THE JOB DESCRIPTION NOBODY GAVE ME What No One Tells You About Starting a Fashion Brand
By Anjna Kaur
When I decided to launch my own jewellery brand, I knew I was signing up to become a designer, creative director and business owner. What I hadn't anticipated was that I'd also need to become an accountant, logistics coordinator, marketing strategist, customer service representative and, on particularly eventful days, something resembling an international customs specialist. There's a rather romanticised idea of what starting a fashion brand looks like. You imagine sketching designs over coffee, choosing beautiful materials, directing campaigns and watching your creative vision come to life. And those moments do exist. They're some of my favourite parts of what I do. They just happen to exist alongside spreadsheets, invoices, production deadlines and the occasional frantic email about a parcel stuck somewhere between two countries.
What I've come to realise is that starting a fashion brand and running one are entirely different things. The former requires an idea, a point of view and the confidence to put something of your own into the world. The latter requires an almost absurd number of skills, many of which have very little to do with fashion. Some days I'm choosing gemstones for a new collection. Other days I'm analysing advertising performance, calculating margins or investigating why a shipment hasn't moved in three days. Occasionally, I'm doing all three before lunch. And perhaps that's the biggest misconception about being a fashion founder.
People assume your job is to create beautiful things. In reality, your job is to make sure the business behind those beautiful things actually works.
The Creative Director, Accountant and Everything in Between
One of the first things you discover when starting a business is that job titles become rather meaningless. In an established fashion house, there are departments dedicated to finance, marketing, production, operations and creative direction. When you're building an independent brand, those responsibilities often end up belonging to the same person. Even with agencies, suppliers or a small team supporting you, you're still responsible for understanding how everything fits together.
You might spend the morning reviewing a campaign moodboard, the afternoon discussing manufacturing costs and the evening examining advertising figures that make you question whether you understand mathematics at all. The strange thing is that these responsibilities require completely different ways of thinking. As a designer, you're encouraged to be imaginative, instinctive and occasionally unreasonable. You want to create something because you believe in it, because it feels exciting or because you haven't seen anything quite like it before. As a business owner, you're expected to be practical, analytical and financially disciplined. Suddenly, every creative decision comes with another set of questions. How much will it cost to produce? What should the retail price be? Is there enough demand? How much stock should you order? Will the margins work? The creative side of you wants to say yes. The financial side would quite like to see a spreadsheet first. Neither is necessarily wrong. Learning to balance the two is simply part of the job.
The Things Nobody Puts on Instagram
Social media has made entrepreneurship look incredibly appealing, particularly within fashion. We see founders attending beautiful launch dinners, directing photoshoots, unboxing samples and celebrating milestones. Their offices are immaculate, their coffee is aesthetically pleasing, and their businesses appear to run on creativity, ambition and excellent lighting. What we see considerably less of are the things that actually keep those businesses functioning. Nobody is particularly interested in watching someone reconcile invoices, chase a supplier or spend an afternoon trying to understand import duties. Yet those unremarkable moments are often where the real work happens. I learnt this lesson rather dramatically while preparing for my most recent campaign. The creative direction was finalised, the studio booked, the photographer, model and team confirmed. Everything was ready to go. There was just one rather important detail missing: the jewellery itself. Despite repeated reassurances that the shipment would arrive on time, the pieces were still stuck in customs just days before the shoot. I found myself obsessively refreshing tracking updates, contacting couriers and trying to work out how I was supposed to photograph a collection that wasn't physically in the country. There is something uniquely stressful about having an entire production organised, with multiple people, schedules and expenses involved, while the one thing everyone is there to photograph is nowhere to be seen. Eventually, I made the decision to postpone the shoot by a week. Of course, that meant rearranging everyone's schedules, adjusting the campaign timeline and managing the consequences of a delay that had initially seemed relatively straightforward. A shipping problem had somehow become a full-scale exercise in crisis management. The irony is that the finished campaign turned out beautifully. Looking at the photographs, you'd never imagine the frantic emails, customs paperwork and sheer amount of stress involved in making them happen. On Instagram, it was a perfectly executed creative vision.
Behind the scenes, it was considerably less glamorous. And I think that experience captures something fundamental about the luxury industry. The more effortless something appears, the more work has often gone into creating that impression. Customers shouldn't have to think about supply chains, production schedules or logistical complications when they're buying something beautiful. Creating that sense of ease is part of the brand experience. But behind it is an enormous amount of coordination, problem-solving and attention to detail. The finished product might look effortless. Getting it there rarely is.
You Don't Have to Know Everything, But You Have to Understand Everything
Perhaps the most unexpected part of becoming a founder is how quickly you're required to make decisions about things you've never encountered before. You can study business, understand marketing and spend years developing your creative skills, but certain lessons only become meaningful when you're personally responsible for the outcome. It's one thing to learn about profit margins. It's another to calculate them when deciding whether to invest in a collection. It's one thing to discuss customer experience. It's another to resolve a complicated delivery situation when a customer is understandably frustrated. And it's one thing to understand brand strategy. It's another to decide where to allocate a limited marketing budget when ten different things need attention. What makes these decisions difficult isn't necessarily a lack of information. It's that there is rarely one perfectly correct answer. You learn to ask better questions, seek advice, understand the numbers and make the best decision possible with the information available. I've also realised that being a founder doesn't mean doing absolutely everything yourself. Knowing when to delegate, and recognising when someone else has more expertise, is essential. But delegating something doesn't mean you can afford to stop understanding it. You don't need to become a professional accountant, but you need to understand your finances. You don't need to manage every advertisement personally, but you should know what your marketing investment is achieving. Ultimately, you're the person connecting the different parts of the business. And if those parts aren't working together, even the strongest creative vision can struggle to become commercially sustainable.
When Your Business Becomes Personal
There's another side to entrepreneurship that receives considerably less attention than the practical challenges: the emotional investment. When you're working for someone else, you can care deeply about your job while maintaining some separation between your professional responsibilities and your personal identity. When you're building something of your own, that separation becomes considerably more difficult. Every collection represents decisions you've made. Every campaign reflects a creative direction you've chosen. Every customer response feels connected to something you've personally put into the world. The highs can be incredibly rewarding. Seeing someone wear a piece you've designed, receiving a thoughtful customer message or watching an idea become something tangible makes the work feel worthwhile. But the difficult moments can feel equally personal. A disappointing sales day can make you question decisions that seemed perfectly reasonable the previous week. A campaign that underperforms can leave you wondering what you should have done differently. Even relatively minor setbacks can feel disproportionately significant when you're emotionally invested in the outcome. Social media adds another complication. It's remarkably easy to compare your everyday reality with someone else's carefully presented success. You see another brand announcing a new stockist, celebrating a sold-out collection or opening a beautiful retail space.
What you don't necessarily see is how long it took them to get there, what challenges they've encountered or what their business looks like beyond that announcement. I've come to believe that one of the most important skills a founder can develop is learning not to interpret every business result as a personal verdict. A slow week doesn't mean you've failed. A successful launch doesn't mean you've figured everything out. Both are simply moments within a much longer process. Of course, understanding that intellectually and actually believing it on a difficult day are two entirely different things.
The Difference Between Launching and Building
I think one reason entrepreneurship has become so romanticised is that we place enormous emphasis on the beginning. The launch is exciting. There's a website going live, a first collection, a campaign, perhaps an event and the anticipation of finally sharing something you've spent months developing. It's absolutely a moment worth celebrating. But the launch is also where the real work begins. Before launching, you're largely working towards a vision. Afterwards, you're responsible for making that vision function in the real world. You have to think about cash flow, inventory, repeat customers, production capacity, marketing performance and the long-term direction of the business. You also have to recognise that not every idea you love will necessarily make commercial sense. There's a significant difference between creating something people notice and building something people continue returning to. A beautiful campaign might attract attention. A celebrity placement might introduce the brand to a new audience. A successful event might generate excitement. But none of those things guarantees a sustainable business. That requires consistency, trust and the ability to deliver quality long after the initial excitement has faded. It's a less glamorous conversation than launch parties and campaign imagery, but arguably a more important one. Increasingly, I find myself thinking not simply about making the next collection exciting, but about how each decision contributes to the brand I want to build over the next five or ten years.
Learning to Be Comfortable With Not Knowing
If there's one thing starting a brand has taught me, it's that confidence doesn't necessarily come from knowing exactly what you're doing. Sometimes it comes from accepting that you don’t and being willing to figure it out anyway. There's a particular pressure that comes with being a young founder. You're expected to have a clear vision, make confident decisions and speak about your business as though everything has unfolded according to a carefully calculated plan. In reality, much of building a business involves learning as you go. You make decisions, observe what happens, adjust your approach and try again. Something you were convinced would succeed might not. An idea you almost overlooked might become unexpectedly successful. You learn that creativity alone isn't enough, but neither is commercial discipline. The challenge is developing both without allowing one to overwhelm the other. And perhaps most importantly, you realise that asking questions isn't evidence that you're unqualified. It's often how you become better at what you do. I still find it slightly amusing that I can spend one hour discussing jewellery designs and the next trying to understand an accounting question I never imagined I'd need to answer. But there's something rewarding about that unpredictability. Building a brand forces you to become more adaptable, resourceful and comfortable stepping outside your expertise. It teaches you to approach practical problems creatively and creative ideas practically. And while I certainly didn't anticipate every responsibility that came with starting a business, I wouldn't necessarily want to give those experiences back. The unexpected parts of the job have taught me just as much as the ones I originally signed up for. I started a jewellery brand because I wanted to create beautiful things. What I didn't realise was how much I'd have to learn about everything else to make that possible. And if I were rewriting the job description today, I suspect it would be considerably longer. Although, at the very bottom, I'd probably still include one final requirement: must be willing to figure it out as you go.
