57 things a designer should do with £30k instead of a fashion show

Fashion week for show, business infrastructure and long-term stability for pros.

Mar 17, 2026

∙ Paid

By Olya Kuryshchuk

When London Fashion Week kicked off in February, we received a newsletter announcing a schedule with 90 brands – an 11% increase on the year before. That may suggest positive forward momentum, but the broader picture for emerging fashion is far from rosy. In Paris, smaller brands are feeling the crunch: “A number of emerging and independent labels are opting out of runway shows entirely as they weigh their budgets amid a shrinking wholesale sector, soft consumer spending, trade volatility and rising costs.” Paris, in that context, saw an 11% decrease.

To show or not to show is a big dilemma for many early-stage designers. It’s a far cry from the 1950s when the catwalk wasn’t about theatre but just a way of conducting business. Today, a show is more a form of cultural currency. Not doing one can make a designer feel like they haven’t quite ‘made’ it – that perhaps they’re doomed to the dustbin of fashion irrelevancy. But for a young brand, a show is often a costly performance of legitimacy before the business itself is ready. Spending £30,000 on 15 minutes of visibility is a gamble not because the industry might miss it, but because even meaningful attention does not automatically translate into a viable business. A young brand may not yet have the product, production, distribution, or systems in place to turn interest into orders and orders into stability.

For their first seasons, most emerging brands don’t need to organise a show or presentation with hundreds of attendees. That money is arguably much better spent building a solid foundation, which is necessary for long-term success. In fact, unless you have a wealthy benefactor, that kind of cash is your oxygen. It’s rent, fabric, samples, and the ability to eat while you figure out how to keep your brand alive. To be clear: this is not an argument against runway shows altogether. When you’re an established brand with shareholders, stores in 10 cities, and actual production behind you, they can be a brilliant, high-leverage marketing move. But when you’re just starting out, here are some ideas of what you could better spend £30k on (a figure, we regret to inform you, that was calculated conservatively – most designers we spoke with estimated the cost at more like £70k).

Production and manufacturing

Begin with what you’re actually selling. A show can obscure a weak product for one season, but you won’t be able to get away with it for two. The most compounding investment a young brand can make is in the product itself. £30k directed at a product and production infrastructure will be still working for you in year five.

You could invest in:

A clear product architecture: hero pieces, supporting pieces, entry price points, so you have a collection logic that you don’t need to rebuild from scratch each time.
A freelance merchandiser to help you set that architecture up properly: how many options per category, what the price ladder looks like, where the collection sits relative to the market, what are your carry overs. Most designers have to learn all this knowledge the hard way, and it’s entirely transferable to every season that follows.
Pricing discipline before you go into production: cost of goods, target retail price, wholesale margin. It’s important that it’s done in advance, not retrofitted afterwards. We are yet to meet a young designer who didn’t make a pricing mistake in their first seasons, producing garments at a loss.
A carry-over strategy: which pieces, fabrics, or constructions will repeat or develop.
Developing and producing a commercial capsule collection of 15-20 pieces with proper margins, fit and finishes.
Building proper tech packs and specifications for production.
Upgrading trims: buttons, zips, linings, stitching standards.
Setting up proper sampling and pattern-cutting workflows with skilled technicians.
Creating a library of graded patterns across your core size range, so scaling an order doesn’t mean starting over.
A fit model, so your sizing is consistent from the beginning.
Developing a signature fabric or print with a mill, something that recurs across seasons and becomes part of how the brand is recognised. Shout-out to Marine Serre.
Building relationships with multiple manufacturers to secure better minimums and terms.
Proper quality control processes and testing before orders go out, not after the complaints come in.
Packaging and labelling built to scale from day one, not patched together when you suddenly need 300 units.
Sampling directly with your production factory where possible.
Hiring a part-time production manager for a year, so these systems actually get built.
Building buffer stock for bestsellers and core pieces.

But most importantly, invest deeply in one or two signature pieces. If you make knitwear, that means spending real time and real money on the yarn, the gauge, the finish, the fit, the weight in the hand. If it’s denim, it’s the fabric, the wash, the construction details, the rise. Get that piece completely right before you build around it. Everything else in this section is only worth building once you have that.

Typical spend: £15k–£25k

Business infrastructure

These one-time setup costs pay for themselves many times over.

Get proper accounting software (we like Xero, but there are many to choose from) and a good accountant (we work with Ben Warren and his team at Hilton Consulting)
Set up your VAT and understand how to track and claim it back.
Trademark registration across key markets (UK, EU, US at a minimum) – this is cheap relative to the cost of a dispute later.
Make founder agreements if there are two of you: equity split, decision-making, what happens if one person leaves. Most partnerships that break down do so because this was never written down. (We often use SeedLegals for this).
Have someone put together a standard wholesale contract and terms of trade for buyers.
Basic employment contracts and freelancer agreements.
Create a database of contacts (for press use Fashion Monitor), a simple CRM or even a well-structured spreadsheet to track buyer relationships, follow-ups, and order history, and a basic inventory tracking system so you know what you have, where it is, and what it costs.
Get business insurance.

Typical spend: £2k–£3k, though trademark registration sits separately. Budget £5k–£8k for UK and EU, and considerably more if you’re covering additional markets and categories. We send everyone to Giles Corbally at Bomhard IP. And we beg you, please trademark before you release your collection and before you post a single image. Winning your rights back after the fact can cost upwards of £200k. We have seen it happen. 😢

Brand identity (get a design studio involved)

There is a version of a young brand that exists only in the designer’s head (vivid and fully formed) and then there is what everyone else sees: an inconsistent Instagram grid, a wonky PDF line sheet that doesn’t match the website, a logo that was done in Canva at midnight before a deadline, different random fonts on different files. Brand identity is what closes that gap and makes the brand real. Done properly, with a studio that takes the time to understand what you’re building, it gives every touchpoint, like the email footer, the hang tag, the deck you send to a buyer in Milan, a coherence that signals seriousness and a clear vision. It is one of the few investments a young brand makes that, if done well, never needs to be made again.