That’s Business podcast<\/a> she had never had a single paid job in the fashion industry when she started the brand.<\/p>\n“I just started sewing, like no overheads, everything myself. My friends were very supportive \u202fat the start and they were all my muses. They were in all my photo shoots,” she said.<\/p>\n
“Organic social media, Instagram, was probably the biggest thing. The first two years it was just me posting pretty much every day.”<\/p>\n
Despite the widespread use of social media, especially Instagram, to access her market, Ms Mildren said she did not pay influencers to wear her clothes.<\/p>\n
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Influencers do not get paid to wear the Katharina Lou label. (Supplied)<\/p>\n
“We actually don’t pay any influencers. We do a lot of gifting, which has really worked for us as a brand,” Ms Mildren said.<\/p>\n
“I just don’t really see the merit in paying people who are going to wear the clothes anyway. I think we’ve built a really good kind of rapport with some influencers who have a lot of style.”<\/p>\n
Instead, the brand relies on paid advertising on social media channels and uses pop-up sales events.<\/p>\n
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The Katharina Lou brand has a turnover of $2-4 million a year. (Supplied)<\/p>\n
There are even special group dinners for their customers.<\/p>\n
“That’s been such an amazing tool for our business growth as well because it really does show that we do put the customer first,” Ms Mildren said.<\/p>\n
“All of my staff come to them.\u202fIt’s so much fun to really connect with our customers.<\/p>\n
“It’s also a great way to talk to our customers and really ask them what they want and what they’re looking for.”<\/p>\n
‘A lot of mistakes’ on road to success<\/p>\n
But building a business has been a steep learning curve for the fashion degree graduate.<\/p>\n
“We never learned how to even talk to factories or negotiate prices with factories, all that kind of stuff that is so integral to the fashion industry,” she said.<\/p>\n
“It’s a daily battle trying to find new factories and factories that are ethical and have the quality standard that we want.<\/p>\n
“I definitely am making a lot of mistakes kind of on my own dime.”<\/p>\n
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The Katharina Lou brand relies on paid advertising on social media channels. (Supplied)<\/p>\n
Like any business selling to the US, she has also been affected by tariffs, with the business pulling back on US promotions after they were introduced.<\/p>\n
“But if someone buys a $350 dress from us, the duties and taxes are like over $150. It’s quite crazy.\u202fSo we’ve definitely seen that drop,” she said.<\/p>\n
Hopes for own store<\/p>\n
Despite her success, Ms Mildren does not see her future in a major department store.<\/p>\n
“That doesn’t really tickle my fancy at all. I don’t see that,” she said.<\/p>\n
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Buyers are unlikely to see Katharine Lou stocked in a major department store any time soon. (Supplied)<\/p>\n
“When you go into those wholesales and you lose a bit of control. And if we’re doing so well direct to consumer, why would we?\u202f”<\/p>\n
But she would one day like her own store.<\/p>\n
“I would love a permanent store. That’s something I’m kind of figuring out at the moment because we do see such amazing things come from each pop-up,” she said.<\/p>\n
“It would be amazing for people to be able to come to that store and see it as kind of like an Australian fashion brand, which is what I do want to build and create.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Katharina Mildren’s clothes have attracted legions of fans online and she ships items around the world, but there…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":731373,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[64,63,134,223397,129084,354013,354012,1314],"class_list":["post-731372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-fashion-designer","tag-fashion-label","tag-katharina-lou","tag-katharina-mildren","tag-social-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=731372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731372\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/731373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=731372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=731372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=731372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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