Tamara Mellon Quotes

People who run a ready-to-wear company are businessmen rather than production or design people.

It takes a lot more than just knowing how to put an outfit together to succeed in the fashion industry, so more power to you if this is where you want to be; just don't expect it to be an extended trip to the mall.

Fashion is like a four-legged table: you need a good designer, a very good business manager, a good manufacturer, and a very good distributor. Without all the legs, table collapses.

I think it is really important to have a sense of business. As a designer you can get so wrapped up in the design and fashion side that you forget the business side.

Everyone wants to be a stylist. If you know that's your calling, then you need to intern as much a humanly possible. You need to go to fashion school if you can.

I'm not going to launch a bikini business and then give up bikinis, am I?

I am an industry.

Once you start a business, you have to grow it and grow with it - starting a business is not just for Christmas.

Playing all of these games, getting to know everything about the NBA, you realize that you are your own business. You have business meetings to go to, signings to go to. Like, I'm only 20, but the stuff I'm doing the average 20-year-old isn't doing.

For the last five years I've been in the production business.

Designing is so easy - it's the business that is hard. That's why you really have to respect Ralph Lauren - look at what he's done. Anybody who can sustain themselves should be applauded.

I think running a business, doing what I've done for the last - since 1996, has taught me so many things because I started from just an idea and then had to figure out how to make it, market it, every single thing from soup to nuts on how to get a product done and out there.

If anyone said to me 'invent a new monster so we can sell more toys', I'd kick them out of my office.

The restaurant business is something that you have to treat like a baby. You have to constantly be there. You can't trust it to anybody else, because no one's going to love it like you do.

I'm an inventor. I don't enjoy running the business.

I always wanted to have my own boutiques. I'm so passionate about clothing and always have been so business-minded.

I wanted control over the merchandising, the actual packaging of the product. That was a big factor. The only way for me to exercise control on all those levels was to start my own label.

Someday I want to have my own clothing line, perfume and makeup line.

I learned to work with my mother, who had an haute-couture business.

Running a fashion business takes the heart of a good gambler. You're always dealing with new things. And there's no guarantee that anything new is going to be successful.

There's no such thing as a good time. I started an apparel-manufacturing business in the tech-boom years. I mean, come on. Get out of your garage and go take a chance and start your business.

I'm running a business.

There's a lot of guys who use their likeness - to do movies, and do other business stuff, but not too many guys are actually making product. I'm making product, it's a different thing. A lot of guys are holding up Coke cans and get paid a lot of money to do that, but no one's making a Coke can. I'm the guy that's trying to make the Coke can.

For myself, I went into an industry I wasn't educated on, and I thought, 'Hey, yeah, let's do this. Awesome.' And I've really had to educate myself in the fashion world: undergarments, fabrics, and learning their language, but it's been really great.

I've always been into fashion and thought it would be amazing to have a clothing line. I just never thought I would have a chance to do something like that.