A Survival Guide for Independent Brands

Dear BoF readers,

Last month, our editor in chief Imran Amed published an article titled “The Industry That Eats Its Young” that underscored the urgent challenges faced by emerging brands, particularly in navigating the troubled wholesale ecosystem. He invited you, our community, to give your feedback. The response was an outpouring of frustrations and tales of struggling to make it in an unforgiving, and often unfair fashion system.

Many of you pointed to a lack of resources and support from the industry. Others highlighted structural issues around building a brand in today’s challenging climate. A common refrain was your desire to see BoF amplify these problems and provide practical support in overcoming them.

We heard you. The vitality of the fashion industry depends on the success of its next generation, yet the path to financial viability has never been more complex. To help you manoeuvre through these choppy waters, we have mined the BoF Professional archive, pulling from years of case studies, deep-dive reports, and expert analysis to create a practical guide for the modern entrepreneur. Going forward, we are intensifying our coverage of these challenges and want to keep hearing your stories as you build what’s next.

In the sections below, we break down the most pressing hurdles, from managing cash flows to rethinking the traditional wholesale model, and pair them with the strategic insights needed to build a resilient, long-term business.

Yours sincerely,

Cathaleen Chen

Retail Editor

1. Securing Financial Footing Without Investors

The Challenge: How do you build a lasting business when you are funding every move yourself?

For many, the 2010s fantasy of becoming a venture-backed unicorn has been replaced by the more practical reality of sustainable bootstrapping. Eschewing outside investors is a slower approach to building a business and comes with its own challenges. But it can be a winning strategy as it allows founders to retain control and ignore common investor pressures to pursue growth at the expense of a brand’s long-term health. To be sure, not everyone is in a position to self-fund a brand. Historically marginalised communities, for instance, are less likely to have personal networks to tap into and therefore must rely on outside investors.

But founders who are able to fund their own businesses end up making their own rules and can even walk away with more money when they finally decide to sell.

“When they say, ‘I’m going to need $2 million and I’m looking for investors,’ I chuckle,” Julie Chung, who bootstrapped the premium hair tools brand T3 with her husband in 2004, told BoF in February. “If [they] get that $2 million and didn’t earn any of it, they’re not going to think as critically about how they spend it.”

To make it work, however, self-funded brands must be scrappy and conservative in managing expenditure.

The most resilient brands are also those that treat inventory management with militant discipline. By avoiding overproduction, brands can maintain liquidity. “[T]hink you will sell 100 of something, order 90,” Adam Cochrane, retail analyst at Deutsche Bank, said in our 2023 case study about mitigating discounts. “It doesn’t generate the fastest sales growth but it’s a profitable way of doing business.”

Cash flow visibility is absolutely critical. With tariffs and oil price uncertainties in 2026, brands must act before a crisis hits to preserve their strategic options. To stay prepared against market shocks, aim for at least a one-month cash buffer and a 13-week rolling forecast to stay ahead of potential deficits, according to Joe Schmitt, managing director at BRG and co-leader of its retail performance improvement practice.

Recommended Reading:

Case Study | The Complete Guide to Managing Markdowns. Offloading excess merchandise has never been more complex and critical for every brand and retailer, regardless of their size or category. BoF examines the best practices along every stage of the process, from planning to liquidation.

How to Go From Wholesale to Direct-To-Consumer. For apparel labels reliant on multi-brand retailers for sales, developing a direct business has never been more important. But how can you go DTC in the middle of the pandemic? Here’s BoF’s guide to pivoting online during a time – and cash – crunch.

How Indie Beauty Brands Are Surviving on Their Own. In a hyper-competitive beauty landscape, the cost of growth is always rising, and bootstrapped brands can feel outgunned by their better-capitalised peers. Going it alone can mean bigger hurdles, but bigger rewards.

2. Competing With a World of Goliaths

The Challenge: It is increasingly difficult to get noticed when you are competing for attention against global giants and the very retailers that stock your clothes.

When platforms like Ssense or Net-a-Porter dominate search results and major brands have infinite marketing budgets, independent labels easily get buried. To combat this, brands must consider a shift towards high-touch strategies such as trunk shows and partnering with a constellation of specialty boutiques rather than a handful of large wholesalers.

“Women love to gather, they love to shop together,” Audrey Fosse, who hosts trunk shows for Marfa Stance in her Chicago-area restaurant, told BoF last December. “Department stores are empty, malls are dying. These traditional places of gathering for fashion are not working anymore. People want a more personal experience.”

The consumer desire for more intimate connections also means independent retailers have one crucial strength over giant platforms and chains.

The biggest players in multibrand retail have become “supermarkets of fashion,” said fashion commentator and StyleZeitgeist editor Eugene Rabkin in September. “Specialty stores are the ones who may actually be in a better place because they have retained what consumers like: a point-of-view, a direction, which cultivates loyalty.”

Additionally, savvy indie brands are investing in their own brick-and-mortar stores to control their brand story entirely. “Overall, it is just so competitive there is too much product and too many brands,” David Lê, cofounder of New York-based brand Maiden Name, told boF in 2023. “The only thing that has really worked for us is brick-and-mortar. It allows us to communicate in a rich way.”

Recommended Reading:

Can Indie Fashion Compete With E-commerce Juggernauts? Brands struggle to adapt to wholesale partners like Ssense because of their rampant discounting, which some say threatens the entire livelihood of independent fashion. But individual brands and retailers may have their own tricks up their sleeves.

Fashion’s Hottest New Sales Strategy Is One of Its Oldest. As wholesale challenges continue and marketing costs tick up, trunk shows have emerged as an increasingly popular way to fuel sales — that is, for the brands that know how to get in front of the right people.

The Great Fashion Reset | The Future of Multi-Brand Retail. As major luxury retailers from Saks to Ssense struggle, independent boutiques are making a comeback.

3. Finding Leverage in the Wholesale Landscape

The Challenge: Small labels are forced to bear all the financial risk for retail giants that often fail to pay on time — or at all.

The traditional wholesale model has reached a breaking point in recent months, the culmination of which was the bankruptcy of Saks Global. But Saks was hardly the only retailer in the habit of payment delays. Against this backdrop, finding leverage is a matter of survival. This means negotiating stricter payment terms, vetting the financial health of partners and being prepared to walk away from prestigious accounts that treat independent talent as interest-free loans.

“Some of my first orders from my biggest wholesale accounts were too big, and it stretched us financially and ended up over-saturating the market,” designer Emme Parsons told BoF in 2023.

Five crucial steps:

1. Vet your partners for resilience: Not every retailer will survive the current market shakeout. Prioritise partners who demonstrate financial stability and a commitment to full-price sales—such as Bloomingdale’s, Mytheresa, or perhaps a newly resilient, post-bankruptcy Saks —over those who rely on constant discounting.
2. View wholesale as a financial risk: Treat payment terms as a core business risk rather than a formality. Protect your cash flow by negotiating shorter payment windows (Net-30 instead of Net-90) and, where possible, securing a portion of the payment upfront.
3. Maintain control through inventory discipline: Don’t send your entire collection to third-party retailers. By reserving your “hero” products for your own website and keeping wholesale assortments lean, you protect your brand’s value if a partner begins to struggle.
4. Use wholesale as a tactical tool, not a volume driver: Wholesale should be used to build prestige or test new markets, not just to move bulk inventory. A few high-quality “doors” that align with your brand are more valuable than a broad, fragile distribution.
5. Seek a sustainable balance: While protecting your own interests is vital, pushing for terms that your partners can’t survive only hurts the industry in the long run. Aim for transparent, durable relationships that allow both the brand and the retailer to thrive.

Recommended Reading:

How Emerging Brands Can Solve the Wholesale Puzzle. Partnering with department stores and boutiques used to be the first and sometimes only option for new labels to break though. Today, that path often winds through Shopify and Instagram first, but multi-brand retailers still have an important role to play.

How Sustainable Designers Can Make Wholesale Work. Landing a big retail partner can be transformative for an emerging brand, but managing the pressures of the wholesale system can be particularly challenging for labels that want to operate responsibly.

4. Competing with ‘Dupes’

The Challenge: It is harder than ever to protect your designs from mass-market copies that sell for a fraction of the price.

In the age of fast fashion, competing on price or speed is already a losing game. But what happens when Zara, Shein or Quince straight-up copies you? Designer Inna Gerchikov, co-founder of the Milan-based label Darkpark, said Zara-owner Inditex has on multiple occasions ordered products from her brand’s website directly to its production facilities in order to mimic her designs.

“Here we are spending god knows how much time and money on fit models and sample production, going through this whole process only to get an order [from Zara] that is going direct to their factories and being copied,” said Gerchikov. “Why is this okay? … I imagine I’m one of many young brands in the same predicament.”

While there is limited legal recourse for targeting dupes and counterfeits, the real solutions lie in brand-building: reminding the customer that the value proposition behind an original design is fundamentally different from that of a Zara or a Quince.

This requires patience in product development. By testing and refining products over time rather than rushing to market, brands can create a level of quality and soul that is impossible for mass-market copycats to replicate.

“We always say, ‘What is the reason for her to buy this?’ There’s always detail, always a colour, it’s never a basic-basic,” Holly Wright, co-founder of womenswear brand Tove, told BoF last year. “We make sure what we offer she can’t get anywhere else. The cut of it, the drape, all those things. There’s so much work in it that it’s actually not the same [as a cheaper version].”

Recommended Reading:

Case Study | The Complete Guide to Communicating Value to Shoppers. Among the greatest challenges fashion businesses face today is convincing increasingly discerning and discount-driven shoppers that their products are worth the buy — at full price. This case study explores how brands, from luxury to mass market, can communicate value in a competitive and choosy environment.

How Brands Are Taking On Quince. The dupe retailer has become a $4.5 billion powerhouse by promising lower prices and comparable quality to labels that fall between fast fashion and luxury. Competitors fighting back by stepping up their brand building chops are already seeing results.

Is Dupe Culture Out of Control?. The widespread availability and acceptance of dupes has cracked open access to products and trends for wider audiences. It’s also made doing business more complicated for many independent designers.

How to Compete With Shein. The Chinese fast fashion giant built an empire on unmatched speed-to-market and unbelievably low prices. To compete, others must play a different game.

5. Weighing DTC Against Wholesale

The Challenge: Selling through your own website and through retail partners often feels like a zero-sum game.

The most successful brands today don’t see direct versus wholesale as a dichotomy. Rather, they treat all channels of distribution as a single ecosystem. By integrating them, brands can use wholesale for discovery and e-commerce for retention, ensuring that every touchpoint — whether it’s a third-party shelf or your own URL — serves the bottom line.

For instance, building a digital-first following allows brands to leverage direct customer insights to refine their products and sharpen their value proposition before the risk of diluting their identity within a larger, third-party retailer.

“A lot of the time the brands are so eager to be stocked that they change their designs to suit a buyer’s intent that they end up producing collections that aren’t true to their vision,” said Eva Galambos, founder of Australian boutique Parlour X and former wholesale agent for brands.

The guiding principles for balance in distribution:

1. Work as one team: Your website and the stores that carry your brand should help each other, not compete. If they work together, you save money on ads and find more customers.
2. Pick partners for a reason: Use small, indie boutiques to keep your brand looking high-end, and use big department stores when you just want to reach as many people as possible.
3. Test before you commit: Before spending the money to open your own store in a new city, see how your products sell in someone else’s store there first to see if there’s actually a demand.
4. Ship only what sells: To avoid losing money on unsold clothes at big stores, try drop-shipping, where you only send the item after a customer buys it from the store’s website.
5. Don’t sell the exact same stuff everywhere: If every store has the same items, customers have no reason to visit your website. Keep your best colours or special designs just for your own shop.

Recommended Reading:

Case Study | How Brands Can Balance DTC and Wholesale. Emerging and established labels today are realising they can’t be exclusively DTC or wholesale. What’s essential is to strike the right balance of both. To do that, brands are streamlining retail partners, better curating products for different channels and leveraging the individual strengths of wholesale and DTC to bolster their sales and profits in each.

The Increasingly Popular Solve to Fashion’s Wholesale Woes. A challenging wholesale environment is pushing more fashion brands to sell on marketplaces where they directly fulfil customers orders. But the model requires a higher level of collaboration between brands and retailers to make it a mutually beneficial investment.