She Asked. That's the Part I Keep Thinking About.
So. Last week I sat next to Anine Bing at dinner.
The Agency hosted a dinner at their showroom for Australian store owners and stockists. A dozen of us, one long table, and me lucky enough to be in the seat beside her.
She is a genuinely divine human. Warm, funny, entirely herself, and without a shred of the ego you might expect from someone who has built what she's built. She asked about my family. She remembered people's names.
But the thing that's actually stayed with me all week is something else.
It's that she spent most of the night asking.
Nobody asks
She wanted to know what we want. What our customers want. What they're asking for, what they're not, what a woman says when she comes out of our fitting room. Actual questions, waiting for actual answers, from someone who has built a global brand from nothing and could very reasonably have spent the evening telling us about it.
I don't think that's a nice personality trait she happens to have. I think it's the job. The brands that keep getting it right are, almost without exception, the ones still asking. The ones that stop asking start designing for a woman who existed five years ago, and you can see it on the rail, and eventually so can she.
What she's actually making
Her thinking on the clothes is refreshingly logical, and it's the other reason the night stuck with me.
She designs for real life. Lifestyle pieces you can genuinely wear, that stay in your wardrobe for years rather than for one summer. Not clothes that photograph well and then hang there with the tag on. Clothes that go into the rotation and stay in it.
Hearing it said that clearly by the person making the decisions was, honestly, a relief. It's the same test we apply when we buy. It was good to hear it coming back the other way.
The rest of the table
The other thing I didn't expect was how much I'd get out of everyone else in the room.
Mostly women. All running their own stores. All working extremely hard, all juggling families and staff and stock and the rest of it, all trying to get the balance right and mostly feeling like they haven't quite managed it. Riding the highs and the lows of business, and of life, which in our case are so tangled together it's hard to tell which is which by Friday.
Retail is a strangely lonely job for something so social. You're in your four walls, with your numbers, making decisions nobody else can make for you. You forget that there are women doing exactly the same thing in Sydney, Perth, Brisbane and Melbourne, second-guessing the same buys, lying awake over the same things, having the same very good week followed by the same quiet one.
We talked for hours. Nobody pretended they had it sorted. I came home full, and not only from dinner.
What I took home
Two things, really.
That creativity and humility go together more often than you'd expect, and that the people at the top of this industry who are still curious are the ones who stay there.
That clothes you actually wear are a higher bar than clothes that look good, and the second is much easier to achieve than the first.
The new Anine Bing has landed, in store and online. Come and have a look, or tell us what your week actually looks like and we'll put a few things aside for you.
Shop Anine Bing →
