As part of NETWORK.’s Female Founders Series, Emily Current and Meritt Elliott welcomed us into their store, THE GREAT on Melrose Avenue, for an intimate conversation with Booth Moore from WWD.  Read highlights from their conversation here:

Booth Moore: Your first entry into the fashion industry was through styling. Tell me how that started and what your big break was?

Emily Current: We knew that we liked to create stories and we knew we liked to create imagery, and we realized that within the industry, stylists control a lot of the outcome of how clothing was visualized in the final product.  We built a book on the side of our day jobs and ended up getting an agent and started styling. We were different because we weren’t pulling things off of the runway. We were hodge-podging vintage with designers, creating this look for ourselves that was different from other stylists at the time.

Booth: How did you jump from styling to designing?  Was it by necessity or was it all planned out?

Emily: We really started by thinking about denim, because we had tailoring vintage Levis for clients.  We saw that there wasn’t a lot of vintage denim in the market, so we thought that we needed to make them.

Booth: After having one huge success with Current Elliot, why on earth did you want to start over again?

Meritt: We love what we do, because we have gone through building, growing, selling, leaving –a full circle. We took all the parts of it that we love and amplified that; we took all the parts we didn’t love and hired people to do that. We knew everyone we worked with shared similar values –share the joy.

Booth: You started Current/Elliott in 2008 and you started The Great in 2015; how have things changed now versus then in terms of what you spend on and what are the most important priorities for branding?

Meritt: Everything has changed!  There was no e-commerce in 2008. There was no Instagram or any of the other social or digital platforms. Those platforms are effective but I also think it is an extremely crowded space, so at the end of the day, we need to ground ourselves in making good product. We have to focus on the hand-feel, the fit, the feeling the customer has, the emotional relationship with the product … and then we have to capture that digitally.

Booth: What was a big “miss” you had with your first business that you have corrected with your second?

Emily: Full transparency.  I think we grew up in a culture and learned business in a culture that was very secretive.   Now in our business, the biggest difference is that we are really transparent.  We all talk about what the consequences if this doesn’t work are, what the costs are, what the context of this is and how we are all working together to build something.

Meritt:  There wasn’t this defined sense of community in female founders and with designers which we could learn from and talk to. That has since changed a lot.  Emily and I had each other, thank god, and we shed tears, and laughs and hugs through the journey.  But we didn’t really understand that there was a community of women who were going through similar things in the same or different industries.

Booth: I wanted to ask you about mentorship, and how important that is and how you have been able to cultivate mentors along the way and meet people you admire and reach out for help?

Emily: My biggest piece of advice for people who want to get into this industry is that relationships are everything.

Meritt: It’s important to always be learning. It’s important to share that knowledge and pass it on.  There are more than enough resources for us all to share and to set aside that competitive nature we all have.  Maintain the relationship and always remain generous with your knowledge and your time.

Booth: How has the impression of being a fashion brand from Los Angeles changed over the time that you have been designing?

Emily: You know a lot and I love this topic because there was a lot of pressure always to sort of show in New York and to participate in certain ways that have not been totally authentic to ourselves or would be a lot for us to do. There is not just one way to do things. There is not one place to design. There is not one place to be taken seriously.

Booth: What have you seen recently for The Great that has been working well to market and sell the brand, what strategies?

Meritt: An authentic customer experiences is definitely what moves the needle for us. We make clothing for real life, and how we live day to day, and I think that we are trying to celebrate that.

Booth: Tell us about the store and why it fits into the retail landscape now and why it works to have this store for you guys, which sounds like it’s almost like a little laboratory.

Meritt: I look back at the beginning of our friendship and our most fun memories are when we would meet early Saturday mornings and get a coffee and go shopping together.  What we found for a while was that there weren’t that many places to go shopping, so we are getting back to our roots and having the experience of walking in somewhere. There’s a sense of discovery, of trying things or treating yourself after a long week. There is something really authentic about the experience of shopping and the curation of other things that we have found along our journey.

Booth: What is the biggest challenge for you now in business?

Emily: Carving out creative time. Business takes precedence a lot of times and it’s really hard to carve out even just an hour a day just for thinking and creating. We’ve made a big effort to travel a bit more and to see things.

Booth: There has been a lot of doom and gloom in the fashion industry lately, and brick and mortar like you just spoke to, what makes you feel hopeful about the industry?

Meritt: I think we are hopeful people. I think we are optimistic people and we have been through ups and downs in this business. People like to touch and feel things; they like to go on journeys with other people. People like aesthetics and they like to  get dressed every morning and show their personality and power through clothes.  So I don’t think the fundamentals of the fashion business have changed. I think the gloom and doom are all things we need to work on fixing in our business and in our industry.