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LaQuan Smith’s Empire State of Mind

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ApparelMagic client LaQuan Smith was in a different headspace this season, an Empire state of mind. And quite literally at that, staging his Spring/Summer 2022 show atop the Empire State Building smack-dab in the center of midtown Manhattan.

The venue choice was a statement all its own, and it signaled a new prominence for the designer. Smith, long associated with larger-than-life celebrity clients, is now a household name of his own. And the clothes? They reflected it.

He went bold. Fishnet bodystockings, plush robes, and lingerie transitioned effortlessly into satin minidresses and diamante-encrusted bras. This was not a show for the faint of heart—and not just because of the runway one hundred stories in the air!

Later in the collection, he traded the slick and shine for dazzle-print patterns that evoked the famous black-and-white warships. The LaQuan Smith woman is fierce in the real sense of the word.

Calder Carmel’s access to ApparelMagic’s instant inventory reporting aids their customer loyalty journey

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Mark Calder is no rookie in the menswear game. From stock boy for a haberdasher to creative director of a luxury menswear brand, he has spent decades refining his craft and distilling it into the perfect luxury sport shirts.

In 2018, he put his years of experience center stage when he launched his own shirting line, Calder Carmel, with his merchandising and production manager Kristina Stuckenbrock.

The driving force of the brand isn’t anything new, but it’s something far too hard to find in today’s market.

“The quality will last you forever,” Stuckenbrock says. “We buy from the same mills as top Italian brands, and we use the highest quality fabrics and materials.”

And as if that Italian quality isn’t enough, the design too is special, using exclusively-designed fabrics, unlike the competition, most of whom buy a mill’s collection as-is.

This attention to detail is making a mark. Just two years in business, and they’ve already sold almost 20,000 shirts! The real secret to their success though goes back to the basics: forming positive, sustainable relationships.

“We’re partnering with the best retailers across the United States,” Stuckenbrock says. “Some of them have been in business for a hundred years. They really know their customer.”

And that knowledge is key. Calder’s business strategy is to let retailers do what they do best and provide them with the best products possible, showing real loyalty in the process.

“We really believe in partnering with our customers to sell our product,” Stuckenbrock says. “We’ve taken the position that we don’t want to sell online because we don’t want to compete with our customers.”

While direct-to-consumer sales are many brands’ preferred pivot, this one has its own strategy that precisely suits its market.

“We’ve taken the approach that if we partner with our customers, we’re hoping to gain more market share within their stores because they know we’re not going to be coming up with a fifty-percent-off sale in the middle of November.”

That loyalty goes both ways, and already men are learning about the brand from their favorite specialty stores and becoming repeat customers.

“What’s really exciting is when we hear about how customers in store are reacting to it.” Stuckenbrock says. “We have some dedicated Calder customers now that they call on anytime our shirts arrive!”

Even during 2020’s retail struggles, Calder Carmel worked with their retailers to help them get through a difficult time. Whether it was sending them extra collection photos they could use promoting online, extending payment terms, or shifting delivery dates.

And you know what? It’s worked out. Customers reported their best sell-through numbers this past Fall, even with reduced foot traffic, and some styles even had to be reordered from factories—during a pandemic!

“For this terrible year, we had a positive end to it,” Stuckenbrock says. “We’re confident that we’re going to be able to get back to where we were and see some more increases.”

Alongside their dedicated relationships with retailers and mills, Calder Carmel has been powered by ApparelMagic. For a small team of two, it’s an essential service to get work done efficiently and accurately.

“ApparelMagic helps me do the work of ten people, really,” Stuckenbrock says. “What a gamechanger it’s been for us to easily access information so quickly. We don’t have time to be sorting through Excel documents all the time. When I get a call from a customer, I can tell them what our inventory is.”

And for an era when what can go wrong will go wrong, ApparelMagic has a whole suite of tools to keep businesses on track.

“Without ApparelMagic, we would not be able to instantly report on overdue invoices, upcoming payables, and the many pending orders in the system that remain to be filled,” Stuckenbrock says. “It is truly a lifeline that I am very grateful to have!”

Calder Carmel is ApparelMagic’s 2020 Most Promising Startup

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Mark Calder is no rookie in the menswear game. From stock boy for a haberdasher to creative director of a luxury menswear brand, he has spent decades refining his craft and distilling it into the perfect luxury sport shirts.

In 2018, he put his years of experience center stage when he launched his own shirting line, Calder Carmel, with his merchandising and production manager Kristina Stuckenbrock.

The driving force of the brand isn’t anything new, but it’s something far too hard to find in today’s market.

“The quality will last you forever,” Stuckenbrock says. “We buy from the same mills as top Italian brands, and we use the highest quality fabrics and materials.”

And as if that Italian quality isn’t enough, the design too is special, using exclusively-designed fabrics, unlike the competition, most of whom buy a mill’s collection as-is.

This attention to detail is making a mark. Just two years in business, and they’ve already sold almost 20,000 shirts! The real secret to their success though goes back to the basics: forming positive, sustainable relationships.

“We’re partnering with the best retailers across the United States,” Stuckenbrock says. “Some of them have been in business for a hundred years. They really know their customer.”

And that knowledge is key. Calder’s business strategy is to let retailers do what they do best and provide them with the best products possible, showing real loyalty in the process.

“We really believe in partnering with our customers to sell our product,” Stuckenbrock says. “We’ve taken the position that we don’t want to sell online because we don’t want to compete with our customers.”

While direct-to-consumer sales are many brands’ preferred pivot, this one has its own strategy that precisely suits its market.

“We’ve taken the approach that if we partner with our customers, we’re hoping to gain more market share within their stores because they know we’re not going to be coming up with a fifty-percent-off sale in the middle of November.”

That loyalty goes both ways, and already men are learning about the brand from their favorite specialty stores and becoming repeat customers.

“What’s really exciting is when we hear about how customers in store are reacting to it.” Stuckenbrock says. “We have some dedicated Calder customers now that they call on anytime our shirts arrive!”

Even during 2020’s retail struggles, Calder Carmel worked with their retailers to help them get through a difficult time. Whether it was sending them extra collection photos they could use promoting online, extending payment terms, or shifting delivery dates.

And you know what? It’s worked out. Customers reported their best sell-through numbers this past Fall, even with reduced foot traffic, and some styles even had to be reordered from factories—during a pandemic!

“For this terrible year, we had a positive end to it,” Stuckenbrock says. “We’re confident that we’re going to be able to get back to where we were and see some more increases.”

Alongside their dedicated relationships with retailers and mills, Calder Carmel has been powered by ApparelMagic. For a small team of two, it’s an essential service to get work done efficiently and accurately.

“ApparelMagic helps me do the work of ten people, really,” Stuckenbrock says. “What a gamechanger it’s been for us to easily access information so quickly. We don’t have time to be sorting through Excel documents all the time. When I get a call from a customer, I can tell them what our inventory is.”

And for an era when what can go wrong will go wrong, ApparelMagic has a whole suite of tools to keep businesses on track.

“Without ApparelMagic, we would not be able to instantly report on overdue invoices, upcoming payables, and the many pending orders in the system that remain to be filled,” Stuckenbrock says. “It is truly a lifeline that I am very grateful to have!”

Lola & Sophie wins the 2020 ApparelMagic Growth Award

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With retailers closing down, some for lockdowns and others permanently, fashion brands have had to regroup and rethink their efforts in record time. The businesses who are best set up for success, like ApparelMagic client Lola & Sophie, have completely recalibrated their businesses as we enter a new era.

For Lola & Sophie founder and designer Gene Kagan, it starts with asking the big questions.

“How do we reach our end consumer?” Kagan remembers wondering at the onset of the pandemic and the industry’s mounting retail woes.

For a womenswear brand doing the vast majority of business through wholesale, this past year set the stage for an evolution in strategy.

“In 2019, ecommerce was 10% of our total revenue,” Kagan says. “2020, we’re looking at 30%, and I suspect that 2021 will be a 50% split.”

Those numbers reflect some big changes behind the scenes. Ecommerce sales require some reliable digital infrastructure, and ApparelMagic has been the label’s data powerhouse when it comes to going online.

“ApparelMagic has been instrumental in our pivoting to a direct-to-consumer business model and incredibly flexible with the changes that we needed to make in order to survive this incredibly challenging business environment,” Kagan says.

Kagan’s colleague, ecommerce manager John Cioni, agrees, seeing a myriad of unique ways the brand has used ApparelMagic in recent months.

“At one point we didn’t know who would and who wouldn’t be taking orders,” Cioni says. “So the reporting where we could see projections on our inventory going out into the future was really helpful.”

Cioni cites the ease of working with ApparelMagic’s API to add new functionality to Lola & Sophie’s ecommerce site that all syncs back effortlessly to ApparelMagic.

“We added to our website support for backorder and preorders on styles so we could rapidly recut if need be,” Cioni says. “It’s been great because it allows a revenue stream that may have not been there otherwise. That was huge for us on the ecommerce side of things.”

The new Linesheet Creator tool has also been a welcome surprise for the brand. With more sales appointments remote, their sales team can make quick presentations on the fly.

“What we’ve been doing is custom tailoring linesheets for them to streamline the whole selling process,” Cioni says. “Our in-house sales rep knows her customer. Rather than bogging them down with an hour and a half of product that they will never buy, it’s very tailored to exactly what it is she thinks they could be buying.”

With this kind of thinking, it’s obvious that this isn’t Lola & Sophie’s first rodeo. Having survived fashion’s previous downturn more than a decade ago, the team already knew how to adapt to a changing climate. They knew this was the time to take a few risks to remain relevant.

“We’ve certainly stepped up our efforts with advertising and direct mailings,” Kagan says. “We sent out a catalog at the end of 2020 to go out to 100,000 consumers.”

Why go the route of ink on paper? In an environment of hours-long Zoom meetings and social media scrolling, the opportunity of looking at a physical piece of branding makes for a better connection with Lola & Sophie’s target customers.

“It feels more real than an ad on Instagram or Facebook,” Kagan says. “Our target audience still likes to touch and feel the product before they commit.”

The pandemic has changed a lot of things, but some things, like the fashion industry’s resiliency, prove stronger than ever.

“We’re a creative bunch,” Kagan says. “Give us a challenge and we’ll meet it.”

Portland Garment Factory is ApparelMagic’s 2020 Innovator of the Year

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The saying goes that a crisis shows your true character, and if their approach to 2020 is any indication, Portland Garment Factory is one of fashion’s forces for good.

The Oregon-based factory had been in business for 12 years manufacturing for local and international clients when the pandemic hit. Business slowed right away, according to Donna White, Portland Garment Factory’s operations manager, but they retooled their mission for the short term.

“In March when Covid hit, we saw the loss of projects at the same time that we got word of an impending shortage of PPE in our area,” White says. “We identified two goals for PGF: 1. Stay in business and 2. Be helpers.”

Leveraging their unique position as a domestic manufacturer, Portland Garment Factory immediately saw ways that they could make a difference.

“We hit the ground running and started making medical masks at PGF and selling them at cost to the healthcare community,” White says.

Pivoting to masks ensured that while their production lines might have slowed from client projects, they kept a steady stream of fulfilling work for the team. Their other unique business feature, their online store, aptly named PGF Gift Shop, also became a part of their 2020 plan.

“After the need for medical masks subsided, we started making and selling reusable, cloth masks for the general public as well as custom orders for other businesses and organizations,” White says.

Online among PGF Gift Shop’s offerings is their LeMask, a convertible face mask/head scarf/neckerchief hybrid that for every one sold, they donate a barrier mask to a local nonprofit.

“To date, we’ve made over 60,000 masks in our factory and we’ve donated over 2,700 masks to vulnerable communities.”

In tandem with this shift to producing their own products, they started ramping up their existing offerings including a loose collection of cushions, pet beds, and even clothing and accessories.

The wide variety comes with a message: Portland Garment Factory is a zero-waste facility and items are created using the excess fabric and trims left over from the factory’s client projects. Large scraps turn into attractive patchworks, and tiny leftover pieces of fabric are pulverized and turned into a fluffy filling that beats out conventional synthetic fills in terms of sustainability.

According to White, last year was all about “making the system that we have work to meet the occasion.”

“It’s been a really interesting transition during the pandemic,” White says. “Prior to the pandemic, we were almost exclusively producing client orders at our factory and doing development and full service production.”

Recognizing their business’s capabilities and the pandemic-led push to move more online, they successfully survived–and thrived–in 2020.

“It has been a challenging year but we are grateful that we are still open, and that we’ve had the opportunity to make a positive impact.”

White points to ApparelMagic, the tool they’ve used for the past six years to track and manage their manufacturing, as one system they can rely on when little around them is functioning like normal.

“I’ve had nothing but amazing support from ApparelMagic,” White says.

And what’s next for 2021?

“We’re really hopeful. We’re already experiencing business picking up,” White says. “The kind of business that, pre-pandemic, we relied upon.”

That said, they’re not forgetting what they’ve learned in the past year, and Portland Garment Factory is already planning to expand their gift shop.

Captain Fin saves time and money with ApparelMagic’s automated ecommerce integration

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Automation is the name of the game for surf specialty brand Captain Fin. Since its founding in 2007, the team has been moving from strength to strength, growing to be an international business. Now that Captain Fin is using ApparelMagic and its wide variety of powerful integrations, they’re able to spend less time on data entry and more time on what’s really important: surfing.

The brand started with one simple idea: introduce art into the world of surfboard fins.

“Traditionally surf board fins that go on the bottom of your board were just a solid color,” Captain Fin CEO Danny Gillis remembers. “We grew up skateboarding and snowboarding. Growing up, you always had your favorite snowboard that had artwork on it.”

The Big Idea

But like the extreme sports motto, Captain Fin wasn’t content with just any designs to decorate the line: they went big.

“We were the first company in the surf industry to collaborate with professional surfers, artists, and musicians to put artwork on high performance surf board fins and products,” Gillis says.

The concept has been a hit, growing the brand over time to include men’s and boys’ apparel. Now they’re stocked online, in brick-and-mortar stores, across the US, and in about 40 countries around the world. So how does a brand scale that fast without feeling the pinch?

“We’ve expanded online, and that business is really growing,” Gillis says. “ApparelMagic has helped us in a lot of ways to grow the business and have visibility into the business. What we can do with Shopify and ApparelMagic and systems like this in the cloud is incredible.”

“It’s saved us a lot of time, and it saves us on the manual side for processing orders. A ton of time.”

Danny Gillis, Captain Fin CEO

Growing Pains

It wasn’t always this easy for the brand. They’ve ran their business using multiple systems and found that their old software overcomplicated their data and workflow, to the detriment of the whole team.

“It wasn’t a system that if you hired a new employee they could get on and figure it out. It was highly customizable—too customizable—and it didn’t integrate with anything. It was an antiquated technology.”

The team learned quickly that when a piece of software is integrated, that doesn’t mean it’s optimized.

“It was integrated, but you had to manually push things through,” Gillis says. “You had to go in and look at your orders everyday, and there was some manual entry.”

 
 
 
 
 
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Switching to ApparelMagic

When enough was enough, they looked for something that could save the business time and money, and they found ApparelMagic.

“We needed something that was more scalable, that integrated, and that anyone could get onto and figure it out pretty quickly,” Gillis says. “We couldn’t be happier, honestly. It’s a really good system for that.”

What works for Captain Fin is using ApparelMagic as the central hub of their business, linking it with integrations to Shopify, CartRover, and 3PL Central to round out their workflow.

“What we can do with Shopify and ApparelMagic and systems like this in the cloud is incredible.”

Danny Gillis, Captain Fin CEO

Automated Ecommerce

“We’ve got it all set up now so it’s all relatively automatic and seamless,” Gillis says. “An ecommerce order comes through Shopify into ApparelMagic, pushes over into our warehouse, they ship the goods, and then it pushes back into ApparelMagic with tracking information and shipping. It’s really great. It’s saved us a lot of time, and it saves us on the manual side for processing orders. A ton of time.”

When it comes to ERP and fashion business software, getting started is a pain point for many businesses, and that’s why ApparelMagic’s development has always put the user and their experience first.

“One thing that attracted me, of many, to ApparelMagic was that I didn’t have to customize it. Out of the box, it worked for us,” Gillis says. “It had all the features that you would need, whether you’re a large company or a small company. It had everything I needed.”

 
 
 
 
 
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Captain Fin’s Favorite Features

  • Invoicing – “We’re able to invoice directly through ApparelMagic. It’s hooked up to our email system. We can send invoices, and we can track it all through ApparelMagic.”
  • Multi-Currency – “We do a lot of international business so we’re able to send invoices or estimates or quotes in the currency in the country that we’re dealing with, which is really powerful.”
  • Available to Sell Inventory Reports – “We use the automated ATS reports out of ApparelMagic that [customers] get on a recurring basis so they are able to see inventory and reorder when they need to.”
  • Commission Tracking – “Our sales reps are able to log in and see just the accounts that they deal with. We’re able to see in real time who has been paid, when they have been paid, and what they’ve been paid on.”

Meet the winners of The ApparelMagic Grant for Emerging Designers of Color

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This past June, ApparelMagic started an initiative to see how we could help effect meaningful, positive change in both our community and the wider fashion industry. With this plan, one of our first steps was to create The ApparelMagic Grant for Emerging Designers of Color, a restriction free monetary grant with complimentary service and consulting. 

This grant is a way for us to give back and, we hope, to give more opportunity to people of color working in the fashion industry.

Throughout the selection process, our team was consistently impressed with the great work the ApparelMagic community was doing both in fashion and outside of the industry.

We saw applications from brands across the whole spectrum of sizes, in a multitude of categories, and from old friends and from new connections.

The recipients of the ApparelMagic Grant, below, represent the next generation of blue-chip brands, trend-setters, and most importantly, change-makers. Each recipient is building brands with the potential to make waves far outside of the fashion industry, taking on sustainability, ethical production, community involvement, and philanthropy.

We’re very pleased to introduce to you the promising talents who are recipients of The ApparelMagic Grant:

Anaak

“It’s not about offering disposable or fast fashion.”

Marissa Maximo

Learn more about Properwear

Harx4

“Your story is very important. And people should not be afraid to tell their story.”

Renee Hill

Learn more about Harx4

Jade Swim

Minimal and sustainable swimwear by Brittany Kozerski

Learn more about Jade Swim

Jamila Mariama

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

Jamila Jones

Learn more about Jamila Mariama

Kate&Frances

“Well, why don’t I just make it? I’ve done this before, worked in fashion for twenty years. I can do this.”

Kate Pierre

Learn more about Kate&Frances

Lendrell Martin

“That idea you thought of that other weekend? Put it up. See what happens.”

Lendrell Martin

Learn more about Lendrell Martin

Properwear

“People want to see something different. I can tell in this community.”

Catherine Jean Bell

Learn more about Properwear

Bode Logo

ApparelMagic client Bode nominated for CFDA Award

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ApparelMagic client Emily Bode’s eponymous line, Bode, has earned her a nomination for the 2020 CFDA Menswear Designer of the Year.

Bode’s business, based in New York City, specializes in literally unique garments, many made of reclaimed textiles like quilts or hand-painted with folk-arty designs.

In addition to menswear, the label also has introduced home and baby lines. The home line is a furniture collaboration between Bode and Green River Project, LLC, and the baby line is full of tiny versions of the mainline’s signature shirting.

The CFDA nomination puts Bode in good company. Several ApparelMagic clients have won at the annual award show, many multiple times.

The CFDA Fashion Awards ceremony is one of the most important events in the fashion industry, drawing from top talent across the United States and from overseas.

Normally held in New York each summer, this year the event will be skipped and winners of this year’s awards will be announced on September 14 via social media.

ApparelMagic also partners with the CFDA in their Supply Chain initiative. Read more 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.”

Sportswear staples meet fashion week glam from Sandy Liang

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What does New York’s coolest brand do after almost single-handedly making fleece cool again?

For ApparelMagic client Sandy Liang, the answer was easy: remind everyone how cool you can make other forgotten fashion staples.

Simple looking babydoll dresses revealed hidden complexities in pattern. An apron dress was rendered very literally in a utilitarian-chic black leather. And ruched blouses were paired with strikingly hemmed denim. These were wardrobe basics no longer.

Of course, the fleece look was still there, now updated in sherpa and furry textures and in warm browns and ivories. A more grown-up fleece, if you will.

But the rest of the collection consisted of easy-to-wear separates effortlessly made of-the-moment (and even a little sporty) via Liang’s masterful touch.

While there were new takes on puffers (oversized or eyeball printed) and duster jackets (Wild West styled with huge lapels) the motorcycle jackets Liang presented during her fashion week show, in both bubblegum pink and classic black, were a real stand out. With their tiny pockets they echoed the mini purse trend, but with daring hoop piercings along the neckline, they bit back.

Lauren Manoogian logo

Lauren Manoogian’s soft statement at New York Fashion Week

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It’s 2020 and we’re beyond trends. But then what do we wear? That’s a question that it appears Lauren Manoogian, an ApparelMagic client, asked herself with her collection for Fall/Winter 2020.

And the answer? Forget the hero pieces of seasons’ past. Don’t worry about making something instantly recognizable for a celebrity’s instagram post. Instead, make something seasonless, timeless, but somehow as au courant as ever.

Showcasing her line in an Axel Vervoordt-designed suite at the Greenwich Hotel in New York, she complemented the moody, dark ambience with moody, dark layers of her own in the finest knitwear imaginable.

Silhouettes were generous, all the better to show off the dimension of the fabric itself. Robe belts lay uncinched hanging off of waists, scarves were draped effortlessly around the shoulders. More than just the most luxurious throw blankets, though, these pieces were precisely tailored to float just so.

Wrapped in warm, wide expanses of wools and cashmeres, the fits were as relaxed as the models wearing them. In shades of ecrus, taupes, and charcoals, the fabrics hid in the shadows. Mysterious, yes, but also infinitely tactile. You want to walk up to one of Manoogian’s clients and ask to pet a sleeve, paw at a hem. The craftsmanship might be untouchable, but the clothes are the opposite.