NINA BRENER-HELLMUND
Takes us on a journey of values-driven global brand discovery with Cult Mia
If you’re longing to discover a beautifully curated selection of fashion by designers and artisans who are located in out-of-reach places, then Cult Mia is your destination.
How we feel and react when we discover something new to us can be extremely powerful. The feeling of surprise, anticipation, novelty and newness trigger the release of dopamine. Which intern makes us want to go exploring in search of a reward.
So, it’s no wonder that discovery is a big topic for the fashion industry. It’s what keeps us coming back to search for new editorial content, or the latest drops from our favourite brands. And it means big business for online retail. But, what if discovery wasn’t just about capitalising on that dopamine rush, and discovery actually became the key to unlocking a decent living as a creative for a female entrepreneur or unknown designer in a far-to-reach location? It puts a different perspective on why discovery is such a big part of Cult Mia.
Nina Brener-Hellmund, Cult Mia’s CEO & Founder, came up with the idea for the during her time at luxury trunkshow and designer pre-order business Moda Operandi. Competing against more than 100 businesses, Nina later applied to London Business School's accelerator program, Launchpad, and won with her idea for Cult Mia. In 2019, Cult Mia’s first year, they onboarded over 70 designers from 25 different countries, including Georgia, Nigeria and Ukraine.
Following on from the launchpad programme, Cult Mia joined London Business School's Incubator programme and received more than £200,000 of resources and office space for the first year of business. Cult Mia has recently raised its pre-seed investment, backed by strategic investors and family offices.
What intrigues us about Cult Mia, is how the brand’s core values - sustainability, empowerment of women, inclusivity, and lifting local communities - drive Cult Mia and their partner businesses forward.
All too often we see brands being ‘inspired by’ other cultures, platforms selling ‘authentic’ clothing without acknowledging they are ‘taking’ rather than celebrating, honouring and creating rightful remuneration for the clothing. Cult Mia is here to make that a thing of the past.
When we consider Nina’s family background - her grandparents moved from Spain, Poland and the Netherlands to Mexico, where her parents were born and raised - and her international education, across Switzerland, the USA, and the UK, it’s not difficult to understand why she has such an international viewpoint on life.
Nina is the daughter of parents who both achieved great things. Her father is a successful businessman and her mother was one of the first women in Mexico to complete a computer science degree before moving on to set up the computer systems for some of the biggest banks in Latin America.
Though her early career Nina spent time as part of The United Nations Women and Trade team supporting female entrepreneurs in underdeveloped countries by growing their micro-enterprises and connecting them to an international market. She also worked at Goldman Sachs in Geneva, covering Latin America.
In this podcast, Jodi Muter-Hamilton finds out all about Nina, her vision for Cult Mia, and the biggest challenges and opportunities ahead for her business, female entrepreneurs and designers operating in a global economy.
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Brands from left to right: Aleksandre Akhalkatsishvili, Andreeva, Janashia.
“I truly believe there has never been a better time to be a female founder. ”
A little bit more about Cult Mia’s product selection process and how they help customers to discover sustainable brands.
What is Cult Mia’s approach to sustainability and how do you review and select products for the whole site. How do you decide what is in The Sustainable Shop?
When it comes to selecting brands, we have a two-pronged approach: 1) fit against our customer values and taste and 2) brand and product vetting.
We focus on operational excellence and finding the perfect product for our community in terms of price, quality, exclusivity. We equally want to uphold the values that we and our community cares about. Our assortment criteria drive a balanced brand portfolio across our core values: sustainability, empowerment of women, inclusivity, and lifting local communities.
For example, 50% of brands are handmade locally and 35% of our brands see female empowerment as key to their mission.
In terms of differentiating our assortment on the sustainability side:
We're looking to showcase brands that are pioneers in new, sustainable materials and unique production techniques. (e.g. we recently onboarded a vegan bag brand that makes products from apple skins.)
We look for sustainable brands that are otherwise hard-to-access geographically and bring them online for the first time or introduce them to the European market for the first time.
We work closely with our brand sourcing partners network that spans across influencers, pr agencies, brand consultancies, regional fashion authorities that are scouting for the up-and-coming sustainable designers. We aim to drop these brands first (at times exclusively) and give them a permanent residence in our Sustainability Shop.
Have you found shoppers are looking to shop more sustainably? And if so, how are you encouraging that behaviour?
Customers buy into the sustainable story behind our brands and actively prefer to shop brands and pieces from our sustainable/made-to-order edit.
23% of Cult Mia's brand partners work with demand-led inventory business models. The top 3 performing brands on site (both in terms of sales and social engagement in 2020) were made-to-order brands. We can see that customers are not only willing to wait for unique and bespoke pieces (not deterred by longer lead times), but actively prefer to shop brands/pieces from our sustainable/made-to-order edit.
We've seen that customers will buy into the sustainable story behind our brands. When we create dedicated designer spotlights (via blog, newsletter, video interviews) with a sustainable storytelling aspect, higher sales and engagement follow.
We look for brands whose product prices haven't skyrocketed due to sustainable goals, as we've seen that customers are still deterred by higher price points, despite knowing that products are sustainable. The good news is that there are amazing sustainable designers at modern luxury price points.
We are trying to reinforce the fact that sustainability goes just beyond the product. Rather than it being something that people trade-off, sustainable versus trendy and cool, we're seeing that customers share feedback on how they are excited that they've found both a very cool product and a product that has a sustainable aspect to it.
Discover Cult Mia’s selection of up and coming designers, carefully hand-picked from around the world.
