Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Elliot Moss
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today I am extremely pleased to say is Shosh Kazab, Co-Founder and CEO of Kidswear Collective, the luxury resale platform for baby and kids’ fashion. A career in marketing and PR led to Shosh taking on a Danish children’s brand and noticing how untapped the kidswear market was. She founded Fuse Communications in 2004, a baby and kids PR agency with a focus on luxury brands. Troubled by the waste in the fashion industry and particularly designer kids’ fashion where it’s estimated children wear garments on average only five times, a eureka moment, as she says, came for Shosh when she saw a fashionable woman shopping in a New York second-hand store where Pucci and Chanel dresses hung on rails. What if you bring a luxury experience to childrenswear while also encouraging greater sustainability? Shosh and her husband Anthony, a financial technology entrepreneur, launched Kidswear Collective in 2018 offering items from over 500 brands, including Dior, Dolce & Gabbana and Moncler at up to 80% price reduction and available both online and in department stores in the UK and Qatar. It’s fabulous to have you here. You’ve almost been here a few times, in fact people wouldn’t know that but you have introduced many guests to this programme with your PR hat on so, hello in your own right, Shosh Kazab.
Shosh Kazab
Wow, I’m so delighted to be here for real, sitting on this fabulous chair, in this fabulous room, it’s, it’s wonderful to be on this side of the screen.
Elliot Moss
Different for you though, right, because you’re used to promoting other people in other businesses and did that, have done it, continued to do it for twenty years.
Shosh Kazab
Yeah, I mean, I’m definitely out of my comfort zone. As a PR for the past twenty-odd years, I’ve always been talking about other people and other people’s businesses and other people’s successes so, it’s, it’s been an adjustment talking about, you know, what we’re doing and what we’re trying to achieve with Kidswear Collective but, you know, it’s an exciting business and actually I love talking about it and I love sharing what we’ve been doing with anyone who wants to listen.
Elliot Moss
Now, we know each other, we know each other very well.
Shosh Kazab
We do.
Elliot Moss
So I, this is a, you know I say that because it’s important that people realise that, and I know this business really well because it was a bit like the Remington moment where he says, ‘It was so great, I want to buy the company’. I’m, I’m involved, which is a fabulous thing to be able to say. I meet so many entrepreneurs and it’s brilliant when you hear their stories, it’s even better when you’re in it. Your first business, so I want to just go back there to Fuse Communications which I mentioned. Why did you set your own thing up then?
Shosh Kazab
I don’t know, I think I’ve always been quite entrepreneurial, I’ve never liked taking orders from people, I don’t know, I grew up as an only child – I have a half brother and half sister with a different, different mums – but I grew up as an only child and I think I’ve always liked to do my own thing and it’s sort of been ever since I can remember and I was never someone who was crazy about school, it never really challenged me in the way that I felt challenged and I always just, I just wasn’t conformist in that way so, working for someone my whole life wasn’t something I ever saw for myself. So, I don’t know, the first opportunity I had to get out and do something myself, I jumped at it so, before launching Fuse, I was working in the fitness industry in a marketing role for many years and I was in that company for a while and I grew as the business grew and kind of got to the point at which I just felt that there weren’t any more challenges so, set about setting up a marketing agency or consultancy on my own with another person I knew from the industry and we did that for a little while and it was okay but I just felt like it was a bit samey and I just needed something different so, you mentioned a Danish kids’ brand earlier, it was an opportunity that just sort of fell in my lap, my sister-in-law, who is Danish, mentioned that a friend of hers was bringing a kids’ brand to the UK and would I like to do her PR. Obviously, I knew nothing about B2C PR, I was in business-to-business for many years, I knew nothing about the kids’ industry but I was at that point in my career where I just thought why not.
Elliot Moss
It was perfect, ‘I knew nothing about this, I knew nothing about that so I went for it’.
Shosh Kazab
Just go for it.
Elliot Moss
Just go for it.
Shosh Kazab
What’s the worst that can happen? So, and that was amazing. It was a kids’ brand called Mini A Ture and actually I was working them up until only a couple of years ago, which is quite rare for PRs, you tend to chop and change PRs quite frequently and actually, with my Fuse business, I had clients for ten/twelve years so, yeah, it was really fun being an extension of people’s businesses but not having to be part of their business.
Elliot Moss
Yeah. But I just want to go back for a minute to the school thing and again, I have spies in this because it happens to be true that my wife went to school with you.
Shosh Kazab
Yes, she did.
Elliot Moss
It’s ridiculous, isn’t it, again, there aren’t many guests that I meet where the, where this has happened. Um, you said you were non-conformist, you know, when Lindsey, my wife, talks about you, she says, this was a force of energy and a ball of just kind creativity and all that. What was it do you think about you not feeling like you wanted to conform? Where did that come from?
Shosh Kazab
Honestly, I don’t know. I’ve had it, I’ve had it ever since I can remember and I just, I just never felt challenged in a school environment, I never felt like this sort of, you know, learning by repetition and just reading and memorising and then forgetting it five minutes later, I just, I couldn’t understand why we weren’t taught things that would stand us in good stead in life and you know, maths in a way that you can apply in business or even legal stuff, I mean why were we not taught about how to look after ourselves in that way so, I just felt like we weren’t being taught things that I could apply in real life. It just never challenged me and I wasn’t interested and I was just one of those people that was happier not being at school than being at school.
Elliot Moss
I quickly add that Shosh speaks many languages, so it isn’t that she didn’t learn stuff but she learnt it in a different way. Stay with me for much more from my spirited Business Shaper, it’s Shosh Kazab and she is the Co-Founder of Kidswear Collective. A lot of people listening will go, do you know what, I didn’t like school either. And I have a variety of people that have set their own business up from the super academic, they did an MBA, all the way through to they left school at sixteen. Yours is kind of a bit of this and a bit of that, it’s almost like you held your nose for all those years and carried on. At what point, as a young adult, did you start to really learn stuff that is useful now?
Shosh Kazab
Do you know, I’ve always worked, like I started working when I was probably, and you couldn’t do it these days, but I was about probably 13/14, my dad had a shop in Petticoat Lane and I would go and work there on the weekends, then I was 15 and I was working in a shop in Golders Green and selling shoes and earning £15 on a Sunday but I loved it, I had my own bank card and I had my own money and I loved not asking my mum for money and having my own freedom in what I could do and what I could spend that money on, so, I’ve always loved earning my own money, it’s always kind of been there. I wanted to be, I enjoyed going to university, I mean I went to study in Paris for a year as part of my year out at uni and I preferred the experience of being in Paris rather than studying in Paris, I learned a lot more being in Paris and just meeting people and I worked while I was living in Paris as well and actually, I got more skills and my language improved more probably from working. Again, it just, every opportunity it was for education to kind of give me those skills, I never really got it from education, I got it from life and you know I….
Elliot Moss
And your dad, just talk about your dad for a minute, I mean he’s, you know, been in lots of businesses, is a proper what you would call kind of survivalist entrepreneur, I mean just gets on and does stuff.
Shosh Kazab
I mean he literally is a survivor, I mean he was one of the Iraqi Jews that fled Baghdad in 1951. They, they left relatively wealthy lives and left with a suitcase and I think $10 to their names and became refugees in Israel and had to start from scratch and I don’t know, I think it’s this inherited, I don’t know if it’s a trauma or, maybe it is but there’s something in you that a survival technique just kind of kicks in and my dad had many different careers but no, it’s a, it’s a real story of success in many ways because to come from something and then have nothing and build yourself up again is, is something that not many people can do and so hopefully it’s a survival technique that is ingrained in me somehow.
Elliot Moss
Um, I read somewhere that you were six and he came back from a work trip in New York with a special set of Christian Dior pyjamas. Was that the beginning of the love affair with luxury?
Shosh Kazab
God, that makes me sound so bratty but I can assure you that was probably my only bit of Dior my entire life and actually, I think still is apart from a Dior kids’ belt that I think I bought myself last week from Kidswear Collective that fit me but yeah, I mean you know, it’s, he used to go off on his exotic travels and he came back from New York this time with this sort of fabulous pair of silk Dior pyjamas and I remember just cherishing them and wearing them until they didn’t fit and just being really upset when I couldn’t fit into them anymore and having to, I don’t even know what happened to them, that’s sad, but you know, yes, I’ve always loved lovely things and I don’t know, maybe it’s the Iraqi Jew in me but I had, I don’t like paying full price for things and I always like to get a deal where I can so, that, you know, balance of quality without having to break the bank and I think that’s a good balance that we can all try to get in life, is just buying better quality things but you know not having to lay out as much as we have to.
Elliot Moss
Yeah, and we’re going to talk all about that because obviously in the context of Kidswear Collective, we shall be hearing lots more about, that is essentially at the core of the idea, great quality but it doesn’t have to break the bank. Stay with me for more from my Business Shaper today, it’s Shosh Kazab and she’s the Co-Founder and CEO of Kidswear Collective, they are a pre-loved, luxury kids’ platform. Right now though we’re going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Innovation Sessions, which can be found on all the major podcast platforms. New presenter, Lydia Kellett, invites business founders to share their industry insights and practical advice for those of you thinking about getting into an industry and starting your very own thing. In this clip, focussed on the fashion industry, we hear from Eshita Kabra Davies, Founder of peer-to-peer rental app, By Rotation.
You can of course find all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice. My guest today, in case you haven’t been listening and crime it is if you haven’t, is Shosh Kazab, Co-Founder and CEO of Kidswear Collective, the luxury resale platform for baby and kids’ fashion. So, Kidswear Collective, 2018, drumroll, it happens, it comes from this, this insight which I mentioned right at the beginning of the programme which as you saw, I think it was, was it The RealReal in New York?
Shosh Kazab
Yep.
Elliot Moss
And RealReal, which if you haven’t, then go and look that up, it’s a, it’s a fabulous business, really interesting and BIG and it does beautiful, luxury second-hand stuff and you saw this in New York and you went, ‘hold on a minute’ because you’ve been in the fashion world for kids for many years. When you had that feeling, Shosh, was it a, ‘I’ve got to do something about this’ or did it kind of percolate through eventually?
Shosh Kazab
No, it really was like a eureka moment. It’s interesting because I’ve always shopped and worn mixed wardrobe and a mixed wardrobe basically means you’re combining new clothes with vintage clothes or second-hand clothes and that’s, that’s something I’ve always done, ever since I was a kid, I mean I used to always buy second-hand a lot of my friends would just, you know turn their noses up at it and…
Elliot Moss
Flip. There was Flip in Covent Garden.
Shosh Kazab
Flip, there was Rocket.
Elliot Moss
Rocket. I used to go there for the jeans. I wore 501s, which is not great for my figure.
Shosh Kazab
I mean, it’s not great for anyone’s figures, to be fair.
Elliot Moss
Let’s be honest. They’re really difficult, they’re not good, I mean seriously though, they were just, they were tight in all the wrong places is all I’ll say. But yes, but that was a real, that was a thing for certain people, you are right.
Shosh Kazab
It was.
Elliot Moss
It was a bit, a bit polarising for…
Shosh Kazab
It was polarising but I also liked like 1940s, 1950s styles so I’d buy hats, like fabulous felt hats, there was an amazing vintage store in Covent Garden on Neal Street and I used to go in there begging for a job every week, just wanting to work in that environment, just for like…
Elliot Moss
You’re wearing a retro, it’s sort of vintage, is this a vintage top as well now?
Shosh Kazab
Well it’s a vintage inspired, yeah, but…
Elliot Moss
This is a Lacoste top.
Shosh Kazab
…my handbag is vintage, I mean, I, you know my jacket is second-hand, my jeans are new, my shoes are from an outlet, I mean it really is, I’m a living embodiment of…
Elliot Moss
Not in a Mr Potato way, quickly.
Shosh Kazab
Thank you.
Elliot Moss
It looks like, it looks great. It’s all working.
Shosh Kazab
Thank you. But yeah, no, it’s, so I’d always shopped that way and then, and New York always had good second-hand stores but they were always that traditional kind of you go in, it smells a bit, hard to find things and you need patience and you know, not everyone has the stamina for that so, I stumbled upon The RealReal when I was in New York for a wedding and it just felt like the tipping point had happened, that moment where I saw these glamorous New Yorkers who probably would never have been seen dead in a second-hand shop before, shopping there, it was, you know you’d have plush carpets, amazing fixtures and fittings, it just felt like a normal shop and I just thought, wow, it’s happened and this is really exciting, so straight away I Googled The RealReal and obviously discovered it was massive but you know, it’s not really something that anyone’s familiar with in the UK, it’s a US business and founded by an amazing woman called Julie Wainwright who’s now stepped down as the CEO but she, she’s done lots of amazing things, she’s a serial entrepreneur as well and not, not that I’m like her but you know, someone to aspire to and I just became obsessed with the idea of this normalisation of, of pre-owned and what I could do in my role and my experience as working in the kids’ space and for me, it would just seem so obvious, you know it comes from a needs based place with kids, like you’re a parent you know, you need to rotate your kids’ wardrobes between every twelve to eighteen months fully so, you can’t hang onto your clothes. We can hang onto our things and hope that we might, you know, if they become a bit tight…
Elliot Moss
Still fit. Still fit, this lovely top I’m wearing.
Shosh Kazab
But you know we can, we can hope that we’re going to squeeze back into them but with kids, you don’t have that luxury, you literally have to rotate their wardrobe so, I was just like well what’s happening with all these amazing clothes and what can we do with them and is there a way to kind of get them out there?
Elliot Moss
Anthony, your husband, has built businesses, financial servicey businesses, training related, technology related, all sorts, he’s there and the two of you go, what? What actually happens to get this thing off the ground?
Shosh Kazab
I mean, we came back from New York and I just said to Anthony, ‘build me a website’ and that was it.
Elliot Moss
Build me a website. And that was it.
Shosh Kazab
And that was it.
Elliot Moss
Right.
Shosh Kazab
Um, and then he, he just, he just went off starting to build the bones of what I thought would be a really great website, just looking at the websites that I enjoyed shopping with and how we can make it feel luxurious and I gave him you know a brief and he delivered, it was amazing and while he was busy doing that, I was just thinking where am I going to get this stock from? What are we going to sell on this website? So, I just drew on my many, many, many years of experience of working in luxury kids’ fashion with my, you know, relationships that I had and I started out initially getting influencers and celebrities that I knew, as well as some stylists, who give me some of their kids’ clothes to sell, I mean I obviously passed the idea by them first and they all loved it and they all felt that there was a need for it and they just thought that it would be something that…
Elliot Moss
It would fly.
Shosh Kazab
…would fly, yeah.
Elliot Moss
And just to jump ahead for a moment. Five years later, a funded business with a valuation that’s growing, you’re in Selfridges, you were in Bicester Village for a pop-up, the website sells many thousands of items on an annual basis, many big brands are on that site, you have gone off and done, you know, it, it’s always the same, I talk to amazing founders, it’s like, it looks like there’s 50 people, there were two of you and now of course the team is around…
Shosh Kazab
Well, we’re five full-time members of staff and we’ve got about five others who work on a more remote basis.
Elliot Moss
So there’s lots that’s happened. Do you ever not work?
Shosh Kazab
No. No. I work seven days a week yeah.
Elliot Moss
And what’s it like, and obviously I know your husband very well, but what’s it like being a husband and wife couple in this? Do you even think about that? How does that play out because if it’s 24/7 and I know it is, where does marriage fit inside of that?
Shosh Kazab
Yeah, yeah. You know it actually, it’s really easy today because we see each other a lot less than we did at the beginning because the business has grown to a certain point now where we’re very much separate in terms of what we do, so I’m, still have a small office in Primrose Hill, we moved our main warehouse and office for Kidswear Collective to northwest London and actually that’s where Anthony’s based most of the time so, actually, we see each other quite infrequently so, you know I’ll see him at the end of the day and be like, “how’s your day dear?” because I didn’t see him so, actually, in the early stages you know it was, it was intense but it was exciting and we get on really well, we’re best friends as well and you know, it’s exciting to build something with your, hopefully, your life partner so, you know it’s a great journey to be on and he has a completely different skillset to me.
Elliot Moss
Yeah, what would you say, what does Anthony deliver for the business, as far as you are concerned?
Shosh Kazab
I mean, he’s back end, I’m front end, so I think that’s it and he’s just very, very good at business, he’s very good at technology, he’s very good with everything to do with finance, fundraising, he’s dealing with all our tech development now, we’re building our own proprietary tech platform, you know those are all the things that gets him excited, those are the things that don’t get me excited, they’ll be great once they’re, once they’re live but I, you know I’m not excited about things like that, I’m excited about partnerships, growing the business, seeing where I can take it from that perspective and he likes to get behind the scenes and the nitty-gritty and so that’s great so, you know we really don’t have any crossover in terms of what our roles are which is, which is why I think it works.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for my final chat with my guest today, Shosh Kazab, and we’ve got some Snarky Puppy for you too. That’s in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
Shosh Kazab is my Business Shaper just for a few more minutes. There’s obviously a tension that’s inherent between a business which says we’re not going to, you know, make more clothes, we’re selling clothes that have already been used. The drive for sustainability, the use of Oxwash, which is the people that get there and clean the clothes and you know you do all this clever stuff which makes sure it comes out looking pristine. There’s that commercial driver and then there’s the purpose piece. How do you square the two together?
Shosh Kazab
When I had the vision for this business, I just though how can we create something that, that is more than just a business that can give back, I mean there are so many different levels to this, I mean first of all, I love the democratisation of designer kids’ fashion, the fact that you know, somebody who can’t afford maybe a Moncler coat or you know any high quality garment that can access it at a more affordable price point through platforms like ours. That makes me very excited. I also love the fact that you know we work with so many different charities now and really there’s no limit to the number of charities we can work with, I mean we work with mothers2mothers which is a wonderful and small charity that supports women who are HIV positive in sub-Saharan Africa and we did a little fundraiser for them where we got celebrities to donate clothes which were sold through one of our pop-ups in Fenwick in Bond Street, which was successful both from a fundraising perspective but also from a, you know, PR perspective, it gave the charity lots of publicity. We work with the NSPCC to try and help raise awareness of online safety for children, something that’s very important for everyone who shops with us and it’s something that’s obviously very relevant. And then we donate clothes that we can’t sell to a charity called Little Village which supports families who are in need, whether it’s a refugee family or a woman who is suffering from domestic violence who has left home with nothing, you know I think that’s really important, so how do you get the balance between being a commercial business but also purposeful and I think that’s really important and I’m seeing most businesses these days kind of gearing up more towards that and I think it’s not a question of what do you do, it’s expected today and I think that’s really important and I think that’s wonderful and long may that continue.
Elliot Moss
In terms of the business of retail, obviously things have changed significantly, the move to online for all of us, you know it’s much easier now and most of us do it and 25 years ago, we just didn’t but the credibility that you get through bricks and mortar, the credibility that, that you have of being in store in Fenwick or in store in Selfridges or in store in Bicester Village or wherever it might be, what’s that doing for your business? How important is that?
Shosh Kazab
I mean, when we launched the business, we totally envisaged it as an online business and we didn’t even consider retail. Selfridges came out of the blue, I know the buyer, she came along to one of my press days and loved what we were doing and asked if we wanted to do a pop-up and I said yes, at that point we only had 400 items on the website and you know my favourite quote, ‘leap and the net will appear’ kicked in and I just thought we’ll make this happen but we opened a 40 square metre space in Selfridges in Oxford Street and I have to say that that, Selfridges was a transformational moment for our business because it really showed Selfridges’ customers how incredible pre-owned clothes can be, encourages Selfridges’ customers to buy mixed wardrobes, it also encourages them to sell their clothes when their kids have grown out of them and keep clothes in circulation for longer. There are so many positive messages and we’re actually launching a drop-off facility as well in Selfridges soon, where Selfridges customers can drop in their kids’ clothes to sell with us. So, there’s so many layers to this but it just builds trust and I think it is still a growth area, I mean we talk about pre-owned like it’s something that we all do but probably quite a lot of people still haven’t bought a pre-owned item before and we talk about it like it’s normal but it’s still very early in this whole movement so, the more that retail can do to normalise this, the better for everyone.
Elliot Moss
In terms of, and just before we go to your song choice, the future, Shosh, the growth’s been fantastic, the trajectory has been rapid, you’re about to acquire a business called Cheeky Cherubs which is going to be part of the family, what else is, what’s going on over the next few years? What will be talking about in the next three to five years, do you think?
Shosh Kazab
I mean, it’s really exciting because the growth that’s happened over the past year is something that we never predicted so you know we opened our first international partner, Galeries Lafayette in Doha, the Middle East is a really exciting market for us and we’re exploring more partners over there. America’s very exciting for us, particularly the East coast. Hopefully we can really grow the business internationally and then can continue to grow online as well and build our partners as well, so it’s just, it’s very exciting and I guess we don’t really know, I mean there’s, there’s so much more that can be done, I mean it’s things like upcycling, we launched a partnership with a couture kidswear brand last year where we used their offcuts from previous collections to create a limited edition partywear collection that’s you know fully sustainable, launched it at Bicester Village, sold out and it was wonderful, it was exciting and just finding solutions to dead stock fabrics, you know we can be so much more experimental with kidswear than you know adults fashion, there are less rules and we can pivot, we can try things out, we can experiment and just see what works and what doesn’t and that’s very exciting so, it’s really hard to predict, so I mean we couldn’t have predicted what, where we would be a year ago so, I don’t know but I know it’s going to be exciting.
Elliot Moss
Is it more fun than school?
Shosh Kazab
Hell yeah!
Elliot Moss
It’s been brilliant talking to you. Thank you for coming in. Just before I let you go, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Shosh Kazab
Well, I was very excited about picking a song choice today because well obviously, Dirty Dancing aside, I wanted to just pick out an artist that means a lot to me. She’s a wonderful artist who unfortunately is no longer with us, Cesaria Evore, she’s from Cape Verde. She was a real force to be reckoned with. She was fostered at a very young age, she was I think one of six children, she had a really tough upbringing and, but this phenomenal voice she had just came through and I’ve always loved her and I had the chance to see her in concert in Amsterdam, one of her final concerts, sat in the front row with Anthony and this woman came on stage wearing no shoes, a glass of whiskey in one hand, a fag in the other and just delivered the most beautiful, beautiful renditions of her songs and she was just magic and we all, you know hairs on your arms stood on end and you just knew you were in the presence of something special and I’m really sad to see her pass but her music stays with us and I hope everyone enjoys it as much as I do.
Elliot Moss
Sodade by Cesaria Evore, the song choice of my Business Shaper, Shosh Kazab. She talked about the normalisation of buying pre-loved and how important that is to her whole mission in life. She talks about her husband and the fact that they’re a double act, ‘he’s the back end, I’m the front end’. And she talked about going for it at every turn as you grow your business. Leap and a net will appear. Fantastic stuff. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to mishcon.com/jazzshapers.