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The British Fashion Council (BFC) has announced the nominees for this year’s Foundation Award: Newgen designers Aaron Esh and Tolu Coker, BFC Fashion Trust recipient Labrum London, BFC/GQ Designer Fashion Fund 2024 winner Bianca Saunders and BFC/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund 2024 winner Chopova Lowena.
The winner will be announced at the The Fashion Awards on 2 December at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The Fashion Awards is the primary fundraiser for the BFC Foundation, a registered UK charity, which was set up in 2019 to provide education, grants and business mentoring to designers.
The award is intended to celebrate the current cohort of designers receiving support through one of the foundation’s core initiatives: Newgen, BFC/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund, BFC/GQ Designer Fashion Fund and the BFC Fashion Trust. All brands that receive funding from the BFC Foundation are on a voting list, which the committee of 1,000 industry leaders selects from.
“The Foundation Award gives us an opportunity to celebrate the designers that are supported through the charity,” BFC CEO Caroline Rush tells Vogue Business. “The Foundation Award is a way of tying together The Fashion Awards, which is about celebrating incredible creativity, putting British designers on a global platform, and of course it’s quite often our biggest fundraiser for the BFC Foundation charity.”
Prizes like those awarded at The Fashion Awards and programmes like those offered via the BFC Foundation, represent important opportunities for independent designers, but are not enough on their own to guarantee success. It’s been a tough few years for independent brands: the traditional model is under threat, with wholesale market challenges mounting, Brexit adding complications for UK brands trading with Europe, consumer habits changing, and rising costs weighing on independent brands — many of whom have gone into administration over the past two years.
Beyond the awards, the BFC Foundation funded research on the business models and principles needed to sustain a commercially viable designer fashion business. A report, titled ‘Commercialising Creativity 2.0: Creating a Success Model for British Fashion Designers’, was published on Wednesday in collaboration with the London Business School. It’s the second iteration of the Commercialising Creativity report, which was first published in 2014.
“Ten years ago, [the report’s advice] was really much more around the basic principles of management — predominantly wholesale channels or going direct-to-consumer,” says Rush. “In the last five years, we’ve seen so much change in our industry. The Commercialising Creativity report gives us an opportunity to give some recommendations around [the current challenges], not only for us as the British Fashion Council, but for the government and industry at large, as a way of thinking about how we can come together and support businesses to grow.”
The report outlines two phases for designer fashion businesses. The first phase, “build and thrive”, involves defining your vision, the founder’s role in their business, knowing your customer and developing solid cash flow management and operations. “Having control over our cash flow means we have options — without it, we’re stuck in survival mode,” says one designer quoted in the report.
The second phase, “scale successfully”, outlines how to choose talent and partners to build out the business’s capabilities and expertise. It also recommends the best go-to-market framework, including how to expand — or enter — into retail, when to expand into wholesale and how to navigate distribution, licensing, collaborations and incubators. “The access to finance bit is incredibly important — making sure that they’re understanding the business’s funding needs and the opportunities to get cash into the business, whether that’s through collaboration, investment or factoring,” says Rush, highlighting that this is an opportunity to work hand-in-hand with the government and financial institutions to generate the cash necessary for designer fashion businesses to thrive.
What does it mean to be successful as an independent brand? The report suggests three metrics: creative acclaim, communication perception and commercial acclaim. The problem many brands face is the gap between creative success and commercial viability. Commercially, a successful brand must behave as a business, recognise the importance of product development, have a unique proposition, have strong production and distribution, and understand funding and financing options (such as when to seek external investment), the report states.
The report calls on stakeholders to support the growth of fashion businesses. For instance, the BFC can support designers by providing a platform for knowledge-sharing and mentorship, and industry players and wholesale partners can offer more flexible support to emerging talent. “One of the key themes that came out from [the research] was the opportunity to work in tandem with industry grantees — bigger businesses who can think about how to use their support across the value chain, their contacts and network to support smaller businesses as they grow,” says Rush, referencing production, logistics, supply chain contacts and payment terms.
Meanwhile, the report highlights that it’s on policy makers to improve regulation and access to funding. On Wednesday, the UK Labour government announced its first budget, which included clarity on the corporate tax roadmap, commitments to cut down on shoplifting and retail crime, and increases to the minimum wage and employer National Insurance contributions, among others. Following the election announcement, the BFC made five recommendations to the new government to support the British fashion sector, including reinstating tax-free shopping for tourists, expanding trade and export investments, introducing sustainability legislation supporting fashion education, and building a pipeline of skilled workers.
For the five brands nominated for the Foundation Award, maintaining a successful business will take more than recognition and celebration — it will require a serious rethink of the UK’s support toward small businesses, particularly those in the creative industries.
“The government’s great agenda is really important for us, but it’s making sure that it is something that’s accessible for the smaller entrepreneurial businesses,” says Rush. “It’s about having an open dialogue with the government to make sure they’re not just looking at big businesses and opportunities for growth there, but they’re mindful of the opportunity to support the many small independent businesses across the UK to enable them to continue to grow and contribute to our economy.”
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