Strut Clothing is celebrating its one year anniversary this December and is officially starting a blog! To commemorate these big steps, owners Julia and Rozina sat down in a candid interview to share some of their favorite parts of running the boutique, what challenges they have overcome in the past year and how they look forward to successfully growing the brand in the years to come. Read on to get the inside scoop of all things Strut Clothing past, present and future!
Briefly describe your role with Strut & what you have been working on recently.
Julia: I coordinate a lot of the operational/behind-the-scenes things with Strut, where I handle things such as new product uploads, keeping the website up-to-date, ensuring our team is organized, and project management tasks. However, Rozina and I work very closely each day bringing our ideas to life in terms of ways to grow! Recently we have been up to many exciting projects for this upcoming year some of which are planning for Rozina to move up to Atlanta so we can finally work in person together, attending many more pop-ups (maybe even some ran by us!), prepping for new inventory to come in, and starting our own line!
Rozina: I handle most of the creative side of the business, where I see a vision and generate eye-catching ideas that will entice our audience. When we organize our photoshoots, I work with Julia to creative direct from start to finish and come up with ideas that fit that specific launch aesthetic. This is a job I’ve dreamt of for so long and to be able to do it for our business makes me even happier! I also hold the inventory, handle the online orders, and make sure all pieces are sent shipped out accordingly.
What were you most looking forward to that you accomplished in the first year of business?
Julia: Having photoshoots all throughout the US is something Rozina and I talked about a lot going into our first year of business. We are always down for a spontaneous adventure! We have been lucky to have the opportunity to travel the country together this past year working wholesale markets where we buy all of our inventory and always wanted to try to find a way to make a photoshoot work in each of the states we travel to, sure enough we accomplished that! From shooting a Spring/Summer collection in the freezing cold streets of New York changing in random restaurant bathrooms to the Las Vegas strip changing in probably every casino you can imagine to getting stranded in the pitch black at the Seven Magic Mountains; if any of you have been there it is literally in the middle of nowhere! However, I couldn’t be more proud of what we have accomplished bringing our visions to life for each launch in all these different cities! We have also grown our team this past year which is something I am so happy about. We have our intern, Makenna that has been apart of our team for 5 months and has been an amazing addition! She is always going above and beyond; bringing new ideas to help grow our business, running our social media, and truly being our right hand girl! We couldn’t do it without her!
Rozina: We’ve always talked about doing pop ups early on when starting Strut, but never really got into it until the month of June. Once we got to meet and connect with our customers and other small businesses, we fell in love with the community. Now, we try to attend pop ups as often as possible, even traveling up to 6 hours for some! For the time being, Julia and I are doing all of this long distance, myself being in Florida and Julia in Atlanta, but that doesn't stop us from doing what we love! We’ve set all odds aside and decided to make do with what we have. So far, we’ve attended pop ups in Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. However, this coming year we plan to hit many more states and even host our own. Looking back on this year, Julia and I have truly made anything work for our business and plan to have many more crazy photoshoots all over the US, attend back to back pop ups in different states, and sacrifice sleep for the content. Our intern, Makenna, has been an amazing help throughout our crazy schedule and has worked alongside with us to make all of our launches, vision boards, and brand aesthetic come to life. We are so fortunate to have expanded Strut this past year and are so excited to see what’s to come in 2024.
What are you most looking forward to for Strut in the coming year?
Julia: We are excited to announce that we will be designing our own line. We will share more details soon but are excited to share this new journey with everyone. We are set to start on this process at the end of January. We believe this is an opportunity to scale our business to new heights and be able to design a collection that is curated to our target audience. On the other hand, I can’t wait for Rozina to move up to Atlanta so we can finally start to work together in person on certain projects and areas of the business. We have a lot planned in this upcoming year and this is just one of the exciting projects that excites me! Stay tuned for all the fun and exciting things to come in 2024.
Rozina: Julia and I have been working behind the scenes for some time now on a few exciting projects. For months, we’ve been wanting to make Strut more personal and have our own designs for our customers. Back in 2020, I found my love in fashion through sewing and coming up with my own designs. None of these were professional by all means, but the joy I got out of a little hobby soon turned into a passion that I wanted to somehow make into a career one day. When I met Julia, we both couldn’t shut up about having our own brand one day and that’s when we came together to make it into a reality. With that being said, I couldn’t be more excited to put our ideas forward and curate collections for our customers that truly resembles the meaning behind Strut.
What is the biggest lesson you learned/experience you learned about yourself and/or your business this year?
Julia: One lesson I have learned this past year is to be able to easily adapt to change and go with the flow. To be transparent, we had plans of moving to Atlanta together in May and things ended up changing last minute, all for the best, but at the same time, it was a big change we both had to adjust to. Although it was not going to be easy being the long distance in the business for another year, we had to set specific goals for ourselves and for the business to hold each other accountable as well as develop “roles” for each of us so we both felt apart of the business equally. It has been a roller coaster of ups and downs and learning to adapt but we made sure to keep communication 24/7, sending lots of voice notes, and having daily Zoom meetings to be sure we are always on the same page.
Rozina: The biggest lesson I’ve learned over this past year has been to be able to overcome any obstacle and adapt to changes. Life definitely does not go as planned sometimes but we need to take a step back and figure out a solution to our problems. Even when it feels nearly impossible, we should never give up, and instead fight harder for that goal we started on. Although it has been a lot of traveling for the both of us being in different states from each other, we’ve managed to get together multiple times this year to build Strut and I am forever grateful for having a partner that is up for a challenge. In business especially, it’s common to have some sacrifices, but we know that anything is possible! However, we are so excited to be living in the same state next year and to see everything else we have been working on come to life!
How do you want or expect to grow your business in the coming year?
Julia: We have many plans to grow and build Strut in the coming year! After lots of trial and error we have finally got a grasp at the perfect customer we want to attract. With that being said we want to ensure our marketing strategies, branding, and product offerings all reflect the customer that we want to be targeting and that they would be likely to fall in love with our brand and proudly share with their followers. Instead of promoting our clothing all the time we want to turn Strut into a community for our followers; from having a blog on our site where customers can stay educated and informed on trends in the fashion industry, to being able to host events to connect with our customers in person, and learning our customers' wants and needs to bring that into action in our business. Rozina and I started Strut after networking with many entrepreneurs, CEO’s and small business owners that were truly our inspiration and motivation to start Strut while we were both still in college. Ever since we both have developed a huge passion and love connecting with small businesses and CEO’s throughout this past year by learning from each other. It is always so empowering and leaves us feeling so inspired to grow our business. We are hoping to create a community this coming year that brings small business owners, entrepreneurs and CEO’s together to create a positive, welcoming, inspiring environment.
Rozina: We want to focus on building a community full of empowered women with a vision to spread confidence. With that, we expect to have our branding down perfectly so that our audience gets to see what it’s like to be part of the Strut community. We want to relate with our audience, educate them, and most importantly, empower them. Building new relationships and learning from other business owners has sparked our interests to keep building this community full of boss women and entrepreneurs. One day Julia and I plan to have a community full of women gather for pop up events with small business owners and guest speakers all over the US. We’ve noticed there is a gap in this industry and want to be the ones who change that! After talking to owners, they all can agree that there’s not many pop ups to attend for their small business year round. Maybe that “one day” will be a day in 2024…you never know!
What has been your favorite thing about running Strut over the past year?
Julia: All the amazing people we have met as well as seeing how much we have grown!! Rozina and I talk about this often, but our lives are truly insane and I wish you could come along and just see a glimpse of all we go through for this little business of ours. We have traveled all throughout the US this past year while both still in college in different states. It was not easy with all of the times we had to miss class to go to market for work while also simultaneously planning our business. However, we both had the same vision and goals and were both motivated and determined to make this work. Seeing how much we have grown internally and externally this past year is bittersweet. We both had the same vision and goals and ran with it and have grown lots along the way. With that being said, we have also met lots of pretty cool people and have had wild experiences along the way that I will forever cherish and be grateful for. We couldn’t be more thankful for this past year and everything we got the chance to experience, the people we got to meet, and friendships we have made.
Rozina: Definitely meeting and growing with people all across the world. It has been so insightful to learn from others and grow in our industry to build a community full of like minded individuals. Networking will always be part of Strut’s routine because being able to learn from new talents keeps us motivated and educated. My mother always told me “you are who you surround yourself with” and man, was she right. From meeting buyers from market, CEOs from pop ups, influencers from photoshoots, our amazing customers, and other like minded people, I’ve never felt so fulfilled and motivated in what we do. All of these people have given me that push that I need on the days I feel like I don’t have it in me. They are my reminder that your passions are worth fighting for. Traveling for work has been one of my favorite accomplishments this past year, and being able to work towards something I have great passion for makes it even better. Looking back, yes, the past year has been absolutely crazy with some of the sacrifices we've had to make with Strut, but I wouldn’t change this for anything.
Strut Clothing has come a long way from its conception at in the past year and has so many wonderful and exciting things to come. We are thankful to have been able to sit down with owners Julia & Rozina to get the inside scoop on their day to day running the boutique. Stay tuned for the next big moves from Strut in 2024, you won't want to miss out!