When Busayo Olupona was just starting up her fashion label—many years before it was stocked at outlets like Saks Fifth Avenue and Nordstrom—she had quit her job and practically ran out of money.
Many stories, sadly, end up that way; Busayo’s didn’t. She says her mentor Mercedes Gonzalez would hold her accountable for making a new collection every season, regardless of how the previous one performed (43:32):
Even though I wasn’t selling successfully every season, she was demanding a new collection. So when you haven’t sold last season’s collection and someone is like, where’s the new collection? Have you shot the collection?
She was just really on top of [it], because she mentors a number of fashion designers, and she had really taken me under her wing and really demanded that I show up to the marketplace every season, because if you don’t have a new collection, you’re not a fashion designer.
That final sentence rings particularly true: “If you don’t have a new collection, you’re not a fashion designer.”
If you want to call yourself an author, you need to write a book every year or two. If you want to call yourself a professional athlete, you need to play as much as you can when your team needs you. If you’re an ad agency that has lost its biggest client, the best thing to do is to keep advertising. And if you’re a fashion designer, you need to launch a new collection every season and trying to sell it:
Even though I was like, “Wait, nobody bought the last one.” Mercedes was like, “Where’s the next collection?” And she really was on top of that. “Are you making calls to stores? Are you trying to sell it?”
If nobody will help you show your work, publish it yourself (e.g., Busayo used to do pop-up shops). Whether your work sells out and gets picked up by press, or gets much less attention than you think it deserves, isn’t entirely in your control; with marketing and promotion, you can influence it.
If there’s any guarantee, it’s that there will be a setback; how can you frame your goal in a way that keeps you practicing and earns your job title for another day?
Derek Sivers has stopped calling himself an entrepreneur, “Holding on to an old title gives you satisfaction without action. But success comes from doing, not declaring.”
Similarly, I’ve written, “Creativity is just about creating something—focusing on the process, discovering new possibilities, and actually doing the work.”
Tina Fey quotes Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels: “The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30.” See the prompt, “Set a Time Limit,” in Creative Doing.
As Pusha T says, “A lot of times, people look at the perks, and they look at the things that they can gain before they look at the work, and that’s a problem. You have to be in this game with people who understand the work…”