Starting A Premium Fashion Brand with Hannah & Sarah

My audience is eager to read stories of female entrepreneurs creating a difference in the world. Tell us about yourself and your brand.

We are, Sara Lewis and Hannah Oliver and we are the co-founders of On Good Authority. We are friends first and foremost. We are city girls living in London with a shared passion for getting away at the weekends spending time in the outdoors, reconnecting with nature.

On Good Authority is a premium, sustainable rain-wear brand. We make waterproof jackets from recycled plastics, using non-toxic water repellency techniques. We think women should be able to be fully protected from the elements without having to compromise on their style or ethics.

Your story & brand is something many readers would relate to. In detail, tell us how you got started and where your idea originated from.

On Good Authority started as an idea at a particularly rainy Glastonbury festival. Relentless wet weather meant that we spent the five-day event in our waterproof hiking jackets feeling frustrated at the compromise between style and practicality. We started speaking to our friends and realised it wasn’t just us that felt this way.

With my background in performance outerwear development it soon became apparent that this was a problem that we could actually solve. I have worked in the fashion industry for 15 years at major lifestyle brands and my experience has always been the same, women’s wear is seen as a second priority to menswear. With smaller teams, smaller collections, less R&D, less investment – the term “shrink it and pink it” is prevalent in the industry. Women don’t want patronising pink and purple jackets with floral prints. They want technical product with style,  empowering them to get on with their day. Women want their rain-wear to be an extension of their everyday outfit whether that’s on their commute, in the boardroom or doing the school run.

Hannah has worked in the communications industry for many years working on creative branding solutions so we felt we had the perfect skill set to create a brand for like-minded women offering them style, protection and a responsible solution.

As female entrepreneurs, you must be multitasking many times while developing your business & brand. If you could systemise something in your business to run on automation, what would it be and what would that look like to help you in your business?

As start-up founders, we have to wear all the hats! We literally have to do everything, even if we don’t know how to, we have to learn how to or find someone kind enough to help us! One of the first hires that we will make once we are further established is a social media manager. It’s such an integral part of communication but extremely time consuming and requires head space to maintain creativity and interest.

From your experience, what are some key factors you’ve learned on this journey to create an outstanding, premium fashion brand?

As previously mentioned, as founders we have to work out how to manage all aspects of running a business. That said, it’s also really important to recognise where our skills fall short and when it’s better to invest in expert support. Hannah and I both have our own specialist areas of knowledge but we recognised that we needed support with brand art direction, especially as we are a high-end brand.

To build a successful brand and to establish it, one has to go through many challenges. What are some of the challenges you go through on a day-to-day basis?

You have to have self-belief. You have to believe in yourself and the brand that you are building. There are good days and there are days when you think, what are we doing? Can we really do this? But you have to hold onto the fire in your belly and keep celebrating the milestones. Even if they are only very small, they are great achievements. We actually run a document that we up-date daily outlining our achievements that day. Not only does it act as a great log of actioned tasks, it helps put our progress into black and white.
Quite often with a start-up you experience one-step forward, two steps backwards, which can feel disheartening. So to be able to look back at a document and see tangible headway can be really helpful.