Lessons for the modern fashion brand from Heiress Beverly Hills founder Hailey Weiner

“I wanted to create a brand where the quality is great, where the pieces we sold would last for years,” Hailey Weiner told me when we met to talk about her brand, Heiress Beverly Hills. Just over six years after founding her company grossed about $18 million, which would be impressive for any emerging fashion company. But Weiner’s story makes it an even bigger accomplishment.

She is not a trained apparel designer, she did not go to business school, in fact, she turned down a full scholarship to a big name law school to pursue her dream. Literally everything she has accomplished comes from hard work, intuition, and making sure that she always makes time to listen to feedback from her incredibly loyal clientele.

“When my customers walk into their closets,” the founder told me, “I want them to take an Heiress Beverly Hills dress and think, ‘I feel so good in this, this is what I want to wear.’ I want my clients to wear our dresses multiple times and people don’t often do that with other brands today.”

Founded on the Dream of Accurate Sizing

Weiner is a petite young woman and while she was a pre-law student at the University of Miami she had a difficult time finding clothes that fit her. Getting up for class, going to an event, it didn’t matter what she was doing; she kept struggling to find anything she could wear off the rack the way her friends did.

“I would buy kids jeans,” she told me. “I would change my outfit 10 times, I just felt terrible in anything I was wearing. I wasn’t confident. I started looking up why clothes wouldn’t fit me. Why everything needed to be tailored. I started researching it.”

In case anyone doesn’t know this already, there is no sizing standard for clothing in the United States. The last time anyone seriously tried to figure one out was back when FDR and the Works Progress Administration were allocating funding for projects. And that study, as much as statisticians Ruth O’Brien and William Shelton wanted to help, was rather problematic. The sizing system they developed was smaller than the national average woman, even in the 1940s, and didn’t include the measurements of women of color. Super creepy? The data set, collected from women who were paid to participate, contained the measurements of a disproportionate number of malnourished women.

So, when Weiner looked into the hows and whys of clothing sizes, learning about sample size and ready to wear fittings, she very quickly learned that there were problems.

“The industry fits on this unrealistic body type that very few people have,” the founder said. “And then companies grade their sizes based off of a sample size of a girl that doesn’t exist.I started thinking, why can’t I start a clothing brand, made with really high quality fabrics, that made clothes which actually fit people? I was brainstorming one night, thinking about what I would need to do, realizing I didn’t have the budget to do fittings on girls of all different sizes. Then I thought, why don’t I go to China? Why don’t I find a factory in China and create custom mannequins? No one had ever done this before. The only person I had hired for the first year and a half was a freelance garment tech, who did some work with YSL and now was out on her own.”

Together, they measured every inch of as many bodies as they could.

“Normal bodies,” Weiner said to me, “so, extra, extra small to extra, extra large. I mean, the measurements are ridiculous. We have measurements of things you would never think of and we used them to create this proprietary size chart; extra, extra small to extra, extra large. We based the size extra, extra small off of me, which was amazing, because finally I had clothes that actually fit that I didn’t need to get altered. It was incredible. For the bigger sizes, because the typical plus sized sample sizes aren’t right either, we measured a lot of different people and averaged out the measurements.”

Because the sizing of her designs were so drastically different from the industry standard, Weiner took steps to make certain her vision would be produced exactly as intended, which was not a cheap or simple choice to make.

“I had custom mannequins made,” she explained, “and I ship them to every factory that I work with. And the factories were like, ‘we’ve never done this before, but we’ll try it.’ We started making the collections and samples based off of these mannequins that had real body types, they weren’t 5′ 11” sample-size models. And that’s really how the brand got started.”

I asked about the initial response from her clients, if there was any one specific factor that she believes helped Heiress Beverly Hills achieve its successes so early on.

“Our repeat customer rate is so high,” the designer told me. “I think it’s because of this proprietary sizing. We make clothes that really do fit the way that they should. And we keep adapting it and we will continue to change things as the years go on. I really think that was really the secret sauce.”

Dropping the Pre-Order Model

I was curious about the brand’s name, and you, My Lovely Reader, might be too. When I asked the designer and founder about it, I learned that it came out of a fortuitous series of events.

“When all this was starting to happen, I had just dressed up as Paris Hilton for Halloween,” Weiner told me. “And at first we were going to produce in LA. I scheduled a trip on my fall break from school and I went to see a few of the factories that I was thinking about using. To be honest, the conditions I saw were not palatable for me. The name kind of stayed, but I never ended up producing there, I was really disturbed at the conditions in the factories, the conditions were not what I thought they would be. What I saw was really not humane. I hope it’s changed since then.”

By the time she got back to Miami, Weiner knew that if her dream was going to have a chance of becoming real, then she was going to have to find a way to manufacture her brand at a facility that cared about the people who worked there, that prioritized the dignity of their workforce.

“I decided I was going to produce overseas,” she explained. “I’m going to find ethical manufacturers.”

Weiner is a self taught designer, she never went to fashion school, and the extent of her business education was the undergrad courses she’d taken. So, you might understand why the cost of her first run was way bigger than she’d imagined it might be. She used her savings to pay for it, but in doing so, it became very clear that it wasn’t a sustainable choice, that if the first collection didn’t do exceptionally well, she might not ever be able to afford to produce another.

“We dropped this basically pre-order model,” the founder explained. “Everything would go to production. We would do a photoshoot and then release the collection before production. So by the time it was finished, we had the revenue to pay for it. Oftentimes, we end up selling out before the production is even done. And, it created this system where we have zero waste. I’ve never had to liquidate inventory, which is so rare. I see all these articles about the clothing landfills. It’s a huge problem right now with fast fashion, the amount of excess inventory. It’s terrible. People are producing things just to produce them. And there’s very little intention behind it. I love knowing that all of the clothes that we’ve made have gone to use, that we have like a 100% sell-through rate.”

Draping Dresses for a 21st Century Goddess

My Lovely Readers will probably remember that there are generally two ways that clothing is designed. Either a piece is drawn, or imagined, and then realized through pattern making. The other option is draping, the process of arranging lengths of fabric on a mannequin (or live model), refining or adjusting until the look is complete. Then the fabric comes off and the pieces get converted into patterns.

While I was looking at the Heiress Beverly Hills website before my conversation with Hailey, I kept noticing words, phrases which made me suspect that she was in the draping school. This writer went to apparel design school, once upon a time when the earth was cooling, and I have always had a soft spot in my heart for designers who work this way. To me, draping always feels more like painting, like making art, than like design. Looking at her array of sculptural, goddess-like designs, thinking about her purposeful choice of language, I knew I had to ask Weiner about her process.

“All of our pieces are first draped on the mannequin,” the designer told me with a grin. “It’s a more traditional approach, what a luxury design house like Yves St. Laurent would do, rather than just this quick sample-and-send path to production. We really try to get these pieces perfect, we are at this point now where we’re able to fit everything on our brand specific mannequins because of how exact our sizing is. We’ve really nailed it down, it’s like a science now, our custom mannequins are basically real people at this point. And because of this, we have extra time in terms of the development process, which we absolutely make the most of by investing it in the design of each piece. Everything that you see on our site is hand draped and hand sewn. We were so lucky to have found such great factories and great partners.”

Making Intentional Color Choices

When a returning or potential customer looks at Heiress Beverly Hills online, on the website or on social media, they are likely to notice that the palette is simple and that there aren’t any florals, stripes or other patterned textiles. Having previously spoken to more than a few brands who have made similar choices, I knew that there were many reasons a designer might choose to work in mostly solid colors, and I was curious what Hailey’s reasons were.

“Back when I started the brand,” Weiner explained, “actually, for the first five and a half years, it was strictly black and white. My closet is painfully boring, it is black, white and gray, there is no color. I feel like I am my own target customer, so really, I began by doing what I wanted. But, we try really hard to look at and respond to every single Instagram DM that we get. It’s really the best research tool we have for giving people what they want. And our most consistent request was to offer more color. The last release was actually our first collection we’ve ever done with colors, because we really listen to our clients. What they say matters to me a lot.”

Unlike many of her competitors, Weiner makes a point of choosing to be as intentional as possible with her business decisions. She wants to know the 360° impact her decisions will make. When the feedback from her customers convinced the founder to add more colorways she knew she could only do it if it meant adding value and not sacrificing her standards.

“I wanted to be very, very intentional,” she told me, “with the lab dips and the whole process of creating color. I also wanted to use colors that weren’t super trendy and could really be worn for multiple seasons. We’ve had such a great response to color, I don’t know why I didn’t do this sooner. It’s definitely something we’re going to keep focusing on. We want the monochromatic blacks, cream, white and gray to be our staples. But each season we’re going to do these limited edition colors. We’ll do it once and then not restock them.”

Listening to Clients is a Love Language

When I was looking at the range of designs that Heiress Beverly Hills offers, I kept thinking that many of the dresses the brand sells could work in the bridal space. That particular sector of the market has changed drastically in the last few years, what a wedding looks like has changed, what ‘traditional’ means now is very different than it was a quarter century back. I asked the designer if she had bridal, or bridesmaid clients.

“We are definitely starting to see a big demand for bridal,” Weiner said. “It’s something I want to tap into. We’re starting to see bachelorette customers too. It’s really important to listen to feedback. And really, that’s at the core of just everything we do. We have this link of open communication with our customers. Back when I was getting started, when I was getting advice, a lot of people would tell me, ‘look at the brands that work, look at skims, look at these huge brands and just follow what they’re doing.’ But that doesn’t work when you’re a small brand, you’re just not going to make it. So, instead, around this time last year I sent a text from me on our SMS platform and was like, ‘please reply to this. What do you want this spring, summer, fall? What colors are you looking for? What styles?’ We got thousands of people responding to the message. And I went through every single one of them and created this Excel sheet.”

“Before this year,” Weiner continued, “I felt like we were really a mini dress brand. But with this past collection, maxis have become some of our core pieces. When I started the brand, I was 21 years old, I was wearing mini dresses all the time. I dressed completely differently than I dress now. But I’m still the only designer for Heiress Beverly Hills, and I feel like our customer has truly grown with us. So, as my own style has become more sophisticated, that same customer is in the same position. Listening to our customers, that’s what really made me switch to like maxi dresses that our customer was, our customer was getting older with us. They wanted more sophisticated pieces. I feel like that’s what’s going to keep the brand alive, is just listening to what the customer wants.”

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