Expert Insight into Running a Millinery Business

Hello everybody and welcome to my first blog post for HATalk! I’m thrilled to be here to share my knowledge and help you to thrive in your millinery business.

I’m Beverley Edmondson and I’ll be writing a series of blogs on running a millinery business. Essentially, everything you need to know about millinery from the business side of things, rather than from our naturally creative side!

I’ve had my own millinery business since 2007, building Beverley Edmondson Millinery from my Dad’s spare bedroom to an award-winning millinery boutique with a permanent team, wholesale and own label accounts with high street brands and a successful millinery school over the last eleven years. Three years ago, I added business mentoring to my services, guiding and advising milliners to step out and reach their business goals.

As creatives, I totally understand that the business side of millinery isn’t as naturally inspiring as the creative side. My mission is to get you excited about the possibilities and directions that you can take your millinery business to. I am drawing from personal experience, business training and the things I’ve learned through my work with many other milliners in a mentor capacity over the last few years.

Why start your own millinery business?

Business is exciting! Being the owner of your own business is one of the most exciting things that you can do. (I’m not going to lie, it’s also one of the hardest things you will ever do). To be in total control of your destiny by the decisions that you make is, while certainly not always straight forward, fulfilling. It’s a great feeling to know that if you step up, make good decisions and work smart, you can design the life, the hats and the financial position that you desire.

Just imagine what you could achieve if you put the same passion, time and energy that you have for making hats into running your millinery business! Clients don’t just turn up at your door, it takes time and hustling and consistency. Personally, my business turned around the moment I viewed myself as a businesswoman first and a milliner second. It is a different mindset but, for me, it is the one I need to succeed. Business first.

My biggest lessons in business:

• You learn more from failing than you do from never starting. It’s only a failure if you don’t learn from it.
• Results are directly linked to the effort that you put in (if you work smart and work on the right things).
• Love making hats? To make money out of this passion you can only spend 20-50% of your working time making millinery (unless you have a team who can take over the business bits you don’t enjoy).
• Being resilient is probably one of the most important traits that you need in business.
• Running your own business is one of the hardest things you will ever do.
• Running your own business is one of the most rewarding things you will ever do.
• Decisions are best made quickly, too much deliberation wastes time.
• Charge your worth or, if you do work for free, understand your reasons and expected return for doing that work for free. Many ‘exposure’ opportunities are just not worth the return on investment.

Understanding what you want from your business

Something that many people lose sight of when building a millinery business is what they actually want to get out of it. I’ve seen it time and time again and, with hindsight, I would perhaps have made changes to the ways that I have grown my own business. Having a business is so personal to the owner that if you aren’t enjoying or getting what you need back from it, you need to question if it’s right for you or what you may need to change about your business. Put what you need from your life first and make the business work around that.

Profit First

It may sound harsh but until you put profit first you have a hobby, not a business. If your millinery business doesn’t make as much money as you need it to for the time that you put into it and you are not working to a clearly outlined projected business plan towards making a profit, then something needs to be addressed.

Work/Life Balance

In a seasonal business such as millinery, we will always have times when our work life/balance gets slightly off-kilter. If you are constantly putting more work in than the return you are getting back, however, something needs to change, either by cutting back on the time spent on certain areas of your business or by increasing your pricing. Take time to understand the work/life balance that you desire.

Business Growth

We all want our businesses to grow, but only create the millinery business that you want! Don’t grow for the sake of growing. If you don’t want to run a team and staff, then keep the business at a sustainable rate that you can maintain yourself. If you don’t want to work weekends, don’t create a business that will mean you need to work weekends. Think about the lifestyle that you want and build your business to fit that. It may not be as glamorous as other people’s Instagram accounts or perceived to be as successful, but if working at that level isn’t going to make you happy personally then it isn’t worth it. And don’t forget you are only ever in competition with yourself.

Goals

To achieve and reach our goals we really need to understand what we want from our business. Without clear goals how do we know how many pieces of millinery that we need to make/sell? How do we know how much money we need to live off of? How do we get to where we want to be in five years’ time without goals? My next blog post will focus on goal setting to go into this in more detail.

Money Mindset

Money can be a tough topic to talk about but if you didn’t need to make money from your business to survive, you would find it difficult to work hard at making money. Be strict with yourself and the money that you spend on millinery. If you spend other income on your business make sure you set up a way to repay yourself that money so that the business pays for itself. Money is the most important thing, if you cannot afford to put food on the table to feed your family then your priorities are all wrong.

Understanding You

It may sound strange, but you need to really understand yourself and how you work best. Are you affected greatly by hormones at different times of the month? Do you have productive weeks and less productive weeks because of it? Do any mental or physical health issues affect how you can/can’t work? Do you work best in the evenings or are you an early riser? Plan your schedule around when you will be most productive, even if it changes weekly. You don’t need to fit into the 9:00-5:00 if that doesn’t work for you.

The more you can understand yourself, the more you can plan your business activity to be most productive. As an added bonus, you will be less harsh on yourself when you aren’t being as productive as you had wished. Just remember that it’s your business. Yes, of course, you want it to be profitable. Just make sure you are building the best business for you, not the business you ‘think’ you should be building.

I hope you have enjoyed my first HATalk blog and that it has given you lots of food for thought about how, and why, you are building your millinery business.

Beverley x

About the Author

Beverley Edmondson is a British milliner and business mentor. She works directly with milliners and creatives mentoring them to help them reach their business dreams.

See Beverley’s full bio HERE.