all I needed was this inspiring push.

Last week before I left on my holiday trip, I attended a seminar hosted by Her World & herworldPLUS - How to make it in fashion. It was held in conjunction with the Asian Fashion Summit at Suntec's newly renovated Conference Halls. To be honest, I signed up for it on impulse - I was reading the article "9 tips that all aspiring fashion designers should know" and found out there was this really affordable seminar (a mere $15 as compared to the other conferences costing from $149 to $449). So I went for it.

I was expecting the talk to cover stuff about what young designers should expect (no glamorous red carpet but hours of sweating through the night with hardly any sleep) and how to survive in it. On the contrary, it was mostly about e-commerce and what you have to do when you first started out.

I shall pick out some golden advice I took from the four speakers and share them here.

The first speaker was Debra Langley (CEO and Founder of Inverted Edge). One thing she kept emphasising was not be afraid to fail. When you fail, learn from your mistake, pick yourself up and try again. You can keep failing - it's fine as long as you don't make the same mistakes. She kept failing when she first started out, but every time she fail, she failed with a different mistake.

Planning is one thing she feels that a lot of designers these days fail to do. Business plan, merchandise plan, marketing plan, logistics plan, etc. It may sound easy, but many people failed to do so. When you don't have a plan, the business is fragile and hard to succeed. It will be very hard to retain your customers because (for example) they do not know what your company's identity is, when will your new collection be launched, how fast can they get the new arrivals once it's launched. I made this mistake myself many years ago when I tried a small online venture. I launched everything at one go, and never launch anything new for months while I continue to try to market my stuff.

The second speaker Pamela Wigglesworth caught our attention with her interesting real-life examples. We all know that social media is important in today's business world. But I didn't know just how important it is. Taken from her article on her blog, this was what she said at the seminar too - there is 1.19 billion active monthly Facebook users. Look at the numbers carefully. 1.19 billion active monthly Facebook users. That is how much customers we can reach out via Facebook!

It's very important to keep the conversation going. The conversation that Pamela speaks about is the "conversation" between you and your customer. This conversation is important as it helps to pull old customers back into your store, reminds them of your existence, etc. This may not come as a new piece of information but I'm sure many of us neglect this. We are all so eager to attract customers into our store, but we all forget about customer retention and also making them come back for more.

Thomas Tan was so excited even before the seminar starts. As he was chatting to other attendees before the seminar start, his high-pitched voice rang across the room and infected everyone with his excitement. He is a very jolly speaker. He shared his personal experiences when he first graduated and try to find his way around before finally becoming a mentor at TaFf. He brought up a very good point - when you graduated from the Fashion Design Diploma or Degree, you don't necessarily have to be a fashion designer. There are many other ways to work in the Fashion industry. Like he shared, there are some students who are excellent drafters or drapers or seamstress. The lecturers could see that too. But such rare talents became lost in the sea of thousands of fashion graduates (yearly) when they graduate just wanting to be a fashion designer with their own label.

Priscilla Shunmugam (founder and designer of Ong Shunmugam) came in halfway through the seminar looking jet-lagged. That's because she just had her first solo runway the night before at Audi Fashion Week 2014. While fighting her fatigue (she was surviving on 2 hours of sleep every night for many many nights), she shared her stories of how she started off. She managed to return the money she borrowed from her friends (to buy fabrics to start making dresses to sell) within 9 months and began making profit in 11 months. It is an impressive feat. She fought off comments from the audience that her success came with luck. It came with sacrifices (social life, job, etc), plenty of research and in my opinion, quite some natural talent in tailoring.

So as you can see, it's quite unexpected and really inspiring. I'll be looking out for more workshops/seminars of similar nature because this is really the best way to learn new knowledge from the professionals or people in that industry who has been there done that.