don't call me a cougar

As a female internet entrepreneur myself, I know we are a relatively rare breed, so I was very impressed with Caroline Beau de Lomenie, French, married, mother of three, living in London who has set up her own site to supply fashionable clothes for dolls.

Here’s my interview with her…

J: Caroline, so how did you get the idea?
C:I was talking to a friend who asked me where to find clothes for her daughter’s Barbie. I looked and there wasn’t anything on the market, online or off. There was very little available and what was out there was bad quality and bad design. The only fashionable clothing available was on the Barbie site, but you couldn’t buy the clothes without the doll, plus they were collectors items priced over $50 not really for little girls to dress their dolls.

J: Had you been thinking about setting up your own business?
C: Yes I’d just had my third child and was looking around for an idea. Various ideas were marinating in my head and when I saw this gap in the market I knew I should develop it.

J: How did you fund it?
C: I had inherited some money which really wasn’t enough to do anything with, like building a new bathroom, but my brother had inherited the same amount and so we put the money together and went into business as a team. It was enough to start something decent. We went to see an accountant and he set up the company very easily.

J: What was your next step?
C: The next step was finding the name. I liked dollita.com but asking around I realised that dollita had too many Lolita connotations and in the UK that is more negative than in France where it just means a sassy young girl. Then we hit on fashionette but the dot com was taken so we registered fashionette.co.uk and fashionette-dollswear.com.

J: What was the next step?
C: We needed to find a designer to do the first samples. We found her through personal contacts and then we had to decide where to get the clothes manufactured. We decided against China, and started looking for somewhere in North Africa. We felt it was nearer to home and we wouldn’t have a language problem. We contacted the chamber of commerce in Morocco who put us in touch with several clothing manufacturers. None of them wanted to do the work for us but several of them suggested we try a manufacturer in Tunisia who specialized in dolls clothes and soft toys. We went to see him and it worked out well. He is an honest man, with good working practices and has a group of women working for him who seem happy.

We took him the fabric, patterns, technical drawings and samples made by the designer to try out to see if he could do what we wanted. I then had to source wholesale fabric so after a holiday in SW France, left the kids with my parents-in-law and went off to Paris.
I tried the Marché St Pierre, which is a well known place for fabric sellers, but it was way too expensive. Then I tried Sentier which is the area for fabric wholesalers and that was far more within my budget.

J: Did you not think you could find fabric in the UK?
C: It was more that with the traditional links between France and North Africa it would be easier to ship the fabric to Tunisia.

J: What was next?
C: We had to find another designer as the original one was too busy with her day job, so I put an ad in the London Fashion School and was inundated with replies. For some reason one email stood out. I always follow my instinct and decided to meet her first. I couldn’t have told by her name but it turned out she was French-Tunisian. She brought her book of designs along and I had no idea how to assess whether she was good or not, but I liked her and she did our first set of full designs and they turned out very well. I returned to the wholesalers in Paris to choose which fabric should be used with which outfit [that took a month!], had it shipped and then went out to Tunisia myself to make sure everything was clear.

J: What about the site, how was that coming along?
C: By the time I went to Tunisia the site was almost finished and I needed photos of the clothes to put on the site and was hoping it would all be done by Christmas, but things always take longer than you think, and the outfits to be photographed are only ready now. We’ve had to redo the packaging and find different printers as I wasn’t happy with the Tunisian samples.

We hope to launch in May. It won’t just be Barbie clothes but all clothes for fashion dolls between 10” and 12” for little girls in the 5 – 9 age group.

J: One last question, aren’t you afraid of encouraging a generation of difficult little fashionistas?
C: Isn’t that what all little girls are anyway?!

By Julia

Check out the site: http://www.fashionette-dollswear.com/

Tags: boutique, chic, dolls, entrepreneurs, female, linkedin

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 at 12:39 and is filed under Female Entrepreneurs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.