Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,

E-commerce is a wild jungle. Complex operations, changing consumer tastes, social media ad overflow, low margins. And yet it is exactly the area today’s podcast guest has founded a business in.

Today, we sit down with Christina Stahl, Co-founder of D2C fashion brand AMELI Zurich. Christina has bootstrapped her business from the beginning and without prior knowledge in the e-commerce sector. AMELI has been selling more than 50.000 products to customers in over 60 countries and has nurtured a community of over 100.000 women worldwide. Listening to Christina’s story has been truly inspiring.

Exclusively for our newsletter subscribers, Christina has shared additional insights below.

🎧 Tune in now on Spotify, Apple, YouTube and share your thoughts!

In the meantime: Follow the Gradient and stay tuned!

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

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How to bootstrap a fashion brand

What you will get out of this episode

In our conversation, Christina shares:

• the initial challenges when starting her D2C brand AMELI Zurich

• how to grow a fashion community on social media

• how to decide which things to do yourself and when to outsource

• why “done” is better than “perfect”

• and much more!

Our main take away’s

1. The importance of getting things done: Entrepreneurship requires a tough mindset on the 80-20 principle. It is much more important to get things done than to do these things perfectly.
   

2. Know your numbers: It is important to run trials and test different things out - be that social media campaigns or product lines. Be comfortable that some of these tests will fail. Importantly, make sure you derive the right conclusions from your tests and dig deep into your data on what worked and what didn’t - and why.
   

3. Think carefully on what tasks to do on your own: There is a ton of (sometimes knitty-gritty) tasks you have to do for your business - from budgeting, coding a website or designing an Instagram ad campaign. It is easy to get lost in tasks to do on your own, although they could be done 10x faster by a (freelance) expert. The money you invest is time you get back to do the things you are good at.

4. Build a community: There is countless fashion brands out there, or brandless clothing labels. To stand out, think about what additional value you provide to your customers except for the fashion item itself.

Additional material on the topic

• Top tools mentioned by Christina: Shopify, Klaviyo

• Personal book recommendation by Christina: Hard things about hard things

How to reach out to Christina

• LinkedIn

• AMELI Zurich

Exclusive from Christina

What was the biggest challenge you faced while transitioning from a Consultant to an Entrepreneur?

In consulting everything needed to be very precise and perfect on the look. There's a different approach to 80-20 in consulting than there is in being an entrepreneur. When you're an entrepreneur, 80-20 is so much more crucial. I really had to learn to simply get it done.

What is the one skill you wished you had developed earlier in your entrepreneurial journey?

It's not necessarily a skill, but rather a mindset: really thinking about what makes sense from a strategic point of view. Because you're often so deep into the operational topics that you don't take a step back and think, does it really make sense that I'm making it or can I solve it in a different way? And what is actually the outcome I want to achieve?
I really need to force myself when I'm deep into coding to think, okay, this is not necessary maybe, and maybe I have a bigger leverage when I'm teaching my team or empowering my team than when I'm actually doing the code by myself.

For someone starting out with a D2C brand, what is the first three milestones you want to achieve?

There is two: Product, Community.

If you don't have a product that delivers what it promises, it's bad. And you need to really have a product that people will buy again. I see a lot of startups, for example, especially in clothing where the fit is a little bit off. Then I buy it once and I'm not buying it again.

Second of all, I think you also need to have the right market, the community. Especially in D2C, there are so many brands which no one knows. It is important to understand why would the person buy from an unknown startup if they can buy at Zalando? So you need to give them something more than simply the product and increase the value of the product. In our case, people are never only buying the bag, but they are also buying the values. And we stand for empowerment. We stand for craftsmanship. We stand for quality. And so they feel like they belong to something bigger when they buy an AMELI instead of simply buying from an anonymous brand from Zalando.

What are books or people in mentoring roles which helped you navigate your challenges?

Hard things about hard things.

When I read that, it gave me a structure, how to really solve the hard issues. The author talks about e.g. how to let go employees, how you build a culture and also how lonely you feel as a CEO. And the quote I like best is that very good, very reflective CEOs say: “How did you manage it all? - I didn't quit.”
And this is so true because you can always say, it was great. But actually, let's be honest, there are so many fire-fightings the whole time. And this book helped me a lot to keep on going.

What is next for AMELI Zurich?

We realized that the AMELI community exists also outside the 9 to 5 hours, so we really want to get them the whole day and accompany them throughout the day. We think about other products that they might need. And I think this is one of our biggest goals to continue delivering them with products that actually help them through their lives.