Helen Brown - Fashion Genius

It could have been football. But when it came down to it, it was the fashion world that Helen Brown decided to shake up.

Brown, 32, is the woman behind Catwalk Genius, the online fashion site that allows designers to sell directly to consumers as they might on ebay, and enables consumers to buy and actually make an investment in the designers they love.

It’s a site for the fashion-forward, the ‘really hardcore fashion fan’, which Brown achieves by carefully selecting the designers selling on the site. “Rather than trying to be all things to all people, we’re aiming for this audience,” she explains.

Which is interesting considering she’s never been a general follower of fashion – never mind the hardcore kind.

Starting out her career as a Life & Pensions specialist, she was unwittingly chasing a dream the fashion industry had created. “I really wanted a job where I could wear shoulder pads and have an office, so I set out to achieve that,” laughs Brown, in her thick Yorkshire accent.

Being promoted to head of her team at 28 should have been the pinnacle of this. She had more money than she could spend, worked with nice people and was doing well ‘in a corporate sense’. Instead, it highlighted what was missing. “Much as it was a challenging job, I didn’t feel creatively stimulated. In fact, I felt stifled.”

So she took some time out. Brown hit the beach for a couple of weeks with her boyfriend, laden down with books on consumer behaviour, the psychology of organisations and technology, in an effort to figure out what she could do next.

“Thousands of designers graduate each year and maybe one gets picked up by the fashion glossies and is made into the next big superstar. Most of the rest fall by the wayside”

“And I came back absolutely enthused and desperate to experiment with these new trends. To become part of this growing movement that empowers consumers to be a bit more interactive with the brands they like,” she admits.

It was summer 2007 and her plan was to research different entrepreneurial propositions, save up money in the interim and take the plunge when the time was right. But, within weeks, she found herself eligible for voluntary redundancy.

“Being quite risk averse, and in the financial field, I wasn’t about to embark on a new career without any type of security. So when I got that offer, I was a little bit shocked. But I just went for it.”

There was no business concept to work on. Living in Dublin at the time, and a die-hard Middlesbrough Football Club fan, Brown noticed the lack of indoor soccer pitches available. “There was definitely a gap in that market, Dublin has a big population but they only had a few pitches. That’s how much we were ready to focus on anything.”

By September, she had turned her attention to fashion and Catwalk Genius. And by St Patrick’s Day 2008, after months of research, site development and meetings, she and her two directors – her boyfriend and a former colleague - had a soft launch.

Their vision was to open up the fashion industry. To develop a crowd funding platform that gave designers the support to create new collections.

To achieve this, they created a shares scheme. Each designer can sell up to 5,000 shares (at £10 a share) on Catwalk Genius. When their £50,000 fund target is met, the designer develops a collection, with the profits equally divided between the shareholders, designer and Catwalk Genius.

“Thousands of designers graduate each year and maybe one gets picked by the fashion glossies and is made into the next big superstar. Then maybe a handful will make successful businesses and work for a few seasons.

“But so many fall by the wayside or find themselves having to get a job around the periphery of it. There’s just no other support for them. And it’s really difficult to get funding, to get produced and to market yourself with so much competition. So a crowd funding mechanism seemed the obvious choice.”

With no fashion credentials, Brown felt this would be her stumbling block. So she hired fashion consultant Sarah Bunter, a well-connected and respected woman in the emerging fashion scene, to regularly recommend and ‘run her eye over’ the designers looking to sell on Catwalk Genius. As a result, they’ve found themselves embraced by the industry immediately, appearing in Vogue and other influential fashion glossies.

“The reaction has been incredible. We’ve not had anybody ripping us apart yet, which is what we thought might happen. They’re intrigued by it.”

“It’s odd,” she continues, “because, for an industry that has to be so up-to-date, current and on-trend by its very definition, it’s been incredibly slow to embrace these new trends in technology and consumer behaviour. That really was the reason we got into it.”

“For an industry that has to be so current and on-trend by its very definition, it’s been incredibly slow to embrace new trends in technology”

It’s equally intriguing to the fashion industry that Brown has had little or no interest in fashion to date. However, just as Catwalk Genius is shaking up the industry, fashion is infiltrating Brown’s life more and more every day.

“I know what I should be wearing now,” she laughs. “The thing I can’t quite get used to is eating size zero portions. I always have trouble trying to squish myself into things. But I think my dress sense has definitely improved!”

What’s been more challenging is the life change – going from a secure, well-paid job where she felt constricted, to starting up her first company, where money is tighter but life is more flexible.

She says she’s never been happier with the trade off, insisting it ‘reminds you that life is about different experiences and doing something you never dreamed you would’.

She’s also convinced of Catwalk Genius’s long-term potential, and laughs that it could well make her millions. Not that that’s what the business is about. “The primary goal is trying to help as many designers as we can and have a great time doing it. That box is being ticked.”

For more information on Helen Brown and Catwalk Genius, visit www.catwalkgenius.com 

By Barbara Walshe