How to Use Lean Fashion to Keep Fashion Brands Simple and Highly Effective

One thing is common to all fashion brands, the people at the helm of affairs have to make decisiions. In the end, a good brand is the sum of good business decisions. In this edition of Fashion Business, we will look at some proven managerial principles that fashion brands can employ for more productivity and structure within. 

Let me pop a question here: What do you think of lean brands?

By lean I do not mean starving, impoverished brands, but brands with lean managerial and staffing numbers. Keeping the numbers down to meet what is absolutely essential is what chiefly defines a lean brand. It helps to make sure that you are not creating space that is not needed in your brand. 

Don’t create space in your brand that you do not need.

As the Creative Lead Designer or Creative Lead of any brand, your primary job is to manage people to make sure that what needs to be done gets done. Whether it is getting a measurement taken, getting the finances balanced, having an interlocking done, doing finishing for a fashion product… whatever it is, people get it done. 

That is why staffing is so important to the growth of any brand.

As your staffing grows, the number of energy and resources needed to manage them also increases; this takes away from what you should be focused on delivering to the world. 

What is the key to lean staffing, then?

It is simple. Hiring the right people and putting them in the right roles. 

What a single right person in a key position will do towers over what many low-level people will do if you divide that same role among them. Get better people to handle key roles in your brand, give them really big tasks to accomplish, enlarge their responsibilities and let them work.

Can you manage other people?

That is not proven becuase you cannot manage or control every thing that an individual does while in your employ. But here’s the thing; you can manage yourself. The goal of lean staffing is to work with the maximum potential that each person on your team brings. 

However, how can you expect others to perform at the highest levels without expecting that of yourself? Peter Drucker, an expert on Management, once said, “the ration of a leader’s performance to those on his or her team remains constant”. This means that if you want the average performance of your staff to go up, you must first improve your own performance.

You must learn how to manage your time, your tasks, and your energy if you will manage your people effectively and get the best growth for your fashion brand within the right timeframes.