Our latest guest on The Manic Metallic Podcast is Kanyinsola Onalaja, the founder and creative director of womenswear brand Onalaja. Kanyinsola’s designs are painstakingly embroidered and embellished, and I had to have her on the show as soon as I got a look at her work. Our talk was filled with priceless fashion and career takeaways — per the usual with our podcast — and you’ll have to listen to the full episode to get all of them.
But, we will share six suggestions that Kanyinsola gave for those looking to enter the fashion industry. Read them below:
Learn The Business Of Fashion As Soon As You Can
Find people that you can collaborate with, and learn about areas like production, marketing, and pricing strategies in order to get yourself on sound footing with the business side of things.
(We actually had a guest in a previous episode — Episode 47 — who drove home the importance of increasing your business knowledge as someone in the fashion industry. Here’s the episode link: 047. Why Fashion Creatives Really Need To Increase Their Business Knowledge With Fashion Executive Leslie Gallin)
Trust Your Perspective
“You’re a unique person, you have your way of looking at things, and you need to lean into that. Trust it, explore it, and show it off.” – Kanyinsola Onalaja
Persevere
“You have to really, really love being in the industry, because it gets tough, and..…that passion is what fuels the hard times and when things aren’t necessarily going the way you want them to go.” – Kanyinsola Onalaja
Be Open-Minded and Adaptable
Don’t necessarily lean into a specific outcome. Following the process and leaning more into the process than what the outcome is is a less stressful way of doing things.
It makes you more open to creating different things or finding new methods of doing things — or finding new avenues.
Test Quickly And Get Feedback
Don’t create in isolation, because when you put your work out there, people won’t necessarily relate to it. And be able to adapt to the feedback, but you don’t have to listen to every single piece of feedback that you get.
As Kanyinsola says, “Take what you need to take from where you need to take it, and then implement it.”
Share Your Work Online
There is a benefit to failing faster — it helps you to learn from your failures more quickly. For the perfectionists out there, Kanyinsola has this to say:
“I’m a perfectionist, so I want things to always be perfect, and over time I had to learn that sometimes, it’s better to fail faster but then learn from it so that I can do it again and then get closer to what I would see as perfect.”
For those of you looking for tips on getting into fashion, Kanyinsola’s advice here is pretty sound.
If you want to go deeper on these ideas that she talks about — both those listed here, as well as hearing the rest of the podcast — you can listen to the full episode of The Manic Metallic Podcast at any of the links below:
053. Perseverance, Perspective, and Overcoming The Need For Perfection In Fashion With Creative Director Kanyinsola Onalaja
Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Click Here For More Listening Options
To subscribe to Manic Metallic‘s Substack newsletter, click here.
