“My passion was always fashion,” she says. “I’ve been making my own clothes since I was in high-school.”
Pippa Milddeton is not the only marketing initiative Connie has been able to leverage. Astrid & miyu has been featured in top glamour magazines Grazia, Company, Marie Claire, Vogue.co.uk and many more. Her designs have been in wedding magazines Brides and You & Your Wedding, and the company sells to high-end independent boutiques in London and around the rest of the UK.
Her entrepreneurial venture is seemingly a success.
This might seem like the culmination of childhood dreams, a teenager whom once made her own clothes making the big-time. And if that was the case, this would be another successful start-up story. But what makes Connie’s case unique is that she wasn’t always interested in a fashion-related career.
Quite the opposite.
She had her hopes invested in a finance bank and before aspiring to study an MBA, was set on a career in equity capital. She worked for Credit Suisse in South Korea for a number of years, before joining HSBC as an Associate focused on markets in South East Asia and India. A jewellery design business could not be farther afield.
“My dad was in finance so I grew up in that environment,” she continues. “I ran through a couple of internships and that led me to getting into banking. But by the fifth year I hit a wall; I decided to switch careers and that’s why I studied an MBA.”
But she didn’t go into the fashion industry blind. While working on clothing designs during high school, she took a raft of art courses and considered studying design full-time. After leaving HSBC, she studied part-time at the Seoul Fashion Academy, working on fashion design, illustration and pattern making.
A year later, she was ready for an MBA. After growing up in the US and Asia, she wanted to experience a different part of the world. She studied at London Business School, the UK’s top b-school in some MBA Rankings, specialising in entrepreneurship and marketing.
“I was drawn to the creativity of London,” she says. “When I visited, I fell in love with the city, and Europe had a lot of luxury groups that I wanted to work for at the time. I had a vague idea to start my own business eventually, but I didn’t know it would happen this soon.”
Connie met her business partner at LBS, and by the following September after graduation astrid & miyu was in full swing. They initially launched the business in 2011.
But it would be a mistake to assume that they had it easy. Start-ups are a challenge in all industries, and fashion and design is a competitive one; even more so in a capital city like London.
“The challenge was getting the first new customers,” she says. “We had a website at the start and online marketing is difficult. It takes time to build up your brand. When we started we would sometimes shave only one order per week, and that was a big challenge.”
Connie had to adapt when her business partner decided to leave. She had to run everything by herself, and unknown start-ups have difficulty finding good candidates to hire, she says.
If that moment was the company’s darkest hour, 2013 is surely their silver lining. Connie may have been struggling for orders and running the business alone, but flash forward to today and turnover is on the up.
The company’s revenue has increased tenfold this year and they expect that number to continue rising. Connie currently employees ten people and just this week she took on three additional staff - and is looking for a fourth.
She may have wanted to join a big luxury company somewhere in Europe, but studying at LBS inspired her to launch an entrepreneurial venture ahead of schedule. An MBA helped her overcome her challenges and she is now thriving in fashion and design.
“We do a lot of case studies on businesses at LBS, so you learn to make fewer mistakes,” she explains. “LBS have an incubator system, and I was a part of the startup incubator for a year, getting guidance from the professors. When I first started I also reached out to alumni in relevant industries, and they were responsive.”
Was an MBA essential to your success?
“Yeah, I think so,” she added. “An MBA helped me to look at things from different perspectives. If I started this company straight out of banking I would focus on finance, but the MBA enabled me to have a holistic view. I also got to work with people from many different countries.”
Astrid & miyu designs and merchandises jewellery pieces that are both unique and of a high quality - but at an affordable price. Connie remains competitive in a feisty industry because she feels they have hit a gap in the market.
“Initially I started the business because when I shopped for jewellery, it wasn’t often easy to find something affordable, that was really good quality,” she says. “I’m trying to use different channels to sell, and am focusing on who my target customers are. It’s a mixture of having the right products and having a clear target audience.”
Many might consider London the fashion capital of the world, and for Connie, Britain is the ideal building block to an international company. She wants to established a strong “British brand” and hopes to expand into other parts of Europe, the US and eventually Asia.
Connie’s entrepreneurial journey may have started back in high school, when she designed her own clothing, but it is in London that her business is thriving. Finance may have been a possibility, and it certainly provided her with a solid background. But fashion was always her passion.
LBS gave her the confidence to launch a start-up way ahead of schedule, and it wouldn’t be too misplaced to think astrid & miyu may be one of the biggest design brands in Britain one day.
But Connie aims higher than the UK. After an MBA, she dreams of going international.
After all, if the jewellery is endorsed by royalty-in-law, surely the rest of the Britain will catch on?
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