With Abbey Li (Fashion Base)
As my classmate, Abbey Li is a fashion designer, model and stylist. I was glad to have a chance to talk deeply with her about bio-synthetic fur. The investigation with Abbey was mainly about her overall impression to bio-synthetic fur, personnel suggestion and potential collaboration expectation.
Our investigation actually was happen after we meet Dr.Will in St. James Cafe together. Along with the speaking with Dr.Will, I naturally invited Abbey join my investigation and gave me some opinions. I was really appreciate that Abbey give a strongly positive feedback when I firstly mentioned bio-synthetic fur to her. As a intensive fashion stakeholder, Abbey know the status of fur and faux fur usage in fashion industry. Moreover, she also agree with my pain point analysis about current fur industry. Therefore, she pointed the importance about the industry transformation and meaningfulness about bio-synthetic fur research.
Running as a brand or running as a commercial project(company), this is actually the biggest difference between Abbey’s opinions and other stakeholders. Abbey’s talking offer a new dimension for bio-synthetic fur’s development. Due to Abbey’s background, she naturally emphasize the meaning and advantages for brand base. She suggested me regard bio-synthetic fur as brand. Then, using the method of branding to develop whole project. This is a thought of B2C business essentially. Compared with my original thinking(mostly seeking to B2B collaboration), running as a brand can reach influence to public further, which can lead the famous of bio-synthetic fur and achieve higher profit in the end.
Based on my introduction about bio-synthetic fur, Abbey also gave me advice in filed of personnel. Currently, the project is settled by me and Jason who is in charge of technology aspect. We are friend and high school classmates, which means we have similar background even expertise in different direction. In consideration of team diversification, Abbey hoped me can invite people who are from different regions, education and culture background to involve in project. In her word, it can help whole project to gain trust(financing base) and opinions(development base) from bigger range of people.
Finally, Abbey also share her personal expectation to bio-synthetic fur. She thunk bio-synthetic fur is on a blue ocean market and it is positive breakthrough for fashion and material industry. She also told me that she can provide some help for later brand and designer collaboration. She believed a successful running of this project can gain plenty of prizes and opportunities. Overall, she encouraged me a lot and I was so pleasure to make interview with her.