Womenswear label Dhini Couture turns five this year. founder Dhini Pararajasingham recounts her journey to Erin O’Loughlin.
I was born in Sri Lanka. I was seven when we first left. We did India first for a couple of years, then the US for two years, then travelled around in Europe for a little while. And then came to good old Australia. I came here when I was 14 years old.
I was artistic since I was a kid and from the time I was five I was drawing. It was actually my grandmother who recognised my talent and nurtured it. She taught me to sew at the age of six. I’d always been interested in something to do with the creative side, but coming from a conservative background I guess I was manoeuvred into something more academic and what family thought would be a more secure profession. I did that but with a view of doing fashion design straight after.
I pursued marketing straight after high school at Monash [University] in Melbourne. I worked in that field for three months and it was never for me, so I quit.
I wanted to get away from Melbourne after my marketing experience and experience the world. I had that urge to go somewhere new and live, work, earn some money. Japan was a really creative country in terms of fashion. That opportunity just came up at the right time, teaching English. And I did it! I was teaching English and on my two days off I studied fashion. I was there for two years.
In 2000 I came back to Melbourne. I sat for my interview to get into RMIT [University] in the city and then in 2001 I started a fashion course. It was positive but challenging, incredibly challenging. To me, I would say it’s one of the best fashion courses in the world because it really prepares you for industry. When I was in London, I was interning for designers and I worked alongside St Martin’s students and Royal College of the Arts students. RMIT’s technical training was better than theirs.
In my graduate year, I was friends with a guy who had an opportunity to showcase a collection for Air New Zealand Fashion Week. He asked me to join him and we started a little label. It was called Wreakes Annundhini – his last name [Paul Wreakes] and my first name. That was 2003, October. The company that was putting on the show gave us a whole lot of money to produce the collection. We had to do 30 outfits in 13 weeks, which is a lot of work for students.
I think before that, my work was quite studenty. It was almost the pressure and the expectations make an idealised student in a university environment snap out of it and realise they’ve got to put something commercially viable on the runway.
We didn’t really think about continuing with [the Wreakes Annundhini label] because we were more independent designers. I definitely was one who just likes to work on my own, and even Paul’s like that. But for this situation... it worked out really well.
University finished in November 2003 and January 2004 was when I moved to London. During that holiday period I was applying to a few British companies and Boudicca, which was number two or three on my list, responded saying that there was an internship position available for me.
It was so much [work], oh my gosh. I went in there expecting to start at 10am and finish at 6pm, but I was working from 10am to 11.30pm, seven days a week leading up to London Fashion Week. And I did everything from cutting all the samples on the cutting tables for the show, to sourcing fabrics for them, sewing up samples, doing patterns, sewing accessories for the show. It was pretty good because I was one of those confident graduates. I became supervisor to the interns in the second week I was there. It was great experience.
It slowed down just a little bit [after London Fashion Week] but we had to do more stuff for Paris Fashion Week that followed soon after. After Paris Fashion Week it quietened down maybe for a week and then it got into production mode. I was ready and confident to move up the ladder, so I moved into the role of production assistant.
[At Boudicca] I learnt everything to do with the process of the fashion industry, from starting with a concept to developing a collection, developing a sample collection, producing it, putting it on the runway, all the admin and the back end that goes with that. I learnt a little bit about the press side of things because for a couple of weeks I was assisting the press assistant. I learned how to liaise with factories, deal with them and push them to meet our delivery deadlines. Stuff I’d never ever learnt or done while I was at uni. I was literally thrown into the deepest of deep ends.
I left Boudicca at the end of 2004 because there was no way up from that position of production assistant. And I wanted to do more and move up more. The only way was to start my own label. So I started it in 2005 in London.
I wasn’t part of the official London Fashion Week schedule or runway show, but we showed from a showroom.
It was the biggest accomplishment, a sense of achievement. And I was really tired as well because it had been three months of working seven days a week, 14-hour days.
Europe and London are very hard markets and no one buys you in your first season, ever. That does not happen. But we were able to get appointments from big customers like Beams in Japan, and Selfridges came in and had a look. We had about five appointments which is really good. They came and looked, that’s all they did.
That happened in February of 2005. Then I did another collection for the September/October season. That one I started in London and then I was running out of money so I came back home. For about two months I lived with my mum, developed the collection and went back to London. We showed in Paris at Rendezvous. That was another great achievement. And I got my first order there from Beams, Japan. It was tiny but how cool did I feel!
I left London on the last day of 2005. The reason why I moved back [to Melbourne] was it was a massive challenge, being an Australian in London, starting out a label without your family and close friend network. Basically financial was the biggest [challenge], and then just being completely on my own. I had to do everything because no one knew me. I didn’t have finances to employ anyone nor did I have a name to have interns or work experience students to help me out.
When I came here I decided to just focus on the Australian market. I took about six months off to research the market here and build a contact list because it was like starting from scratch.
I started my next collection at the end of May [2006]. I had gone up to Sydney for Fashion Week at the end of April to see what the Australian designers were doing and what the standard was like. I went to all the shows. It’s so tiring going to all the shows one by one like a dag, my god. It was a really good research trip because I knew I was ready to show there.
From May to the end of August [2006] I just hard core worked on my collection. And then Fashion Week was for the very first time in Melbourne, the trans-seasonal show. [Dhini launched her label at RAFW Transeasonal]. It was the biggest success. It probably was the best success I’ve had because the collection was really strong and I had no idea but there was a buzz about me even before the show. I was doing a lot of my own PR and just all that experience of having worked in Boudicca and being in Paris, a lot of the media were talking about coming to my show and seeing what I was going to do.
I did the New Generation group show and I was the stand out. The stand out designer gets sooo much press. The next day’s newspapers I was in The Age, The Australian, The Herald Sun, even Ragtrader covered me. Then IMG Rosemount invited me to be part of their press conference as well. That generated more press. Next minute all the high-end boutiques were calling my phone wanting to make appointments. I got stock in the best stores Australia-wide. Six boutiques [picked up the label]. Wow, I think back to those days and I wonder how I did it.
I think I did longer days than I do now, because you don’t have as many resources. You just rely on yourself to get everything done. Now there’s a lot more experience and knowledge behind every element of the process.
I’ve got two employed staff in the business, and then the others are outsourced freelancers. My financial resources are in a better position, and that’s an important component. I’ve built stronger supplier relationships and we’ve expanded as well in the sense I now work with factories in Switzerland to produce exclusive fabrics for me.
Also I work with India to do embellishment and the digital printing that just got shown in this season. My network has also grown, the strength of relationships has grown, understanding of the market is heaps more evolved and I guess I’ve found my target market. I had no idea when I started – I just put out a collection and wondered who would go for it.
In this sort of business, even with the GFC, things happen suddenly that you have to reassess your goals and change direction a little bit. But I have goals for this year. This year is my international expansion year. We’re talking to some agents at the moment and I’m doing a trip in June to go and meet with them and start to sell overseas.
I’ve never not wanted to do this. Sometimes like in the GFC year when there were all these bankruptcies and non-paying customers, you start to question and get really frustrated and worried about the state of your business.
That’s realistic. There are just negative things outside your control that affect your view on things. But you know, you’ve got to pick up and damage control and move on. That’s been my attitude.
I’d love to be showing in London Fashion Week. And also, soon after, Paris Fashion Week. Those will be my dreams. Within 10 years I’m hoping to achieve that.