JUMA Inspiration | Source: JUMA

TORONTO, Canada — Following our piece on Vancouver’s Digital Olympics earlier this week, it only makes sense that the BoF Spotlight should focus on the Great White North for our monthly inspiration from emerging designers. This month I turned to long-time friends of BoF, Alia and Jamil Juma.

The designer brother-and-sister duo are based in Toronto, not Vancouver, though they have called both cities home. They are of South Asian ancestry via Africa, having grown up tied-at-the-hip all over the world, from Los Angeles to Kinshasa, and even Almaty, Kazakhstan. Indeed, the only time they have lived apart was in university, but still only 5 hours away from each other in Toronto and Montreal. That’s a mouthful of cities to have lived in for a couple of thirtysomethings.

Jamil and Alia are symbiotic sponges of the cities they live in, soaking in inspiration from their surroundings and feeding off of each other, and reflecting the cultural diversity of Toronto. In the suburban neighbourhood of North York, for example, Jamil and Alia found inspiration from the local Hasidim and their characteristic black attire, with a slim and relaxed silhouette that is their signature.

Having spent so much time together building their fledgling business, it’s not inconsequential that Alia has recently moved to New York to give their brand a presence in North America’s only global fashion capital, leaving Jamil in Toronto. Following a characteristically deep research immersion trip that took them to China and Bali at the end of last year, for the first time they are living and designing apart. But with two cities to draw inspiration from, and modern technology to keep the communication lines open, we’re hoping for big things from JUMA.

JUMA for BoF

And so without further ado, sitting in the nexus of business and fashion in our logo this month are JUMA’s dreamy printed scarves. “The scarves are designed in the same spirit of our collections,” Jamil told me via email.  “We took images from various inspirations combined with images from our blog to create scarves that reflect our brand personality.  The scarves come in either silk twill or silk jersey, and are unisex.”

Many thanks to outgoing Spotlightee, Fanny Boucher, whose Honorine jewels have been colourfully gracing our masthead for just over a month now, and will debut on Net-a-Porter exclusively in the coming months.

The Spotlight is BoF’s showcase for emerging talent employing creativity and business acumen to make their mark in the fashion business.

TORONTO, Canada – When Richard Baker, CEO of NRDC, bought The Hudson’s Bay Company for a cool $8 billion last month, he announced his plans to turn Canada’s oldest retailer into an industry leader, using a similar strategy to that of US retailer Lord & Taylor. Lord & Taylor, which happens to be America’s oldest department store, was also recently acquired by NRDC. So, with two of the oldest department store chains on the continent in his portfolio, what are Baker’s grand plans?

In Canada, Baker believes that there is a gap between mass-market The Bay and luxe player Holt Renfrew. Thus, he plans to open 10 to 15 Lord & Taylor stores within existing Bay flagship stores or within HBC real estates. According to a source at HBC, large city centre The Bay flagships of 600,000 sq. ft. and up will be split into two entities, containing both The Bay and Lord & Taylor across, say, 2 floors each.  NRDC will also introduce more prestigious brands to The Bay’s lineup, including those of NRDC-owned Creative Design Studios, Peter Som’s parent company.

As part of the HBC acquisition, NRDC also acquired Home Outfitters, Fields, and Zellers, a mass consumer store which had been losing ground to Wal-Mart Canada. For Zellers, Baker says he plans on improving customer service, and rolling out a 125,000 sq. ft. prototype to fight Walmart.

To make this complex strategy happen, Baker has called on some high-profile industry veterans. Jeffrey Sherman, who had been serving as President and Chief Operating Officer at Polo Retail Group, was named President and CEO of HBC. Previously, he was President and COO of Bloomingdale’s and CEO of The Limited.

Sherman himself hired Canadian Bonnie Brooks to become President and CEO of The Bay. Brooks was previously President of Lane Crawford Joyce Group in Hong Kong, where she “tripled its business in the last five years and expanded its scope beyond Hong Kong and Macau into China, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia,” according to WWD.com.

But even with a retail dream team in place, the task ahead will not be easy.

Department stores such as Eaton’s, once Canada’s largest department store chain, have been fading from the Canadian retail landscape over the past 20 years. When the 1980’s and 1990’s gave rise to  new competitors such as Winners, H&M and Zara, the once-venerable Eaton’s began to struggle, and was eventually sold to Sears Canada in 1999. The latter tried to re-launch Eaton’s as a younger, more upscale department store (not so different from the Lord&Taylor positioning being proffered by Baker) and failed. In 2002, Sears Canada finally decided to close and retire the Eaton’s name for good.

As Baker sets his sights on the Canadian market, he will have his work cut out for him. Luring customers back into the department store fold won’t be easy. But, we won’t know if his strategy is working for some time yet as significant operational changes aren’t expected at HBC before 2009.

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By Tu Tram Pham, a new contributor to The Business of Fashion, based in Montreal, Canada. Pham is the author of Dualité, a blog focused on Canada’s fashion industry.

I am filing this post from “Cottage Country”, north of Toronto, very far from the centre of the fashion world. Nontheless, when I first arrived in Toronto about a week ago, I asked local fashionistas the same questions I ask everywhere in an effort to seek out local stories which are still relevant to the international readership of the Business of Fashion. There’s always an interesting story to tell. Who should I try to meet, where should I go to see designs by the top local designers, and which fashion brands and retail chains are using innovative ways to build their businesses?

Almost without exception, these questions were met with a slight shrugging of the shoulders and a resignation that the local scene is nothing to write home about. “There’s not a lot going on,” I was told over and over again. “Canadian designers lack the confidence to push forward their own ideas, choosing instead to be ‘inspired’ by major international designers.”

I had almost resigned myself to the fact that there was nothing to write about, when I started recalling the names of supermodels, young and old, who have come from Canada. Irina Lazareanu grew up in the Montréal suburb of St-Hubert and was launched to fame by her friend Kate Moss. Coco Rocha of Richmond, British Columbia used her Celtic dance skills spark her fashion moment. Jessica Stam from Kincardine near Lake Huron, 2 hours from Toronto, is the namesake of Marc Jacobs’ ever popular Stam bag. And of course, 90’s supermodels like Linda Evangelista of Toronto and Yasmeen Ghauri of Montréal were amongst the first Canadian models to hit the big time.

So, maybe Canada isn’t a land that develops world-class designers, but something about the place does seem to nurture top models. Could Canada be giving traditional model hunting grounds like Brazil and Eastern Europe a run for the money?

You be the judge. Here’s a look at the top 5 international models hailing from Canada.

Canada’s top (business) models

Being a model these days is no easy task. While the lifestyle is glamorous, no doubt, it also requires long hours, endless plane rides, getting prodded and made-up and being told what to do all day long. Most importantly, models today need to have business sense in order to best manage their careers and capture some of the value they create. Each of these top models has shown the propensity to do exactly that. Who’s your favourite?

5. Lisa Cant – Edmonton, Alberta

(Photo courtesy of Chanel)

Lisa Cant hails from Alberta, an oil-rich Canadian province which also gave rise to other notable Canadian models, Heather Marks and Tricia Helfer. She tells one of those model ‘discovery’ stories, having been approached at an IKEA in Calgary by another model. She scored a double-whammy when she secured 2 consecutive covers at Vogue Italia, shot by Steven Meisel who has a knack for being the first to photograph the world’s top new modeling talent. Cant has been commended for her business savvy by modelresource.ca:

"I guess I’ve grown up a lot because I’ve had to manage myself as a business. You can’t just rely on everyone else to manage your finances and scheduling. You put a lot of faith in your agency, but you have to watch out for everything yourself. You have to have a business head, and make sure all your money is being put in the right place and know that you’re booking the right jobs. Your agency does that but you also have to watch."

4. Daria Werbowy – Mississauga, Ontario

(Photo courtesy of Mert and Marcus for Louis Vuitton)

Ukranian-born, suburban-Toronto raised Werbowy raked in $3.5m in between June 2006 and June 2007 and holds the record for opening and closing the most shows in one season. She has been on the cover of no less than 21 issues of Vogue and has been in advertisements for almost every fashion brand imaginable. Though her star has been falling a bit of late, she is still a modeling force to be reckoned with and has a few years to go before returning to Canada to become a painter or open an art gallery.

3. Coco Rocha – Richmond, British Columbia

(Photo courtesy of David Sims for Balenciaga)

American Vogue said in May 2007 that fashion’s "Coco Moment" came when Coco Rocha danced a jig down the runway to open Jean-Paul Gaultier’s A/W 2007 collection earlier this year. Truly avant garde designers at esteemed French houses like Nicolas Ghesquiere for Balenciaga and Alber Elbaz for Lanvin have chosen Coco Rocha as the face of their advertising campaigns.

2. Irina Lazareanu – St Hubert, Québec

(Photo courtesy of Chanel)

Originally discovered by Jean-Francois Leroux of Montréal’s Giovanni agency, Irina Lazareanu has gone on to become a darling of Karl Lagerfeld (and therefore just about everyone else in the business). He described her to Canada’s Maclean’s magazine as "theJuliette Gréco of our times,” referring to the legendary muse of Jean-Paul Sartre. His entire Paris-Monte Carlo collection was designed with Lazareanu in mind. Last Autumn, she clocked an astonishing 76 shows during fashion weeks in New York, Paris, and Milan. She has spoken eloquently of  her plans to build a portfolio of activities to round out her career and has shown adept networking and relationship skills in getting her name out there. She is releasing a CD this fall, with lyrics advice from fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell and guitar lessons from Nick Jones, formerly of the Clash.

 1. Jessica Stam – Kincardine, Ontario

In a recent American Vogue issue on “The World’s Next Top Models," Jessica Stam describes how she was discovered in a local amusement park during a time in her life where she was more focused on schoolwork and sports than DJ AM
and Marc Jacobs. While she may not be the highest earning model from Canada (both Daria Werbowy and Shalom Harlow earned more) Stam is everywhere these days and therefore earns the honour of being Canada’s top (business) model. Her face is instantly recognisable from catwalk shows and advertising campaigns for DKNY, Dior, Marc Jacobs, Anna Sui, Vera Wang, Valentino, MiuMiu, Gucci, Prada, Dolce & Gabban and Versace. She told Vogue that she now understands that she

“has to take care of [herself]…a great manager, a business manager, a financial advisor – a team to help [her] stay smart."

To many die-hard fashionistas, Los Angeles has always been considered the less sophisticated, dressed-down, in your face, suburban, over-celebrity conscious little sister to New York, which has consistently retained its place amongst the world’s fashion capitals.  However, our visit to L.A. has revealed an interesting mix of local designers and boutiques combined with the glossy global brands along Rodeo Drive. Driven by its native contemporary brands, L.A. is experiencing a fashion renaissance.

Yesterday, I cruised around some upcoming fashion districts here with Jamil Juma, of Juma, which he designs with his sister Alia. Juma’s collections (one fashion forward RTW, one activewear) are carried at more than 30 boutiques around North America, including Fred Segal  in L.A. and Caravan in NY. Both Jamil and I were keen to get a feel for what is going on here, especially in the hot contemporary segment where his brand is positioned.

In the past few years, contemporary brands based out of L.A. (which themselves grew out of the designer denim explosion that also started here) have taken America by storm. While Juicy Couture is the best known of these brands outside the USA, others including Vince, Joie, Corpus and James Perse have built sizeable businesses using an operationally efficient model that combines fast fashion (multiple deliveries, great ease of reordering) with with celebrity-based promotion.

Not surprisingly, all of the major high-end department stores have turned to these contemporary businesses to drive sales growth, particularly with the surge of Zara and H&M in the mass segment. Barney’s Co-op, Bergdorf Goodman’s 5F and Neiman Marcus Cusp are all sub-brands and businesses built for the contemporary market and Bloomingdales revamped its second floor in New York to get in on the action. And, there are entire shopping districts, like Abbot Kinney in Venice Beach and West 3rd in L.A., which seem to be dedicated to these fashionable yet affordable brands, priced in-between designer and mass.

The Abbot Kinney district boasts more than a dozen boutiques, tightly clustered along the edgy boulevard, mixed in with cafes teeming with laptop-toting students and hipsters. There is a strong movement to keep the independent vibe of the street, and a petition to keep chain stores out of the area was highly visible in many of the stores we walked into. The shopping experience therefore feels a lot more authentic than your friendly neighbourhood H&M.

The standout boutique in Abbot Kinney is Heist, an elegant store with an emphasis on French contemporary labels like Vanessa Bruno and Isabelle Marrant. Like most of the best boutiques, the owner is passionate about fashion and does all of the buying herself.

Jamil and I also spent some time scoping out the cluster of stores around the intersection of 3rd and Fairfax in West L.A. and spoke at length with Eveline Morel, the fashion aficionado behind EM & Co, a women’s boutique on the West 3rd strip. The store had an interesting mix of local labels, international names and Contemporary brands from Vivienne Westwood to Brian Reyes. Seeing Jamil in action reminded me how powerful it can be for young designer to go out and meet with boutique owners and buyers directly, as it is the best way to build confidence in their creative vision, product sense and reliability. It also puts a face to the name on the label.

Eveline told us she works with local emerging designers on product development and collection planning to help grow their businesses. And while she hasn’t bought into the whole celebrity angle for her own store, she said the power of name recognition associated with a Hollywood starlet is undeniable.  She cited the example of Mblem, a business built around the celebrity of Mandy Moore, who while not involved in design, provides input and takes 30% of sales revenue in return.

The Business of Fashion is here in L.A for the next few days and will continue to explore the nooks and crannies and highs and lows of the city of angels. Stay tuned.

Unlike the United States, Europe and the Middle East, the Canadian retail luxury landscape is dominated by one major player, Holt Renfrew, which was founded in 1837 in Quebec City. 

In 1986, the venerable retail chain was acquired by Galen Weston, who also owns Selfridges in London and Brown Thomas in Ireland.  Since then, Holts has gone on to become the destination for luxury shoppers in Canada with 9 locations in all major cities, an estimated $500m in revenues, and still virtually no competition to speak of in the domestic luxury department store market.

However, with monopoly can come complacency. 

To address this, in 2004, the company brought in Caryn Lerner to be its new President and CEO. Lerner came to Holts after a distinguished career in American retail luxury department stores and brands. At a recent Luxury Goods and Retail Conference at Harvard Business School, Lerner told the audience that it was her ambition to make Holt Renfrew the best luxury retail shopping experience in the world, saying that even though the company operates without any major domestic competition, Holts’ competitors are the Saks, Harvey Nichols and Printemps of the world, because the luxury shopper is well-traveled and expects a global standard.

Some of her initiatives to achieve this lofty goal have been to revitalise the brand image, build a programme for driving sales through individual customer relationships, and take control of the shoe department which was previously subcontracted out to an external partner. These are all sensible decisions in light of Ms. Lerner’s insight that the luxury shopper is a global customer.

Finally, there is also the brand new Holt Renfrew store in Vancouver. Over the weekend I visited the store and found that although the service was excellent  (very friendly and helpful) and the brand mix was strong (luxury, contemporary and young designer brands), the store seemed to lack consistency. On the one hand, it was clean and shiny (if not a bit mass market) like some of the new Bloomingdales stores, but the (bizarre, trying too hard spaceship and dinosaur theme) visual merchandising was aiming (mostly unsuccessfully) to be more like Barneys New York, with a little Selfridges thrown into the mix.

The new hot pink shopping bags with modern, stylised logo didn’t help either, especially for shoppers who want to be discrete about their purchases or men who don’t want to walk around with a bright pink shopping bag. A salesperson admitted that they have experienced a few challenges with the store and are still making changes to make it work better.

With limited local competition, the chain is clearly not under direct threat. But, it does need to work out what it is trying to be, so that all of the elements of the retail experience can create the pinnacle of  luxury that Ms. Lerner is rightfully trying to create.

Fashion blogging
Any regular readers of this blog know that I have been a big fan of the Sartorialist, aka Scott Schuman, since I first came across his site almost two years ago. His was the first blog of any sort to really catch my attention because there was something really powerful about seeing clothes that are styled by real people on the street. It brings the clothes to life in a way that high-fashion editorial sometimes cannot.  FT does a great video profile of Scott that allows you to see how The Sartorialist came to be, explains how Scott thinks about his work and reveals that The Sartorialist is now receiving over 1.3 million page views per month. [You can see my own Sartorialist moment here]

The Sartorialist blog also opened my eyes to the potential of what the democracy of blogging could do for a fashion business, particularly emerging businesses with limited profiles and advertising budgets.  What if, for example, you could mouse over a sweater you like in one of Scott’s photos and could discover who designed the sweater and where you could buy it online through phototagging (just like you can tag people in your photos on Facebook.com)? Its Fashion 2.0 folks and its only going to get more interesting.

There is a lot more discussion of the fashion blogosphere is in this video overview narrated by Jeanne Beker, highlighting the pros and cons of the fashion blogging phenomenon, which some say has resulted in a reported 2 million fashion blogs. Jeanne speaks to some of the world’s leading fashion critics  (Cathy Horyn of the New York Times, Kate Betts from Time magazine, and Colin McDowell from the Sunday Times) to get their views on what blogging has done for them. She also speakss to the (love-him-or-hate-him) blogstar Perez Hilton.

Tom Ford’s new store on Madison Avenue
FT also gives us a peek into the much-discussed Madison Avenue flagship recently opened by Tom Ford, and heavily criticised by some observers for being too exclusive and too expensive. Tom Ford gives Jeanne a personal tour of the store which provides some of Tom’s own thinking on what he was trying to accomplish with the store. Jeanne does go through the price points in the store, which are truly astronomical,  including personalised underwear for $75.

Mentoring emerging designers
When emerging designers talk to me about setting up their own businesses, I often encourage them to try to get some time working in the studio of an established design house first.  This video outlines the mentorship of young proteges including Yves Saint Laurent (mentored by Christian Dior) to Francisco Costa (mentored by Calvin Klein) to Narcisco Rodriguez (mentored by Donna Karan). You can see how some of the industry’s biggest names of today started their careers as apprentices to some of the biggest names from yesteryear.

© 2007 Copyright Imran Amed – The Business of Fashion. 
Scott Shuman photo courtesy of FT.

Yes, this blog is a commentary on the Business of Fashion. But, it is also a blog, more generally, on how you can take artistic and creative ideas and channel them in a way that is economically sustainable (and commercially lucrative) over the long term; how you can make the worlds of creativity and commerce co-exisit and feed off of each other harmoniously, without worrying about "selling out." Yes there is always a tension between the creatives and the corporates, but if the right balance is struck, the results can be magical.

For example, when John Galliano takes his fantastical ideas from Haute Couture origami and oriental dreams and declines them for his RTW show in a way that is sumptuous, beautiful and (just slightly) more accessible to a larger audience, he understands the realitities of the business, but does not compromise his creative energy for this. He just finds a way for them to co-exist. In this way, the high costs of designing and showing a couture collection are justified not only by the brand-building and awareness of the Dior brand that comes from these spectacles, but also because his couture collection acts as a creative playground from where he can take the most extreme creative ideas and then use the same raw material to adapt them for RTW, fragrance and accessories which are huge money makers.

Today, I was reading an article from the New York Times on one of my favourite Indie bands, The Arcade Fire whose balance of creative and business sense, one could argue, is equally astute as Galliano’s. I first came to hear of the band through word of mouth a few years ago from friends in Montreal and New York. Intrigued, I showed up outside the venue for Arcade Fire’s intimate sold-out European debut concert in a tiny venue at King’s College in central London, without a ticket in hand. With a bit of patience and some luck, I managed to snag a ticket from someone who had an extra one to sell and walked into this concert, knowing almost nothing about the band. There was a palpable sense of expectation in the air. The room was filled with important European music industry execs who wanted to see what all of the trans-Atlantic fuss was all about, hard-core fans who had been following the band’s progress on blogs and music media like NME and pitchforkmedia.com, and many former Montrealers like me who wanted to share in the excitement of a homegrown Montreal talent creating waves in the global music industry. I walked away that night knowing I had witnessed a magical creative moment.

Since then, The Arcade Fire have gone on to play sell-out shows all over the world, their debut album Funeral has sold 750,000 copies, and they now count Bono and David Bowie among their biggest fans. Not bad for a bunch of former McGill University students who were signed up to an independent record label. Expectations have therefore been even higher for their second album Neon Bible. which comes out on March 6th.

The Times article today struck a chord (really, I swear, no pun intended) with me as it was clear from the article that it is not only their creative talent and vision that has propelled them to success. It is also their common sense approach to business, aptitude for marketing and PR (while still remaining somewhat mysterious), and the strong collaborative and consensus driven leadership style of Win Butler and Regine Chassagne.

First, the common sense. This isn’t a band that went on alcohol-binge-benders bashing up hotel rooms and burning through cash like the paper it is. This is a band that paid for the recording of its own albums, bought a studio-cum-Church to record its second album, retained rights to its master recroding and brand, and then licensed it to  music companies Merge and Universal. Furthermore, they are constantly pushing the creative envelope (another similarity to Galliano) but do so in way that is still reasonable (which Galliano has learned though the year). For example, they shipped themselves off to Budapest to work with a 60 piece orchestra there because it was more financially realistic to do so than doing the same in North America. In short, they have kept control of their affairs, their cash, and themselves so that they can shape their creative output in a way that is consistent with their values and insipiration, but that also allows them to reap financial rewards. To be clear, these are not ascetic idealist types who  think that commercial success somehow invalidates the value of their creative success. They have found a way to be comfortable with both.   

When it comes to marketing, these guys have combined the use of edgy new media and traditional mainstream media platforms to create a huge profile and awareness of their music and brand. First, they seize the zeitgeist of their target audience and deliver marketing messages that resonate because they are authentic and true to what Arcade Fire stands for. As the NYT article points out, instead of a ‘professional’ marketing strategy for their new album they produced instead an iMovie for distribution on YouTube, complete with a toll-free 1-800 hotline number for fans to call in to hear material from the new album. What the article fails to mention is that their professional marketing strategy has also been built on venerable media outlets like TIME Magazine and the New York Times reporting on the band’s curious modus operandi and cult following as a cultural interest piece, while at the same time giving them another important audience to reach: the audience who will pay for their music because it is perceived as cool and hip by those in the know. Broad media coverage like this is priceless, but the band manages to do it without losing their creative edge. To top it all off, their penchant for theatrics is not just a little similar to Galliano’s use of spectacle and  fantasy in his runway shows. Both Galliano and the Arcade Fire understand that conjuring up and delivering dreams that people want to be part of  is always the making of great marketing.

Finally, they also seem to have the management of their ever-growing cast of musicians and complex business affairs under control. And, while its seems that the band is driven by consensus and shared values of what feels right and consistent with what Arcade Fire is about, there is also clear leadership in place in the form of Win Butler and Regine Chassagne. Butler strikes me as a visionary leader who knows where he wants to take things and inspires others to come along with him. Regine pushes people to test the limits of their creative energy and this brings the most out of her bandmates. Even if the results arent always spectacular, she encourages risk-taking. At a recent London show that didnt go off as they wanted, she improvised and brought the audience outside the concert venue and fired up one of their hits from the first album. Leadership in innovation, clarity and vision is something this band has in spades.

And so, I think Arcade Fire is a great case study for any young designers who want to be true to their creative selves while still recognise the need for commercial success. You can check out a video of their impromptu performance in London’s Porchester Hall lobby below to witness the almost religous fervour that captivates the audience as they launch into one of Arcade Fire’s best songs from the first album. If you look carefully you can see Coldplay’s Chris Martin amongst the Arcade Fire faithful.

First Arcade Fire photo from the New York Times. Galliano for Dior photo from Style.com   © 2007 Copyright Imran Amed.