I WANT HER: Creating purposeful fashion

About a year ago, I started thinking about ways to make my own money. I felt quite guilty for spending so heavily on account of my single mother to get the things I want. During a stay with my dad in Bandung, he inspired me with the idea to start my own business. There during that stay, I realized, that idea can be utilized as the topic for my Personal Project. I noticed that starting and administrating businesses runs in my family. However, those family businesses have yet to establish long-term success. I want to be the first in my family to mass a lasting empire, and trying out business this early can only aid that dream with experience. The most significant figures in my life have always been women, the heads of the family have been women for generations—and most of them have built their own ventures. I would like to take an example from the women in my life and exercise my business, and creative skills in the process. Running a business and cultivating its brand are two different things that intertwine in launching a successful empire. Familiarizing myself with the creative process, financing, and preparing for a launch is essential in business making, but the branding of the business will be important to know what the business stands for—how the business makes itself known, as well as a compass to what the business should/shouldn’t do. Therefore, my Learning Goal is to learn the skills of how to create and run a small business at this age is something I know will aid me in my future, especially because I will have to multitask everything alongside school. At this moment, my interests lay within the creative arts, and while this may change as I mature, learning how to market, finance, and multitask are basic skills useful in any field to make a living.

Product Goal

My Product Goal is to create a small business with a fashion line and social media presence. I want to create and run a business that sells clothes that have meaning; containing stories behind the simple physical material itself. Self-expression has always been important to me. I write to let go of my thoughts and emotions as well as reflect on them. I also use fashion as a medium to express my creativity and to boost my confidence. The goal is to combine both art forms, so all the clothes I design and produce will be based on a story I write. The stories and characteristics of the clothes will be inspired by a real person that I believe resonates with what the brand stands for. The story will be placed on the Instagram posts of the product. The stories and captions will share philosophies and in sharing those texts, the clothes my business sells will have a purpose. As a homage to my friends who’ve made an impact in my life, I want their traits and their stories to be the purpose behind the clothing of the first collection. The muses of this first collection will be my 5 friends who’ve helped me the most in my hardest times, however, there will be 6 articles of clothing as I would also like to create an article based on myself as well.

Reflection

In the beginning, I was under the impression that executing this project would be straightforward and easy. I’ve thought about starting my own business for a very long time, and I thought that I had mentally prepared myself enough to go through this project with a breeze. But the reality of what happened isn’t as effortless as I anticipated at the start. The process was tiring, absolutely time and energy-consuming. I finished both projects and report with spontaneous spurts of energy, and looking back, I know that wasn’t the smartest thing to go through. Halfway through starting IWANT HER, I found myself questioning my motives for starting such an ambitious project. Sometimes, I find myself regretting it—but I wasn’t regretting choosing my product goal (starting a business), I regretted choosing this project specifically to be something I would be required to work on for school. There was a period between starting the project and finishing it, where I felt so discouraged and pushed everything back. Regrets floated in my head every time I would even touch my Notion page dedicated to Personal Project. However, at some point, I decided that the only way I would ever actually finish my goal was if I put a due date to it. Looking back now, I would have never actually launched I WANT HER if it weren’t for it being a school requirement.

In all honesty, I lose interest in the things I work on horribly easily. It’s one of my biggest limitations. I always find myself saying I’ll do something for myself but lose interest and get caught up with another thing I’m spontaneously more interested in. Making this big personal goal into my Personal Project for IB was the greatest decision I could have made for myself. I overcame one of my greatest flaws, and now I’m looking forward to doing the same for my other interests.

So, other than my learning goal, how else did this project impact me? Well, I discovered that while I do love fashion and expressing myself, it’s probably not something that I’d like to pursue as a full-time job in the future. The reasoning behind this has been mentioned—I realized this passion isn’t something I’d like to do as a job, in fact when I make it a chore I lose interest in it. During the creation of this first line, I found myself less enthusiastic to experiment with my fashion sense in my everyday life. I don’t want fashion to be ruined for me. So will I continue I WANT HER? For now, I just want to make sure I gain all expenses from investing back. After that, I’ll probably make another line when inspiration strikes, and energy is recollected. But looking at the fact I want to try other things this year, maybe it won’t be something too frequent.

Product Evaluation

Based on the evaluation of my product and the answers given by people through a survey, I can definitely say that I have executed my project well and created a satisfactory product. I am proud of my writing, and IWH’s feed, but to tell you the truth, I do wish that all of my products were worth 7-8 ratings. But personally, I know some things about the final products I want to tweak. Specifically, sizing. I think I measured the models wrong and that tampered with the final outcome of the products.