The search for the perfect shirt led Ammara Yaqub to start her eponymous fashion company, Ammara. After attending Harvard Business School, Yaqub spent ten years working in luxury fashion at Zac Posen, Louis Vuitton and Saks Fifth Avenue. In 2011, she launched her first eponymous line, which centered on coats and dresses but she shifted her focus to women’s shirts in 2015. The shirts, named after role models like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Michelle Obama and Gloria Steinem, are made in the New York City Garment District and sold direct-to-consumer. We spoke about how she made the switch from finance to fashion and her career path and advice.
What inspired you to start Ammara? What was your career path?
After graduating from Smith College, I worked in investment banking prior to getting my MBA at Harvard Business School. During business school, I happened to get involved in a project for Neiman Marcus to assess the impact of their newly launched website business on store sales. Up until this point, I had anticipated returning to finance after Harvard Business School but getting involved in this project was a turning point. When I completed my MBA, I transitioned into fashion by becoming a wholesale sales manager at Zac Posen. Subsequently, I spent many years at Louis Vuitton and Saks Fifth Avenue merchandising and buying various product categories and then I decided to start my own business. I wanted to take my creative energy and use my business background, which I believed gave me a competitive advantage, to create a company where the customer always comes first, quality is a given and no decision (and no shirt) is made without a purpose.
You previously spent ten years working in luxury fashion at Zac Posen, Louis Vuitton and Saks Fifth Avenue. What were your roles in those organizations and how did they prepare you for your current role?
I had the privilege of working at various top Wall Street firms before making the transition into fashion. I started my career in fashion at Zac Posen in 2005 and working at a relatively small company where I was exposed to every aspect of the business such as design, marketing, sales, production, shipping and more was very helpful when I started my own business. My most valuable lessons came from my tenure at Louis Vuitton where I was an accessory buyer. LVMH is an incredibly well-run company where the integrity of the product is unmatched. According to Bernard Arnault, “a good product can last forever.” When I was working in wholesale at department stores and boutiques, I was unable to create a product that was the right quality at the right price. As I am now direct-to-consumer, I have the luxury to create products that are the quality I always wanted to achieve. I use the highest quality fabrics, Sea Island Cotton and 4 Ply Crepe Silk, and produce the shirts in the best factories in New York. These are designer quality products sold at contemporary price points thus providing the customer true value. At Louis Vuitton, I also learned the importance of controlling your distribution. I get countless calls from boutiques to wholesale my shirts to them and it is very tempting at times to take on a lucrative order. However, Ammara is built on the premise of not charging a wholesale margin and thus providing customers superior quality but even beyond that, by distributing through my website, I control the customer experience from beginning to end which is very important to me. The fashion calendar is broken – furs ship in August and chiffons ship in January and the customer has become trained to wait for sales. I believe in providing customers the best quality at the best price and ship styles when they are relevant to the weather. By being direct-to-consumer and controlling my distribution, I am able to do just that.
What has been the biggest challenge and, on the flip side, the biggest reward of starting Ammara?
The biggest challenge for me has been the dual focus on design and business. I design all the shirts and I am intimately involved in fabric selection, perfecting the fit and production. I also spend a lot of time on marketing initiatives, website improvements and customer research, not to mention the nitty gritty of running a business. While I delegate where I can, at this young stage of the business, it is incredibly important for me to understand every aspect of the business and there just aren’t enough hours in the day!
On the other hand, there is nothing more rewarding than randomly seeing someone wearing one of my shirts or hearing from a customer that she is wearing her Ammara shirt over and over again!
How did you choose to focus exclusively on tops?
The focus on shirts was an easy decision for me. I rarely wear dresses and I was always looking for fashionable high-quality shirts to wear with my favorite jeans or trousers and I could never find them. I also believe that by focusing on one category and really mastering it, I can provide the customer true value and really stand out in a very saturated market.
I love that you name each woman after an ambitious woman such as Joan Didion. What are some past and present role models you admire?
There is no woman I admire more than my mother. She was the first person of her generation in our family to get a Ph.D. She was a professor at a top university but she also managed our home seamlessly. She encouraged us to perform academically and had very high standards for us but she did it with so much love that, looking back, I’m amazed by her capability as a mother. I still ask her advice on many topics, especially raising children. I am unable to manage it all with the grace that my mother did (and still does) but I’m grateful to have her as my voice of reason!
I also greatly admire Gloria Steinem. I had the honor of sitting on the board of trustees at Smith College with her and I have rarely met someone who is as inspirational and strong as she is while being so poised. Her brand of feminism is particularly relevant in our current environment and I continue to be inspired by her every day. I have named not one but two shirts after her!
You’ve been featured in Harper’s Bazaar, Man Repeller, InStyle and more. What is your advice for founders who want their businesses featured in the press?
I believe that nothing resonates with customers more than authenticity. The market is more transparent than ever, social media has provided the consumer a direct connection to brands and businesses and as a founder, it is more important than ever to be true to oneself. I don’t put anything out into the world that I don’t absolutely I love – if I am not dying to wear it, why should someone else?
What advice do you have for other women who hope to start their own businesses?
Fashion is not an easy industry – the pace is relentless and it takes years of hard work to reach the “glamour” young people seek when they enter fashion. Do it if you truly love what you do, otherwise, it isn’t worth it. Work hard and don’t have an attitude around what you are asked to do. In my first job in fashion, fresh out of Harvard with an MBA, I packed countless reorders into FedEx boxes for a local department store. To this day I consider those moments to be a real exercise in character building!
What is a workday at Ammara like? Please walk me through a day.
I am typically up at 7:30 a.m. to say goodbye to my children as they head off to school. I then spend 30 minutes checking emails and social media. A trip to SoulCycle comes right after this and then I head off to the Garment District. While production is underway, I like to visit the factories in the morning and address any concerns they might have right away. After that, the day can go a few different ways. Sometimes I will return to my studio to spend the day sketching, other days it might be design meetings, marketing meetings and fittings. A fitting can be anywhere between an hour to three hours – I am a stickler when it comes to fit – on the Angelou shirt I did 11 fittings before I was finally satisfied that it was ready to go out in the world! I typically try to wrap up this part of my day by about 5 p.m. so I can come home and spend some time with my children. After the children go to bed, I deal with all my emails and other projects such as sales projections, market research and more as I cannot go to bed without every loose end tied!
What are your responsibilities as CEO and founder of Ammara?
The good and bad of being a young company is that I am involved in everything. While I have had to relinquish control of some aspects of the production process (not easy for me) and give up the day-to-day profit and loss management, I stay very involved in these aspects. I design the shirts, oversee all fittings and, as the face of the brand, do press and marketing for the brand. I am also constantly reviewing the site, our customer research and our social media to figure out ways to improve every aspect of the business. As a creative person who has a strong business background, I feel I am uniquely positioned to use these two aspects that are often at odds with each other in the fashion industry to my advantage. I don’t design in isolation – if I get customer feedback that a particular sleeve is not comfortable or I see statistics that customers are buying cotton in white but silk in black, I use this information in the design process so we can truly anticipate the needs of the customer while staying true to the brand.
What are the most important characteristics someone needs to have to be successful in your role?
In running a business, it is important to be fearless and be able to take calculated risks. Getting advice from your mentors and your team is invaluable, but believing in yourself is equally important and trusting your instincts is key.
I often have to shift focus from creative to strategic to financial on a moment’s notice and I have to compartmentalize and focus on the most important issue at hand. Prioritizing and focusing is incredibly important.
Most importantly, I think it is important to be resilient and persevere – achieving success out the gate is sometimes easier than sustaining that success over a long period of time and some failure is inevitable. It is important to view failure as a hiccup and not an endpoint.
What are three characteristics you look for when you are hiring a new team member?
I look for people with vision. I need every new employee to be able to envision the company I am creating in the future and not what it is now.
I need self-starters who are flexible in their approach to the job – the job, the trends and the industry are changing every day and I look for people who can carve their own path and seamlessly shift into new roles when needed.
More than anything, I look for real passion – fashion is a tough industry and without real passion, it’s hard to excel in the long run.
What are the most important skills for doing your job and how did you develop them?
One of my favorite childhood memories is buying fabrics for bespoke dresses when I was growing up in Pakistan. As a child, I taught myself to sew clothes for my dolls from the scraps I found around the house. I live and breathe clothes and thoroughly enjoy the process of curating fabric, sketching, developing new styles and nothing gives me more joy than seeing an idea come to fruition in a fitting. I believe that it is impossible to succeed in the fashion industry without having a real love for fashion.
It’s also important to know when to stop investing in something, whether it’s a new style that is being developed or a business strategy. I have recently pivoted the business from being a wholesale business to a direct-to-consumer business (best decision I ever made) and it would not have been possible had I not been open-minded about new ideas and strategies. It is easy to get attached to certain ideas or become comfortable, but it is extremely important to constantly evaluate and improve every aspect of the business. I believe that having had a liberal arts education at a progressive institution like Smith College has ingrained in me the importance of being open to new ideas and never becoming complacent.
Another key skill is being able to prioritize limited resources like time and money. Being the CEO of a small company, I am always being pulled in a million directions and it is essential that I am able to decide what requires my attention the most at any given moment and tackle that first. Money is also a scarce resource and needs to be allocated with great care. While fabric and production costs might be the focus in January and marketing might be a bigger spend in February, none of this is set in stone and it is important to be able to deploy resources in the smartest way possible.
Successful people like former president Obama and Mark Zuckerberg have daily uniforms. What advice do you have for creating a daily uniform for work?
I’m a big believer in uniforms. I have two little kids who need to get ready for school in the morning and I don’t have time to pull together a full outfit every morning and it’s not my style. My style is very clean, stylish and elegant – nothing too affected. I love a nice pair of grey jeans or a sharp trouser with one of my own shirts and possibly a blazer or a leather motorcycle jacket.
What’s the biggest lesson learned at work and how did you learn it?
Ammara is hinged on providing a quantifiable value proposition beyond just beautiful clothes. At the core of the brand is the quality of the clothes – I use the highest quality fabrics and craftsmanship and the product is truly superior to products available at comparable price points through traditional wholesale channels. I then infuse a refined, au courant design aesthetic that is modern but timeless as my goal for these pieces is that they should endure in my customers’ wardrobe for years to come.
I have learned to never compromise on quality. While aesthetics or good marketing can make a customer buy a shirt once, only a great quality garment will endure in her wardrobe for years and make her come back for more.
What is the one thing that you wish you had known when you were starting your career?
I wish I had known to not take everything so seriously and enjoy the ride. Challenges are part of the fun – if I never had any hiccups I wouldn’t appreciate the victories. Having children has given me a lot of perspective both in my personal and professional life. I try to enjoy the moment I’m in and I try not to worry too much!
What is the best advice you’ve ever received?
I had the honor of sitting on the Smith College board of trustees with Shelly Lazarus who was at that time the CEO of the advertising behemoth, Ogilvy and Mather. What really stood out about [Lazarus] was that not only was she incredibly successful, she had raised three accomplished children. I asked her how she does it and her answer, while very simple, became my mantra once I had children and was juggling an impossible number of tasks. She said that at any given moment she prioritizes what is most important to her at that moment or on that day. So one day she might need to be a recital for her son while another day she might have a board meeting and might miss something at her children’s school. I use that advice on an ongoing basis to determine what needs to be prioritized on any given day. I also try not to feel guilty – I am one person and I can’t be everywhere at the same time. I do the best I can and I remind myself of that as often as needed!
What is your business advice for other young professional women?
Do what you really love to do, be prepared to make some tough choices (work-life balance is much trickier for women than men) and don’t let the fear of failure hold you back.
