How my line started killing me

I came across a quote recently on Business of Fashion, which sums up how I've been feeling quite well:

At Cloak I was doing production, I was doing business, I was doing financing. It kind of killed me, actually. I was doing very little designing. The key thing at Versace was that I just got to design; it got the juices flowing again. Now, with my own collection, I get to design more, which is what I want to do. I don’t pretend to be a businessman. You have to be to a certain extent, but I also want to work with people who know what they are doing.

Alexandre Plokhov, speaking to BoF about shutting down his celebrated cult menswear label Cloak, moving on to design for Versace, and then launching a new, eponymous label, one of the best new collections for A/W 2011 as featured in this short, sharp fashion film by Douglas Keeve.

Writing about the tough times in developing my line is difficult, mainly because it's hard to air what feels like failures in public.  If I put things in perspective, there were a couple of factors working against me:

- The recession made business difficult for everyone.  In fashion blogs, in the past year or two, I read constantly about labels and boutiques folding.  Buyers became conservative, sticking with established designers (like Marc Jacobs) over lesser known labels.  And consumers were just not buying things, or buying when things were heavily discounted.

- Like Plokhov, I was juggling all aspects of the business myself, in addition to trying to support myself through other means.  It was exhausting, both physically and emotionally, and when you're trying to do many things simultaneously, it's hard to do each thing well.

- Startups by nature are destined to fail.  I think the statistic is a 2% survival rate, and I imagine the number could be smaller in fashion, where luck plays a bigger part than in other industries.  

In short, the line, "It kind of killed me" really resonates with me.  I felt like I wasn't doing anything particularly well, be it designing, or running my business, or just living my life.  I felt guilty about hanging out with friends instead of working and was constantly worrying about how I was going to pay my rent and other expenses.  My parents were worried about my future.  I would go through bouts of depression and question what I was doing.  The instability of my lifestyle was killing me, and I also realized I thrive in structured environments, which I couldn't provide for myself.  I also felt that I was running my business in survival mode rather than in a planned and organized way, and it didn't feel sustainable.

On a side note, my music "career" benefited as a result.  I found myself drawn into the music scene because long before I was really involved with fashion, I had been playing violin (since I was seven) and was friends with musicians who asked me to play with them on shows.  Through this I eventually started writing my own music and started recording and playing it.  The great thing about music for me was that it was a creative outlet where I felt less pressure to succeed and was able to be involved in and feel like I was making progress with not too much effort.  The bad thing was that it served as a distraction from fashion, kind of how sometimes people cheat on their significant others when their relationships aren't going well.

I didn't want to give up on my line, but I felt that I needed to take time and figure out a better way to do things.  I started figuring out my next move.