Building AYM
How my business began with very humble roots.
AYM didn’t start as AYM - like many of us, it’s had multiple versions of itself. It started life as a hobby, eventually morphing into ‘Boom Boom Boutique’, then being refined as ‘Boom Boom the Label’ before I finally decided to elevate and rebrand it as ‘AYM Studio’. But let’s start at the beginning, before it even became ‘Boom Boom’.
I was studying product design at university, and I was (and still am) deeply interested in how things were made. That curiosity naturally spilled beyond my uni life and into a growing collection of hobbies. I was making jewellery (badly), embellishing tops and beanie hats with studs, and generally tinkering and experimenting with whatever materials I could get my hands on. I was always making something.
I came across a sewing machine at my mum’s house, so it felt like a natural opportunity when I then found a box of scrap fabric in a charity shop for £14. I decided, that I was going to turn that box of scraps into clothes. I started experimenting with sewing, seeing what was possible, learning as I went. From that single box of fabric, I made 6 dresses, which I began wearing on nights out.
It was during those nights that something shifted. Girls would come up to me and ask where my dress was from. Those moments felt pretty pivotal. It was the first time I realised I could create something that other people genuinely wanted. That realisation stayed with me and pushed me to keep going, and to take what I was doing more seriously.
I went on to sell the dresses and reinvested the profits in buying more fabric, from eBay! And then I found myself with a business..
I taught myself everything by doing. I learned how to pattern cut, how to grade clothing, and how to take an idea for a garment and turn it into a finished piece. I really immersed myself in the technical side of clothing production. Along the way, almost by accident, I began double-layering my garments. At the time, I simply wanted to create jersey and stretch pieces that were not see-through. It was surprisingly difficult to find garments like that on the market at the time.
This was the era of bodycon dresses, that 2016 fashion. Stretch clothing was everywhere, but it was mostly single-layered, cheaply made, and poorly constructed. Fast fashion was in it’s absolute hay day. I wanted to do something different. I started making dresses with two layers of fabric throughout, fully lined jersey pieces. I used a pattern-cutting approach that would normally be applied to woven garments and adapted it for stretch fabrics. I incorporated details like lace-up waists and darts, focusing obsessively on how to achieve a tailored, structured look using jersey.
As a woman who has a small waist to larger hips ratio, getting the shape of the garment to fit a curved figure was my goal. I was sick of badly made bodycon dresses that had no shape in them, cheaply churned out to sell for a tenner.
Through all this experimentation, the silhouettes of my designs slowly became refined. Within the first couple of years, I had developed a handful of core pieces. I shared them on social media, and organically, I began to build a following. It was a wild time, because it was the birth of social media and influencers. So within the first few years I had the most amazing women wearing my scrappy little designs. Lydia Millen wore one of my studded beanies, Sarah Ashcroft was wearing my dresses and influencers around the world were wearing dresses I was hand making in my mum’s garage.
At that point, I didn’t hold any stock... I honestly wouldn’t have even known how to. So every time an order came through my website, I would make that garment from scratch. I would cut the fabric, sew it, package it, walk it to the post office, and send it off. Every single piece was made individually, start to finish.
It was an incredibly time-consuming way to work, but it taught me everything. I could see exactly what worked and what didn’t. I was involved in every part of the business: customer care, marketing, production, merchandising, website building, all of it. It was a real education in how to build a business from the ground up.
Within a few years, demand grew beyond what I could realistically manage alone. The business reached £250,000 a year, with just me, making every garment myself. I look back at it now and it’s astounding that it was even possible. I don’t know how I managed to make that many clothes by myself!! By that point, I was working close to 18 hours a day. My life was split between my computer screen and my sewing machine, with very little space for anything else. It became clear that something had to change.
I realised I needed support, and that the next step was not just about making more clothes, but about thinking strategically about how to grow the business in a sustainable way.
Business Start Up - Book Recommendations
Lean Start Up - Eric Reis
Story Brand - Donald Miller
Measure What Matters - John Doerr
Profit First - Mike Michalowicz
These are the books I always recommend when I speak to someone who is starting a business. They are the ones that will help build courage in the numbers, confidence in the message and marketing - and clarity on tracking results.
Let me know what you’d like to know about my journey in building this business so far.
Are you building a business of your own? What road blocks are you facing that I might be able to help you with?
I absolutely love supporting women in business and want to provide as much value as possible to other women who want to build something of their own.
Thanks for sharing, I always love reading peoples stories and journeys of how they got started. I am just at the beginning, the very beginning of my journey so can't wait to hear more from you.