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Designer and ApparelMagic Grant winner Jamila Jones on building her brand

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Jamila Jones is a recipient of the ApparelMagic Grant for Emerging Designers of Color, a new initiative to encourage and empower promising fashion professionals.

The founder of the contemporary womenswear line Jamila Mariama, Jones is experiencing all of the highs and lows of first-time entrepreneurship during one of the most unpredictable times in recent memory.

After establishing the brand four years ago, Jones is now really getting started.

“I don’t want to waste time and hold back building my own brand,” Jones says.

Right out of the gate, she’s already gotten started getting into production, starting small and building an audience for her unique point of view, equally vintage inspired and fashion forward.

“I did a really small capsule collection a few months ago,” Jones says. “I did tie-dye crop tops and masks and sold them at my friend’s store.”

It’s this kind of scrappy ingenuity that will get Jones and her company far in the fashion industry.

The designer, whose corporate fashion job was a recent victim of the latest retail downturn, is optimistic even in a time when few else are.

“It was kind of a blessing in disguise,” she said. “That weight was lifted.”

With more time to develop her line and work on sourcing manufacturers, Jones is well on her way to building a successful brand with all of the challenges that entails. Already in development, Jones will debut a new collection for Jamila Mariama for Spring 2021.

“Especially with COVID, I’ve learned to be super flexible and take things as they come,” Jones says.

Identifying direct to consumer sales as her business’s pathway to growth, Jones weighs what was unheard of just a year ago as just another obstacle to overcome.

“I definitely want to build my online customer base,” she says. “because that’s important, especially if we run into another COVID situation.”

Graduating just four years ago, Jones is punching well above her weight with experience working in a range of different product types and an enthusiasm to experiment in even more.

That experience, however, has also showed her problems within the fashion industry as it exists.

“There have definitely been a lot of times when I’ve been the only black girl on my design team or in a meeting or even during internships,” Jones says.

Jones grew up in a creative, diverse environment, and she’s ready to realize the potential of better representation and inclusion within the industry.

“Now it’s so easy to know so many black designers, stylists, and models because of the internet and social media,” Jones says, “but when I was in high school, I found out everything through Teen Vogue magazine and TV, so it was limited. Now everyone is a lot more accessible.”

And in this slowly changing new world, Jones hopes to pay it forward, speaking excitedly about ideas on how she wants to collaborate with schools and nonprofits, empower women, and work sustainably. She is looking forward when so many of us are stuck on the present.

“I wouldn’t want this year to go the way it did, but it’s been eye opening for a lot of companies,” she says.

For more information on the ApparelMagic Grant for Emerging Designers of Color, the winners, and other resources for fashion businesses, please click here.

SoftShirts automates production and logistics with ApparelMagic and Timereaction

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What is Timereaction?

Function: Timereaction coordinates your day-to-day business operations, managing workflow, communications, and scheduling through an integrated calendar app.

Hosting: Timereaction is cloud based, just like ApparelMagic.

Onboarding Difficulty: Low! The Timereaction interface looks much like calendar systems you already use.

Customer Support: Free support and updates

Pricing: Starting at $150 per month for up to 10 users

Learn More: Get the full story from Timereaction’s website.

Overview

For Clayton Hunt, “it all starts with the cotton.”

Hunt, a co-founder of SoftShirts, an organic T shirt manufacturer, is one to talk: he grew up in the American South, where they know their cotton.

“South Carolina used to be textile center of the country. My family was in the yarn business for 80 years, and I got my chops digging through mills in the South,” Hunt says. “I had mentors who taught me how to knit and sew, so I can go into a dye house and set it up exactly how I want.”

Thanks to Hunt’s know-how, SoftShirts is able to follow a business plan that is almost minimalist in an age when his competitors are trying to expand into hundreds of new SKUs every season: “Make one shirt. Make one fabric. Make one dollar. Keep it real simple.”

Challenges

Simplicity, as is often the case, however, is never so easy to pull off.

SoftShirts manages its production down to the yarn, working with suppliers and factories across the world, bringing yarn from India and quality from Peru—all to create the best T-shirts available on the market.

“Most companies are not doing this,” Hunt admits.

Managing their production process requires full transparency. Hunt, who manages production on his own, needs to know where his materials are and where exactly in their WIP stage they sit as they are knit, cut, and dyed.

Working with his factory in Honduras, Hunt found that they were managing their production with only spreadsheets.

When it comes to making quality apparel on time and on budget, “spreadsheets don’t work.” Hunt says, “Nobody knows whats going on.”

The factory relied on just once weekly reports to keep customers abreast of their production status and schedules, leading to outdated, inaccurate data.

“When you do get a report, the data is a week old. You never know what you’ve got,” Hunt said. “I’m more of a real time reactionary: I need to see it right now.”

At the time, the factory was on the look out for ERP software to meet their increased demands, and that’s how Hunt developed a streamlined workflow for his business, combining the features of some of the best software in the business to create a nearly automated process from production to sales.

Solution

“I spent about a year and a half checking out different systems,” Hunt says. “I probably checked ten systems out. I decided to use ApparelMagic because quite honestly it was the only one that could track my contract management.”

With ApparelMagic as the central hub, Hunt was able to keep accurate inventory throughout the process as he got a bird’s eye view of his production pipeline with the Timereaction integration.

Timereaction, a workflow software, keeps everyone in sync through visual calendars that are both easy to understand and incredibly powerful when used across teams and departments.

SoftShirts uses the integration between Timereaction and ApparelMagic to keep both their office team and their factory’s team on the same page. Teams can mark the status of lots and POs so their counterparts can easily see statuses at a glance.

“So if it’s stuck in QC [quality control] because there’s a hole in the fabric and it’s taken twice the time, it shows red on my screen,” Hunt says, the visual cue showing any hiccups in production as soon as the factory reports them.

Insights

What’s the advantage of using this integration rather than a custom-built solution?

“So essentially, without them having to spend $20,000 on an ERP system and project managment, it’s all tied in,” Hunt says. “And they’ve already got the thing built.”

With his fully-integrated workflow, Hunt has been able to automate much of his production and logistics process.

“It’s in the front door of BigCommerce, straight through ApparelMagic, and out the back door at ShipStation,” Hunt says. “It’s seamless.”

How Anaak manages their supply chain through ApparelMagic

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Calling it a supply chain makes it sound deceptively simple, but there are few things more abstract: for a modern fashion brand, the supply chain is a complex web of materials, manufacturers, suppliers, dates, duties, and international logistics.

For a multinational conglomerate, it’s a department. But for a small business? It’s a full time job. Ethical womenswear brand Anaak uses ApparelMagic as their one-stop shop to track products and their supply chain around the world.

“To have one place that we’re going to to look style by style is really important,” Anaak founder Marissa Maximo says.

Why ApparelMagic?

Time is money in any business, but when you’re a small business with higher order quantities each season, an apparel inventory system is indispensable.

“It reduces the duplication of work and reduces the margin of error. For a small designer, that’s really important,” Maximo says. “Whatever investment you have, you need to make it worth your while and have a strong ROI.”

Maximo, whose brand is centered around ethical production by highly skilled female artisans in India, is committed to keeping visibility over her entire supply chain, often traveling to work with the women for months at a time.

A Central Hub

“How did it get made? How did it get the trim? How did it employ people? How did it ship?” she asks. “It’s all these hidden costs that people don’t realize.”

And it’s all of these hidden aspects that ApparelMagic can track.

Using ApparelMagic as a central hub for her business, Maximo has a virtual home for her data with the sales figures from the London showroom, the product designs from the US, and the POs going to India now all in one place.

“The showroom will show the collection to buyers from all around the world,” Maximo says. “We enter the orders into ApparelMagic, and then pull our factory production purchase orders, which is very helpful to have automated.”

Maximo is able to communicate clearly and quickly with her collaborators in every time zone, using reports created directly from ApparelMagic.

“From the production order, you can also print the dye lot, so the factory can quickly see how many styles and how many colors,” she says.

Making Connections

Utilizing ApparelMagic’s connections to the industry’s top services in ecommerce, B2B, logistics, and more, Anaak can do their bookkeeping through ApparelMagic or software like QuickBooks or Xero.

“We do all of our accounting through QuickBooks,” Maximo says, “And so to be able to do that sync is also helpful.”

With all her data under control and ApparelMagic as the central hub, Maximo is able to focus on Anaak’s real mission: making clothing responsibly and giving new opportunities to “all the people that I work with all the way down my supply chain,” Maximo says. “Which might be a short supply chain, but it’s a meaningful one.”