How reading The Art of Retail Buying taught co-founder of sustainable fashion label Allegory everything she needed to know about business
- Fiona Fang, co-founder of sustainable Hong Kong fashion label Allegory, talks about the book that changed her life
- She read it when starting out as a buyer, to get a basic education about fashion, and it solidified her theories about retail
Marie-Louise Jacobsen’s The Art of Retail Buying: An Insider’s Guide to the Best Practices from the Industry (2009) is a detailed, step-by-step guide to the role of a retail buyer and the many skills it encompasses, written by a professional buyer with more than 28 years’ experience in the industry.
Fiona Fang, co-founder of sustainable Hong Kong fashion label Allegory, which exclusively uses deadstock fabric, tells Richard Lord how it changed her life.
I read the book when I was just starting out in my career. I didn’t study fashion at school – I studied marketing and accounting as an undergraduate, and international business for my master’s. Nothing in my education was fashion-based; everything I know about fashion is from doing the job. I didn’t even know that buying was a thing until I came into the working world. I couldn’t believe it. It sounded like the dream job.
I was working at Dickson Concepts, which was the licensee for Ralph Lauren. I started right at the bottom, as a shipping clerk. Ralph Lauren had a head office person based in Hong Kong who didn’t belong to the licensee, and she and I went out for lunch one day. She said, “I know you’re a buyer and everything, but there’s so much you don’t know because you didn’t study fashion. You should look it up and get the technical side – you’d be so much better at it.” She gave me this book and said, “Look at this and see what you think of it.”
It was a light-bulb moment. I have an accounting brain but I also love the creative side of things. This amalgamated everything in a text. It solidified a lot of things I already thought. I thought we needed to break down different stores by size so we were comparing apples to apples, for example; after reading the book, I realised that that is a real thing and what you’re supposed to be doing. The book was a confirmation: what it said was like what I was experiencing. It was like: “Yeah, you’re doing OK.”
