Any business can be boiled down to a series of choices. At first it’s the founder making the choices, but eventually the choices also might belong to the investors, employees or executives. But the difficult part is that, as a founder, it isn’t always clear which choices are the “right” ones. All we can do is hope that we’re making more good decisions than bad ones. Or at least that we catch the bad decisions and alter them before things get too far.

There is no instruction manual for starting a fashion brand. Or, rather, there are millions of them, but none of them seem to agree. I absorbed a lot of them, in the form of blog posts, YouTube videos, and online lessons. Everybody is so eager to share their story, to say what worked for them or for their clients, and help others to navigate the scary world of starting a new fashion brand without making the same rookie mistakes they did. And I appreciated and took comfort in hearing their stories, really. But everybody’s story is different and their goals and desired outcomes are widely diverse, and everybody has a different opinion on how to get started. Eventually, I came to the understanding that there is no right answer, we’re all on our own, and a lot of what happens with the brand depends on luck. So, I decided that maybe I can be one of the lucky few, but I’ll never know if I don’t try.