• Australian accessories designer Poppy Lissiman’s approach to connecting with her customers; seasonless and driven by creative collaboration, is a blueprint for how contemporary brands find success.
• Founded in 2008, her label now runs on limited edition drops accessible immediately online.
• “Having that direct line to the very people who are supporting your business is so valuable,” Lissiman told Business Insider Australia.
• Visit Business Insider Australia’s homepage for more stories.

Poppy Lissiman remembers exactly when “the penny dropped” for her on how e-commerce would transform fashion.

The Australian accessories designer, who founded her label in 2008, had a multi-brand store with several other designers including Emma Mulholland and Self Portrait, which they decided to complement with an online store.

When one of the bags she sold was worn by Leandra Medine from the now-defunct fashion site Man Repeller, showcased on her Instagram, and featured on Vogue.com, “the brand exploded in the US basically overnight,” she said, and the bag began selling faster than “everything else we had in store and could sell in a week of normal trade.”

International markets are now online

A common story these days — especially for local labels that have found international success overnight, Lissiman says another of her brand’s sales bumps in the US came off the back of a Hadid wearing one of her designs.

Being stocked at hipster streetwear boutique KITH, which has stores in New York, Tokyo and Paris, “came off the back of Bella Hadid wearing one of our best selling sunglasses…around late 2017,” Lissiman said.

She says her thinking around reaching international audiences from Australia has adapted as the fashion industry has evolved.

Where she would once show at New York and Paris fashion weeks and attend trade shows, Lissiman says now almost all the connections she makes are online and on social media, through “influencers all over the world.”

As a result, her label has done away with the concept of seasons, too.

“We don’t actually make collections anymore,” Lissiman said, and even having her label stocked in bricks and mortar stores is becoming less and less important.

“With accessories I create pieces which I see a gap in the market for, usually dropping a new style every fortnight or so via our online store,” she explains.

“Wholesaling is no longer a big focus so our customers always see the newness first and more often than not can buy before it’s available anywhere else.”

The result, she says, is that the process from inspiration to a sellable product is both fluid and fast.

“If I design something and the sample comes back exactly how I want it, we put it into production immediately so it can be online as soon as possible,” she said.

Like it has everywhere, the Australia fashion landscape has changed enormously with the rise of e-commerce and social media, Lissiman said, but it’s also helped creatives living oceans away from global fashion hubs stay connected.

“The population size of the state of California is almost double the size of the entire population of Australia,” Lissiman said, making accessing an international market “so important.”

It’s also led to the freedom from trying to be everything to everyone in the Australian market, she said.

“I…think that brands have become way more specialised,” Lissiman said. “Ten years ago in the Australian fashion scene I think it would have been quite unusual to start a brand which just did one thing really well.”

“Now thankfully I think a lot of brands have honed in on the things which have brought them success,” she said.

The importance of collaborations

To reach new audiences and stay relevant, Lissiman also places a premium on creative collaborations; most recently with Moroccan artist Hassan Hajjaj, whose work has appeared everywhere from collaborations with Nike to the pages of The New Yorker.

“Aside from being a huge guilty pleasure for me, the collaboration also helped introduce the Poppy Lissiman brand to new regions and audiences through Hassan’s following,” she said.

The collaboration features Lissiman’s sunglasses on the faces of Billie Eilish, Paris Hilton and others backdropped by Hajjaj’s work.

Lissiman said that like most brands using social media to market their products, she’s invested in making her process more reciprocal with her audience, from showing more of the design process on Instagram stories to “taking polls from our customers on which colours to put into bulk production when I can’t decide myself.”

“This is something that would have never happened when I first started,” she said, “but ultimately having that direct line to the very people who are supporting your business is so valuable so I try to make the most of it when I can.”

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