Image Fabrics; Business Fashion
Brand identity is all about devising a particular mix of colour and embellishments that has an instantly recognisable aesthetic, and keeping a stringent eye on quality, so that the customers keep coming back, Quoted in Dawn News
In this dynamic world of fashion, where trends fade as quickly as they appear, it is becoming crucial to maintain a strong brand identity. You have to understand that behind the tapestries of glamour and accolades, there lies the business of fashion, which is ultimately, a business.
However, in this dynamic world, this concept was grabbed vigilantly by Image Fabrics. It is a high-street stalwart which was born in 1993. Since then it has been expanding and evolving according to the changing tastes of its customers while ensuring consistent quality.
More Read
Image Fabrics works only on two fundamental principles:
1) Quality over Price
2) Customer Respect
As stated by Farnaz Ahmed who is a director and co-founder of Image Fabrics.
“We never compromise on quality, even if that means that our prices may sometimes be higher than those of our competitors.
Growing up in a business-centric family, over the years, I absorbed so many do’s and don’ts that were part of the breakfast table conversation. ‘Never take customers for fools’, my elders would say, ‘because when you cut corners and bring down quality, they can sense it. They may not be able to put their finger on it, but they will know that something is wrong.”
During the interview with Farnaz and her daughters – Uzma Ahmad and Marium Ahmad, the interviewer noticed that they were all wearing outfits from various Image Fabric Collections
“Only the fabric is outsourced, from some very reliable suppliers,” Farnaz tells Icon. “The rest of the manufacturing is done in-house.”
She told “The fabric arrives at the factory once it has been inspected and approved, where it goes through multiple stages of embroidering, stitching, cutting, the addition of details, before the final look emerges. “There is a beauty to seeing the CAD [Computer-Aided Design] team at work, and for the fabric to pass through the embroidery machine and to see a flower come to life with thread or laser cut-work.”
“Uzma joined the business back in 2014 and, till then, we had only been selling fabric by the metre,” recalls Farnaz. “She told me that she would create some designs for the launch of our ready-to-wear line and came up with some ideas. I took one look at them and told her to throw them away. They were designs that may have been trending at the time but they did not reflect our identity.
“I firmly believe that the market doesn’t know better until you offer it something better and that’s what we would do. Our forte has always been cutwork and Schiffli embroidery. So, if we were to create a ready-to-wear line, it had to be true to our roots.
“So I instructed Uzma to visit our library of archives and select ten designs from the ’90s, add laces to them, stitch them neatly and we would have our new line ready!
By 2016, we expanded from fabric to fashion. Maryam joined in and we also plunged into e-commerce.”
Summing up, she told her entire journey and said that there is the first rule in book of the Business pf Fashion 101 – that is- A Brand Identity.
