Australian Fashion Laureate winner A.BCH founder Courtney Holm discusses how her brand 'grew up' in 2020.
As any emerging label might do, since our early days we’ve pursued almost every opportunity that presented itself, from runway shows to round tables, competitions to pop ups and more.
Amongst all that busyness, I’d often grapple with how A.BCH fit into the fashion industry.
Most often, we wouldn’t meet the criteria and I’d find myself explaining why we didn’t have a new collection to show, stockists or a retail markup.
Disobeying most fashion business rules, I’ve frequently felt like an industry misfit and it was a challenge to stay the course.
When the severity of the pandemic dawned, the network of threads holding the industry together began to break.
Billions of dollars of orders were cancelled or left unpaid to suppliers, retail shuttered and product assortments became obsolete overnight.
But COVID-19 wasn’t the problem here. It just happened to be the final cut in exposing the fashion system’s fundamental flaws and inequitable arrangement.
It seems A.BCH was built to weather the pandemic storm. Wholesale was never something that felt right for us.
We needed to be part of each customer transaction to follow through with care instructions, repairs and our recycling take back program.
Hyper local supply chains and producing in-house gives us greater control over stock and materials, which are kept lean and backfilled regularly.
Our product releases don’t adhere to seasonal collection expectations - things are ready when they're ready.
The pieces themselves are built for timeless appeal, comfort and health, never for trends.
We don’t discount and our marketing efforts focus on loving your clothes and making them last, and we think that’s always relevant.
So in 2020, we found our feet.
Our business foundation was solid and all the stuff we’d thought was essential to fitting into the industry, but never felt quite us, didn’t seem to matter so much.
This year we’ve had the space to focus on what was important to our community, like continuing to educate practically on garment care and invest in a better online experience for customers.
We developed and produced a much-loved compostable face mask, gifting hundreds of them to our community and making our pattern open source for anyone to access.
And we re-imagined the concept of fashion seasons and launched our own A.BCH Seasons – which aren’t based on collections but on education and celebration of the lifecycle of a garment in its Birth, Life and Afterlife.
We’ve learned that we’re at our best when we fully embrace our deep-set values (however challenging they are to enact or explain) and to continually renew an action-based focus on our community.
Thinking back to fitting in, we clearly aren’t a typical fashion label.
While we still have a lot to learn, we don’t need to do every expected thing in all the expected ways in order to succeed.
Winning the 2020 Australian Laureate for Sustainable Innovation (Emerging Designer) has proven that it’s alright to be an industry misfit.
And to me, that feels a little bit like growing up.