In The Room with Sarah Miyazawa LaFleur
Welcome to the fourth episode of Season Six of the Room Podcast. Today we sit down with Sarah Miyazawa LaFleur, founder and CEO of M.M. LaFleur, a clothing company dedicated towards empowering working women through their wardrobe .
Sarah began her journey at Harvard. Upon graduating, she set out to define herself professionally — she was particularly attracted by the humanitarian sector, drawing inspiration from her experience seeing the effects of poverty first hand while volunteering at a refugee camp in Zambia in highschool. Finding a job in consulting at Bain allowed her to gain professional experience over the course of three years, and later led her to work at a nonprofit called TechnoServe in South Africa. During this time she came to the realization that, although she loved the missions of nonprofit work, Sarah missed the business side of consulting, and returned to New York to pursue that.
Although Sarah never worked in the fashion industry prior to her return, as a consumer she noticed problems in the industry — including the difficulty of fabric care, and lack of stylish yet comfortable workwear options — which propelled her to become involved on a professional level.
On today’s episode we discuss how Sarah’s early professional experiences provided a unique point of view for her to disrupt the fashion industry, the process of designing, sourcing, and iterating on the first pieces as a newcomer in the fashion world, and the future of DTC from both the brand and consumer perspective.
Let’s open the door.
Listen to the fourth episode of season six here.
Key Theme 1: Using experiences to disrupt the fashion industry
Coming from a consulting and consumer background rather than one of high fashion or magazine editing, Sarah was more focused on creating clothes for the everyday working woman, rather than fashion that was “sparkly and loud but largely impractical”. Looking at her own life, Sarah began with the perspective of figuring out what she was missing, and how she wishes her clothes could make it easier to get out of the house in the morning. She combined this consumer mindset with the confidence and problem-solution oriented outlook she gained from consulting in order to create M.M. LaFleur and change the fashion industry.
Key Theme 2: The process of designing, sourcing, and iterating on the first pieces as a newcomer in the fashion world
As a newcomer in the fashion industry, Sarah originally found herself underestimating the difficulty of physically producing clothes. She took it upon herself to put in the effort of hands-on work in order to better understand exactly what she was designing, but even then, Sarah recalls in shock, it still took her a full year to design just seven dresses the company felt confident about.
However, the designing process, Sarah soon learned, was just the tip of the iceberg. Sarah recalls being told in an early meeting that the key to success was all about how she sold her product. Originally struggling with getting customers online, Sarah regrouped and came up with new methods to get the clothes to consumers. She created the successful strategy of sending previous customers boxes of dresses in order to expose them to the products, and ultimately managed to use this to grow revenue eight times over in just one year.
Key Theme 3: The future of DTC from both the brand and consumer perspective
As 95% of Sarah’s sales comes from e-commerce, she is particularly focused on what the future of e-commerce and selling directly to consumers will look like. Above all else, Sarah says she is looking to cultivate a joyful retail experience on the part of the brand and for the consumers. Currently, when consumers book an appointment at M.M. LaFleur they are able to work one on one with a stylist to cultivate their specific look, enjoying some champagne and a friendly back and forth while they’re at it. In the future, Sarah hopes to further integrate this consumerism with a cheerful experience, not only to improve the overall shopping adventure, but also to bring a little more joy to the world which it is currently lacking.
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We will be back next Tuesday for a new, inspiring conversation.
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