In part three, I'll be exploring how do you finance your fashion business?

Just to note that this talk was recorded in front of a live audience, so please excuse any audio issues.

So part three of the business of fashion basics is how do I finance my fashion business?

Financing a business in fashion is a really, really critical piece of the puzzle to understand.

As I said in part one, you need capital to make these things work.

The question is, where do I get that capital from?

And why is it so important to running a business? In order to kind of put things into perspective, what I'd like you to do is just think about a theoretical season.

Say, and this is really based around the first season for a new fashion business that's just starting out. As we know, fashion

typically happens on a six-month cycle between when a collection is developed and

when it actually hits the shop floor. So the question is what are all the things that

need to happen between the design of the collection and delivering the collection

in order to finance it.

And the truth is, in a fashion business, you will incur many, many, many costs before

you see any revenue.

And this is probably the biggest challenge of working in the fashion business.

In the first season, you might be thinking

about design or researching some fabrics, and that doesn't necessarily cost you that much. It's

mostly your time. And researching fabrics is also not really a costly thing to do. But very soon,

as you've decided on what your fabrics are

and you start developing samples, you'll start incurring costs. Then you need to somehow

sell the collection. You need to get away, find a way to get that collection in front of people's

eyes and build awareness about that collection.

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