When to Make Your First Senior Hire at a Fashion Brand
Deciding on your first senior hire is one of the hardest and most important calls a fashion founder makes. For a long time you have done nearly everything yourself, or with a small team of doers, and the brand has grown on the strength of your own taste and hustle. Then a moment arrives where […]
Fashion Production Manager Hiring: 5 Key Mistakes
Fashion production manager hiring is one of those searches that looks operational and turns out to be strategic. The production manager is the person who gets product made on time, on cost, and on quality, which means they sit on top of a brand’s margin, its delivery dates, and its relationships with the factories that […]
Technical Designer Hiring: 5 Key Mistakes
Technical designer hiring is one of the most quietly consequential searches a fashion brand runs, and one of the most frequently misunderstood. The technical designer is the person who turns a creative idea into a garment that actually fits, holds up, and can be made consistently at scale. They own the tech packs, the fit […]
Accessories and Handbag Designer Hiring: 5 Key Mistakes
Handbag designer hiring is one of the most specialized searches in fashion, and one that brands routinely underestimate. Designing a handbag has very little in common with designing a dress. It is an engineering problem as much as a creative one, built around construction, hardware, materials, and the unforgiving economics of a category where a […]
Fashion PR Director Hiring: 5 Key Mistakes
Fashion PR is one of the most misunderstood functions a brand ever hires for, which is exactly why fashion PR director hiring goes wrong so often. A strong PR and communications director shapes how the world perceives a brand: which editors write about it, which stylists pull it, how it shows up in a cultural […]
5 Reasons Counteroffers Backfire in Fashion Hiring
A counteroffer feels like a win in the moment, and it is one of the most reliable ways to lose in fashion hiring. You finally land the designer, merchandiser, or salesperson you have been chasing, they accept, and then their current employer comes back with more money and a promise that things will change. Sometimes […]
Licensing Director Hiring: 5 Key Mistakes
Licensing director hiring is one of the most specialized searches in fashion, and one of the easiest to get wrong because so few people truly understand what the role requires. A licensing director is the person who lets a brand extend into categories it does not manufacture itself, from eyewear and fragrance to accessories, footwear, […]
Fashion CFO Hiring: 5 Key Mistakes
Fashion CFO hiring is one of the most consequential and least understood searches a growing brand will run. Finance in a fashion business does not look like finance in most other industries. The balance sheet is dominated by inventory, the cash cycle is stretched across long production and selling seasons, and a single bad markdown […]
Merchandising Director Hiring: 5 Key Mistakes
Merchandising director hiring is one of the highest-leverage searches a fashion brand ever runs, and one of the most frequently botched. The merchandising director sits at the exact point where creative vision meets commercial reality. They decide what the line becomes, how it is structured across categories and price points, how it is planned against […]
What Fashion Hiring Managers Actually Look for in a Portfolio
Your fashion hiring portfolio is the single most important asset you bring to an interview, and most candidates underestimate how quickly it gets evaluated. Hiring managers in fashion typically spend less than two minutes on a portfolio before deciding whether to keep reading or move on. That window is not about how beautiful your work […]