Conner Ives is Building a Business With Instinct

**Imran Amed** (0:04)
Hi, this is Imran Amed, founder and CEO of The Business of Fashion. Welcome to The BoF Podcast. It's Friday, June 5th.
Born in the leafy enclave of Bedford, New York, Conner Ives, a self-possessed country mouse, grew up in a household that taught him two things early on, that quality is worth protecting, and ambition is worth following. At 16, a connection through his mother's dental practice landed him an internship with Wes Gordon. Soon after, he moved to London and set about becoming a fashion designer. In his first year at Central Saint Martins, a garment from his foundational white project was requested and worn by model Adwoa Aboah to the 2017 Met Gala.

**Conner Ives** (0:52)
I remember then my next tutorial after that being sat down and told, it's nice that you can make dresses for people, quote unquote, reducing like doing the Met Gala as a 20-year-old first year BA student to that, but school has to come first.

**Imran Amed** (1:09)
Now, almost six years into building his label, Conner is navigating what it takes to turn creative instinct into a functioning business. His label began with one-of-a-kind reworked vintage pieces and dead stock materials, a proposition that gave the clothes their character, but was not always easy to translate into the wholesale system.

**Conner Ives** (1:31)
We do maybe 1,500 t-shirt dresses and no two were the same, and that was always the selling point of it, but that is a very difficult business pitch to get to a Net-a-porter, let alone a Net-a-porter buyer, but a Net-a-porter customer.

**Imran Amed** (1:47)
This week on The BoF Podcast, Conner Ives joins me to discuss what it means to build an independent fashion business without losing the instinct that made the work resonate in the first place. Here's Conner Ives on The BoF Podcast.
Conner Ives, welcome to The BoF Podcast.

**Conner Ives** (2:09)
Thank you so much for having me.

**Imran Amed** (2:10)
It's a heat wave in London. Are you keeping cool?

**Conner Ives** (2:13)
Well, I mean, it was supposed to have ended yesterday, but getting dressed today, even, I was like, OK, we're not out of it yet.
I am, actually. I didn't go into work today because I went yesterday when it was what?

**Imran Amed** (2:27)
So you don't have to go into work every day?

**Conner Ives** (2:30)
I know. The beauties of a founder slash director.

**Imran Amed** (2:34)
Oh my God, I have to work every day. No, seriously, thank you for coming to see us. I know it's really hot out there.

**Conner Ives** (2:43)
Thank you for having me. This is one of my, I mean, a longtime listener, first-time caller. I feel really honored to be here. Yes, of course.

**Imran Amed** (2:52)
Okay, good. Well, you know the drill then. I'm going to go deep into your personal history, examine your journey into fashion, excavate all the things that you're doing, and ask you to share some thoughts and feedback and advice. It's a pretty standard arc at this stage, but what's amazing for me about having conversations is everyone's journey into fashion is different. So let's start with yours.
Bedford. Where the heck is Bedford, New York? Explain to me and our listeners all around the world where Bedford is and what it was like to grow up there.

**Conner Ives** (3:32)
So Bedford, New York is a suburb of New York City. It's about an hour on the dot outside of the city. I always described it as it's the first town when you're going, maybe not the first town, but maybe the first town in my eyes that gets really rural. The Metro North, which is the equivalent to the EMR or something here, is a train line and you can do it door-to-door in an hour. So that was maybe the saving grace of Bedford for me.
Because it offered some kind of lifeline of escape. This is coming from a person that is a self-professed country mouse. I think I prefer the country to a city, but as a 16-year-old kid in the suburbs of New York City, that probably developed some affect that I was not going to be staying here for the rest of my life. It served as a wonderful lifeline to an industry that I at the time kind of felt almost like Oz.

**Imran Amed** (4:44)
So part of you is country mouse, part of you is city kid, and Bedford kind of offers a bit of both, because you can be in Bedford and near a farm or the country at some stage. In an hour, you can be, what is it, Grand Central Station?

**Conner Ives** (5:00)