. So I guess the reverse of that is my fantastique, which is like the people who manage to challenge the industry to do better. The people who aren't afraid to use their voice.

1:30:07and the people who do so in a way that's constructive, which engenders conversation, not combat. I don't really like this mud-slinging, rock-throwing dynamic that's playing out on the internet these days. I like it when we create conversations that actually make people maybe from very different vantage points come together. And you see that in everything. You see that in like wars, in politics, in conflict, whatever it might be. Like I just, that's why we do voices. Like I like to bring people together to have like a real conversation.

1:30:49The Gstaad Guy:Thank you for being here. Calls to action. Please follow Imran Ahmed on Instagram. And BOF. And BOF. I mean, I'm sure they're already following, at least. Everyone's following BOF as well. and learn more. Yeah, and if you want to support what we do at BOF, just subscribe. That's the best way to support our journalism and our amazing team. They work really hard. They do. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Start Guy 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.

1:31:34The Gstaad Guy:And we look forward to seeing you next week. Merci beaucoup. A la prochaine and a big hug from the Start Guy.