What kind of designer are you? What kind of business do you want to run?

If you're interested in running your own fashion business, the Fashion Incubator blog is a great resource.  Two posts I would recommend if you're trying to figure out how your business will look like are "What kind of designer are you?" and "Where and how do you start a design business?"

In the first, Fasanella describes five archetypes of designers:

• The artist
• The artisan/engineer/technician
• The mogul
• The accountant
• The project manager

 In the second, she describes categories of fashion entrepreneurs:

1. The dilettante: one who aspires to a bit of pin money,
2. the income replacer: one who needs income equivalent to a job -or maybe even a bit extra,
3. the merchant: those who need to support their family and their employees families with the business,
4. corporate: one who aspires to scale; growing their business to whatever limits there are.

In fashion, as this article about Tory Burch and her newly minted billionaire status describes, one doesn't become hugely successful (at least financially) by creativity alone:

In food-chain terms, she's probably Carluccio's rather than River Café. Power to her. Maybe she'll use some of that power to invest in the inventive designers who struggle to achieve anything like her level of commercial success, because here is the bottom line: in fashion, you'll always make more money packaging taste than lobbing little grenades of genuinely new design at the world. But without innovation, taste eventually becomes arid.

You need to be able to figure out how to marry creativity and commerce.  Predict the kind of products your target customer wants to buy but keep it fresh and new, so that they get excited and have a reason to buy.