052 Hillary France - The CEO of Brand Assembly Has Got Fashion's Back

A self-described “supply chain nerd” Hillary France, the CEO and co-founder of Brand Assembly, is helping fashion creatives focus on crafting their visions of the future while she and her team take on the day to day, back of house fundamental tasks that any growing small business has to master if it wants to become successful. Her full-service BtoB business does everything from bookkeeping, warehouse management, and running e-commerce operations to creating costing sheets, merchandising and sales plans, and even social media and global marketing strategies. But Hillary, who founded her company in 2013, wanted to do even more for her clients. She also organizes trade shows and created a co-working space called The Square, with locations in New York and Los Angeles, for people to meet up and hopefully collaborate on the next big thing. She also hosts monthly panels and workshops to help her clients stay on top of the latest innovations taking place in the industry. Before branching out on her own, Hillary, who is a graduate of Duke University, cut her retail buying and wholesale teeth at marquee brands like Diane von Furstenberg, Kate Spade, Guess and Kimberly Ovitz. And was even behind the launch of the Rachel Zoe brand for the Li and Fung company. Today, just like thousands of other fashion-focused companies Hillary has had to pivot her business working model post-pandemic as the world continues to maintain social distancing practices. Brand Assembly is launching later this month its first ever virtual tradeshow platform with two portals: one for Brand Assembly Show called Pages and one for Reassembled Show called Grid. Brand Assembly is also adding other forms of virtual content such as panel discussions, workshops and showroom walk-throughs on Zoom on the dates they would usually have had their in-person trade show, from June 22nd through to June 24th. The tag line for Brand Assembly is “Our mission is simple: help brands reach theirs”. It is clear that Hillary has taken this message to heart and has no intention of letting something like a global pandemic or a corona economy keep her from giving brands the support they need to become the successes they always dreamed of. Just on a technical side note, I did want to let all you listeners know that Hillary and I did our interview over Zoom Video. So don’t be surprised by a couple of very minor audio issues. And if you happen to be more of a visual learner, feel free to head over to my signature YouTube channel to watch the video version of this podcast in action. Now let’s listen to Hillary talk about how she sees the future of fashion shaping up, as she takes on the topics of seasonal collections, markdown cycles, and the growing power of the digital space for fashion brands.