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Leonard: Today’s session is about retail in fashion, both local and international. So with that said, I would like to start introducing our speakers, they represent different perspective in this business, each of them are here today because we feel that they suit the subject. First, I would like to introduce Chris Kerrigan, one of the co-founder of Brightspot Market. His perspective will be more of an independent retail and he would be sharing with us a lot of what Brightspot [market] is about, how they started, and how it relates to the market right now. Next to me is Nina from Nikicio, maybe some of you already know, she is a fashion designer, an independent designer, she is pushing her own brand, and she will be sharing to us some of her experience and how to build a fashion brand. And next to me, on my left is Marcel, Marcel is a brand owner of his family business, Delami brands. Delami brands is a manufacturing of several brands under their belt, and here he is with us, because we feel that there should be a perspective from the manufacturing side. And last but not least is Nic, Nic is the founder of 707 and T-Lab, some of the progressive retail that we see in Jakarta. He also represents a lot of the international brands from abroad.Leo: So, I would like to start with Nina. So Nina, I’m sure they all would like to know what year did you start and how did you get started in this business here?

Nina: Hi everyone, anyway, I started the business in 2007. Before, I started in Singapore where I was working for this local company called Victoria. It was for menswear tailoring. I was working for him as a fashion designer, but then I realized that it wasn’t really going anywhere as designer. So I was thinking why don’t I just build my own brand. So I went back to Jakarta, and started on my own brand. It started very small actually, it started only from a website and then from there it took off.

Leo: Okay, basically we would like to establish a current state of the fashion retail in Indonesia, as Nina said she is practically a young brand, 3 years old. But she is able to catapult her brand into the scene. And I would like to ask the next question to Marcel, probably they are curious why, because I know you actually have your own brand but then you decided to join your family business, why is that?

Marcel: Actually, I’ve been starting my own business since junior high school that is around 2000 to 2001. I’ve been through a lot of things from that year and after some period of time my family found out that I had those kind of business. They offered me the chance to start learning in the family business. I was thinking, okay, I could learn a lot of new things in my family business, in terms of the international brands, in terms of the technical side and everything. So yea, I wanted to learn.

Nic: My background in as you know is finance, not retail at all. And when I first moved here, I was actually quite tired of working in that field, because you don’t get to see anything tangible. I was not actually looking specifically to work in retail, but to open something which I can see every day, which can affect a lot of people and which allows me to be creative and experience the process of developing a brand, working on a concept and building a business. It just happened, and having spent time here, I saw the different retails here which were quite stagnant. There wasn’t really anything away of investing progressive type of store, a store that try to show people something different, a store where product has to be led by the taste of the owner rather than what they thought they could sell to the customer. So it’s sort of came out of that, because there was potential of opportunity in the business.

Leo: So that’s very interesting, what you said about led by the taste of the owner, so basically there is a lot of curation that goes into it. I guess that is sort of similar with the initial idea of Brightspot Market as well. Perhaps Chris would like to share the beginning of Brightspot Market?

Chris: Well, we started Brightspot in early 2009. We started it basically because we saw a lot brands are really interesting and they would like to kind of expand to become more than just distro which was obviously quite common. They are great designers, like Nina, and quite a few others, the problem was none of them really has a place to showcase their products. Most of them like Nina said, started with websites and selling it to friends. So what we wanted to do was to create a bridge between where the actual retailers and buyers in the malls met. We wanted to give that society a chance to showcase those products to larger audience, really give them a chance to expand their brands, and at the same time they can earn money to keep it going and so on. We decided to do it by taking over big spaces in malls, because at the time there were lots of empty spaces in malls. Basically, we set it up like a trade show, and open it up to the public. At first not a lot of people understood what we were doing; they thought it was just a bazaar. We wanted to elevate a little bit from that and do something a lot more interesting.

Leo: I guess, now you understand a little bit about each of the speakers’ position. They are here today, because we wanted to establish sort of market discussion rather than a discussion about what is going on in retail from their perspectives and also from this discussion, hopefully it will be something useful for you guys especially for the fashion design students.

To read the full-length discussion, please download it in the link here.

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Video by: Heru Admadja