Mother Hustler: Bianca Acke of Le Edit
The mother of five with ten years of business under her belt talks balance and art of slowing down when duty calls
I spoke to fashion and skincare entrepreneur Bianca Acke (Le Edit, Solitude) on a Wednesday in the middle of a school day. She stressed the importance of balancing her 10 year-old business around her five children; wrapping up our chat just before she got an emergency call from the school about a broken bone.
Hannah: Thank you so much for doing this! It's so cool to be able to talk to creatives and other women in business; especially mums. I know you’ve been going for quite a while in your business with a few different iterations, like Little Pop Studio?
Bianca: Yep, then I changed the name because I knew that I would always end up doing something for women. Little Pop Studio didn't really work for women!
How did you get into business? What's your background?
I think that for a lot of us, having kids, being stuck at home and having the time to think about stuff does it! I started off just doing some paintings for my kids’ rooms - Instagram had just started, and my friend was like, you should share them on Instagram, so I did!
Then people started to ask me if I could do it for their kids’ rooms too and shops asked me if they could sell prints. Rock Your Baby asked me if they could put the prints on clothes but it didn’t work out, so I thought, well, why don't I just do it myself?
Oh my gosh, so it was super organic!
Instagram was just such a different place back then. The reach was just - it was crazy. Now it's like, pay to play. If you're getting traction organically, that's amazing.
Was any of it intentional? Were you thinking that you wanted to build a business or was it just one foot in front of the other?
It all just started from my kids, like I was painting things for their rooms, and then making clothes for them to wear. And that's how the name [Le Edit] came around, because I knew that it would always be small, edited collections. My goal at the start was just to do a onesie and some pants and a woollen jumper - just to keep things tight and very edited.
What did you do for work before your kids? Did it lead into this or help you build your brand?
Before we had kids, we lived in London for a few years; I was just doing admin work. It really didn’t have anything to do with what I do now!
I think when you have kids, you feel like, is this going to ruin my career? But I think for a lot of people, it actually sets you off on a different course that ends up being what you love.
Yeah, for sure. It's kind of crystallises everything and gives you this new motivation and purpose that you never had before as well. That’s how it was for me. So were there any challenges in the way when you first started out?
When the Rock Your Baby deal didn't work out, I thought I’d just put the paintings on clothes myself, like the little Batman pictures I did. I didn’t know it at the time but there were copyright issues with that, obviously, but I had no idea. That’s why it didn’t work out with RYB. I was just about to get them printed on clothes and they were like, you can’t do that.
So I was like, oh, I better put something else on there, I don’t want to get in trouble, and that’s where it started!
My style is pretty basic, so then it was all black and white and super monochrome, and that's just me, so I carried that through to women's clothes as well. It just makes it easy to mix and match stuff!
And when I had babies, I was really into putting them in organic clothes, natural fibres, so that’s something that’s still an important part of it.
That’s right - the clothing you produce is very much done so with sustainability as a priority and you advocate for slow fashion; how do you release your collections if not on a seasonal basis?
I just design what I feel like wearing and hopefully other people do too. I feel like there’s so much fast fashion out there, and sometimes I’ll be in the mall and think, what am I even doing making clothes?
But that’s my point of difference, there’s no plastic in my clothes, it’s linen and cashmere and 100% organic cotton. I hope people are kind of starting to feel that they don’t want to wear plastic as much as we learn more about the impact it has on us. Like workout gear, right? That’s another thing I’m playing around with at the moment.
My focus is always creating key pieces, with beautiful, natural fabrics and fibres that are going to go with what you’ve already got and they’re going to stand the test of time. Like a great linen shirt that lasts forever or a pair of cotton jeans that are going to hold their shape forever and just stay with you.
So aside from the copyright issue at the beginning, was there ever a moment where you almost gave up? That maybe it wasn’t meant to be or maybe you questioned if you should carry on?
Yeah, all the time in business, I really feel like I had no idea what I was doing! I got in contact with a manufacturer in India telling them I wanted to make these baby clothes.
They were like, sure, it’s 100 minimum quantity per size. So all of a sudden I had hundreds and hundreds of these baby clothes in my garage. It was just this jump from selling a few prints and pillowcases to selling clothes. I think I sold maybe one or two when I launched, and I had HUNDREDS.
I was like what do I do?
So what did you do?
Well they all sold eventually, but the next thing was that I went to the stores that had stocked my prints and they’re all like thanks but no thanks, we don’t want merino jumpers coming into summer.
I just hadn’t even thought about the seasonality of clothing. I just had no idea, and had so many failures and learned so much!
Honestly, if you meet someone who hasn’t failed, then they haven’t done anything.
I love that. It sounds like it was very much a trial by fire! It also sounds like you’re pretty comfortable with charging into things and figuring it out as you go - where did that come from? I feel like so many people overthink, they get analysis paralysis and just quit before they even start.
I just think if you keep going, you’ll get there. So many people give up too soon; they give up right before things could start to get better. And you need to be ready and able to change and evolve constantly too.
My husband isn’t a risk taker like me! He kind of balances me out where I would just risk everything.
And I guess you had to be quite humble and open to those failures and learning and improving along the way. You had the right attitude for it - it sounds like you owned that you didn’t know what you were doing!
I feel like I still have no idea! I’m always just giving things a go, learning on the way.
That’s incredible. And how long has it been now?
Around 10 years. I started when I was pregnant.
And you’ve since had five children?
Yeah, my oldest is almost 14, and my baby just turned six. We live in the Coromandel and they all go to a little country school.
So, your youngest has only just started school; how did that change things? You’ve got full school days to work with!
Yeah, but it's messy! You think that you're gonna have all this time, but this week I've had parent teacher interviews, I’ve got to pick my little girl up from school early, I’m taking a leadership class next week with the kids. I don’t think I’d be able to hold down a normal job with five kids, it’s just messy.
I feel like I’ve always said to myself that this is just my hobby, because it has to work around my kids.
Has your business always been a one-woman show?
Whenever I’ve had a baby, I would get someone on to help so I could stay home, but it’s always just been for a limited time.
So you just always keep it at a level that’s manageable for you and not try to grow it too much?
I feel like this year I just figured out how to do Facebook advertising, because it was getting to a point where I didn’t do it for so long, and it was like, well, no one’s seeing anything, so I have to either pay to get some attention or I have to get a normal job.
I feel like I’ve just reached another phase with it; my baby is in school now, I have a bit of time to put into studying how to advertise, so I’ll just see what happens. I’m always going to need it to be flexible, because my kids are always going to come first.
Over the ten years you must have been through so many ebbs and flows!
Oh yeah, like when you have a baby, everything just stops; it goes out the window.
And do you think your kids will follow in your footsteps? Do any of them have any interest in what you do?
I don't know. I really don't know! They're all so different - one's really into animals, another one's arty. I would love to be able to offer them a job as they get older - I always have that in the back of my mind, especially where we live, it’s quite a small community and there aren’t a lot of job opportunities.
With being able to be online, it really opens things up, no matter where you are.
It’s so incredible that you’ve sustained this ‘hobby’ as you say, for ten years now, and it’s really cool that you haven’t felt the need to chase this massive, scaled business, you can just kind of keep it simmering and turn it up and turn it down as you need. It seems like a really sustainable way to do business as a mother.
Yeah. It always fits in with my life, and it changes as we go - who knows what it will become as my kids grow up!
You can explore Bianca’s brand Le Edit here, as well as her skincare range, Solitude.