Meet the MD: Founder of Astrid & Miyu on the "big learning curve" of setting up a business

In the last decade, Connie Nam has had quite the journey - going from an investment banking career to creating a chain of jewellery stores.

Connie is the founder and CEO of London-based Astrid & Miyu, which has four stores and 80 staff, and has seen 1,000 per cent growth in the past three years alone.

She took the time to talk to Bdaily about her journey to becoming a business owner, helping to support young entrepreneurs, and battling sexism to found her company.

Can you tell the readers about yourself first of all - i.e. your background, where you are from etc?

I was born in Seoul, South Korea and spent my childhood moving between there and Washington DC, US in accordance with my father’s placements as a diplomat.

I started my career as an investment banker in Hong Kong where I was no stranger to 18-hour working days. I developed a keen interest in the tech start-ups I worked with, observing how they approached business and the language that was used during corporate funding rounds.

I always had an entrepreneurial spirit and soon decided I wanted to run my own business so, having acquired the skills to do so naturally through my work, I set about deciding what that business would be and learning as much as possible from my peers.

I was always interested in the fashion and beauty space and I identified a gap in the market for affordable, higher-end fashion jewellery and so I set about developing the Astrid & Miyu brand eight years ago.

I wanted to create a disruptor jewellery brand that was fashion-forward and well-branded with good quality products and without a hefty price tag, something I felt was missing from the UK high street at the time.

I am passionate about creating unique products and Astrid & Miyu soon became a leader in the fashion jewellery space and today many of our competitors copy our ideas, which I find flattering as it shows we are taking the brand in the right direction and leading the way.

What does your role entail?

As founder and CEO of Astrid & Miyu, my role is to ultimately create a clear vision, run the business, continue its growth and lead and support my team in their work and in their development and progression within the business.

We now have 84 staff members across the retail and head office divisions of the business, with 34 in head office and 50 retail staff across the four stores and two concessions.

Having started off on my own, recruitment and team management was a big learning curve for me. Through trial and error, we now have a rigorous recruitment process, driven by strong cultural values, to identify the perfect candidates and I have excellent people heading up each department.

We are trying to navigate this uncertain climate just like everyone else but, luckily, we have a strong online community and loyal customer base that has allowed us to continue growing through this pandemic.

As a retail business, one of our biggest priorities is making sure our customers have positive shopping experiences, regardless of whether this is in store or online.

When was Astrid & Miyu set up, and how has it grown since then?

Astrid & Miyu was incorporated in 2012 when I launched the brand from my kitchen table in my Notting Hill flat.

Although I was embarking on an obviously exciting and dauting journey, setting up Astrid & Miyu was a very lonely experience – something I don’t think anyone tells you when you go solo and set up your own business – but as the brand successfully secured investment and the business grew, so did the Astrid & Miyu team.

In the last three years alone, Astrid & Miyu has achieved 1,000 per cent growth to £10m turnover with four stores, two concessions and 84 staff.

In 2018, we introduced in-store piercing and in 2019 added tattooing, which boosted like for like turnover by 350 per cent in 2019.

This year, the brand continues to defy the challenges presented by the current uncertain climate and continues growing thanks to our strong online community and experience-driven approach.

While our retail sales have inevitably dipped, our online sales are up over 100 per cent year on year as a result of our renewed focus on our online community.

What is it about your organisation that motivates and excites you the most?

We love creating new and fun products for our customers and their reactions to new collections is wonderful. We recently launched the Vintage Collection with a marketing story based on nostalgia and the feedback has been brilliant with some items sold out in weeks.

We have prototyped 100 per cent of our recent designs through 3D printing in London which is a huge innovation – we have been able to reduce lead times by a month while reducing carbon footprint!

I think it’s important to take risks and innovate to be a leader rather than a follower. When we decided to launch the tattoo and piercing experience in our stores and concessions, this was a risk as it required investment – financial and time-wise – and was very niche, not to mention the health and safety aspect, but it turned out to be one of the most successful elements of our brand.

Unfortunately, these elements are on hold pending further guidance from the government but we receive daily enquiries from customers who are keen to get back in the chair so it is great to know the appetite is still there.

Seeing just how far the brand has come over the last eight years also excites me and spurs me on to achieve more as an entrepreneur and to inspire others. I started this brand from scratch and on my own, whilst raising my two young children which I think is testament to what you can achieve with hard work and carving a niche for yourself.

I also feel proud and excited to see my colleagues grow with the company. As we have grown so rapidly, it has put a lot of challenges and pressure on the team, but at the same time they were able to grow and step up very quickly to becoming industry leaders in their fields.

Looking back on the past year, what has been your biggest achievement?

I believe in brand purpose and giving back to the community; I think that is a very important element of running a business and generating brand loyalty. In the last six months alone we have launched two Business Accelerator Programmes with the aim of supporting other entrepreneurs by sharing my business knowledge and advice.

I wish I had had someone with entrepreneurial experience to guide me when I was starting out, so I am keen to share my mistakes as well as my successes with my mentees as I know first-hand how much you can learn from mistakes.

Three months ago we chose three young fashion and lifestyle entrepreneurs to mentor under the first Business Accelerator Programme and help them establish and scale their businesses by sharing advice and guidance over one-to-one Zoom calls.

Following the success of our first round of business mentoring, we have launched a second similar initiative purely for young black entrepreneurs. We are currently assessing applications and finalising which six business owners will be accepted onto the programme where they will then be advised by up to six members of our senior team, depending on where their challenges lie.

As a minority myself, I was keen to dedicate a programme to support black-owned businesses as a way of making a positive contribution to the Black Lives Matter movement and ensuring we’re promoting diversity in business and the fashion and lifestyle industry.

What have been your biggest challenges during your time at Astrid & Miyu so far, and how have you overcome them?

One of the biggest challenges for me was securing the initial funding when I founded the business.

Many of the potential investors were more tech-focused at the time and the space was very male-dominant so it was challenging to be taken seriously as a young female entrepreneur launching a fashion and lifestyle-focused business in an already saturated market.

I strived to overcome this challenge and debunk the stereotype of a young woman aspiring to revolutionise the fashion industry.

My experience as an investment banker in Hong Kong in my 20s taught me the language needed to use to appeal to my audience and convince them that my business approach was viable and was able to successfully navigate my way through three rounds of corporate fundraising – two while pregnant.

The biggest challenge of all was becoming accustomed to managing people. I hadn’t had any management experience prior to founding Astrid & Miyu, so learning things on my own as I went along was a challenge; shifting my mindset from being an individual contributor to managing people, to then having to lead a full team of talent was quite overwhelming.

It was a learning process to relinquish some control and trust that I had the right people in place to manage day- today running of the business, freeing me up to focus on vision creation and longer-term growth strategies.

What does the future hold for your company? Any exciting projects in the pipeline we should know about?

The future holds physical expansion within the UK to cities including Brighton, Bristol, Manchester and Edinburgh and I have international ambition for the brand, having built up a loyal fanbase stateside.

Last year we staged three pop-up stores in Soho, New York, achieving sales of $10k a day. We are planning to open a store in the area once it is appropriate to do so.

It’s exciting to know we have that international customer base and it will be great to be able to expand into the physical retail space internationally and meet that demand.