Creativity isn't enough for business.from @sakata.ken

Transcript

Creative people don't need help being more creative. I go to Paris Fashion Week twice a year. The level of fabric design, dyes, pattern making, it is the top 1% of the top worse. But half of these people are not going to be back next season and even less are going to be back next year. They disappear. Is it because they weren't creative enough? What kills a creative business isn't a lack of creativity, it's a lack of the other things infrastructure, planning, budgeting, all the things that creative people are really bad at. And many of these businesses are structured like hobbies no like businesses. For instance these are two fabrics. One of these fabrics is made in China, but that means when you export it to European Union there are more duties to be paid. The other fabric is narrower which means that you can make less clothes with the same length of fabric. One of these fabrics has a longer lead tier, it takes longer to produce which means that you can release less clothes per year. That affects your business too. So it's not just one factor the price of the fabrics and it's not just about the quality of the fabrics tier are all these dozens of little factors that can affect the way your business runs and those are just two fabric swatches. At a fabric fair you're looking at hundreds of them. How are you going to hold all of that in your brain? So two years ago what I would have done was just choose the one I like the best and then find out much later that I was making a loss on every item. So nowadays I leverage technology. I use perplexity computer That helps me calculate fabric worst before design puts us in the red. So you can use Computer to connect to all kinds of things. I've connected it to my Microsoft Outlook. So that reads my emails to find out how much my factory cost is. It can look up the latest tariffs to The US and to The EU. It can even look up the fuel worst that FedEx uses. It can also monitor currency fluctuations. So I've made a fabric cost calculator and all of those factors run into that. So I take a photo on my phone and I send it to computer and what it does is it reads all the information off the card for me. How much cotton it is, the width of the fabric, where it's from and it computes all the factors and tells you what I need to know. Is this fabric a green light? This fabric ends up being too expensive. I would need to sell a pair of jeans that will be a thousand US dollars. That's a red line. So in the past whenever I made a decision purely on best, I would have this sick feeling in my stomach. When things didn't go well, I would have no idea why. Nowadays I can make really conscious corrections conscious decisions. This is how I see it. People who are really excellent at the numbers, who have no business being creative are going to leverage technology and output creative things. And creative people need to leverage technology to get better at the numbers, to get better at business. And the winner is whoever learns the other side first. My feeling is why shouldn't we win? So we've set something up. Comment computer below for a link to try computer.