How I Got Here: Sticks and Stones Agency founder Ainsley Hutchence on the science of running a fashion label
PHOTOGRAPHY BY Ula Weir
WORDS BY MAGGIE ZHOU AND CAIT EMMA BURKE
“You put all of your time, energy, love, emotions and inspiration into this product that people will either love or hate.”
Have you ever stalked someone on LinkedIn and wondered how on earth they managed to land that wildly impressive job? While the internet and social media might have us believe that our ideal job is a mere pipe dream, the individuals who have these jobs were, believe it or not, in the same position once, fantasising over someone else’s seemingly unattainable job.
But behind the awe-inspiring titles and the fancy work events lies a heck of a lot of hard work. So what lessons have been learnt and what skills have proved invaluable in getting them from daydreaming about success to actually being at the top of their industry?
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Welcome to How I Got Here, where we talk to women who are killing it in their respective fields about how they landed their awe-inspiring jobs, exploring the peaks and pits, the failures and the wins, and most importantly the knowledge, advice and practical tips they’ve gleaned along the way.
Today we have Sunshine Coast-born, Byron Bay-based creative Ainsley Hutchence passing on her best career advice. In the two decades since she graduated high school, Ainsley has garnered some incredible memories to last most people three lifetimes over. In 2009, she launched Sticks and Stones Agency, a fashion agency servicing local and international streetwear brands. Six years later, she flipped the business into an online publication known as Sticks and Stones Mothership – eight years on, it still functions as a living and breathing output of creative talent.
Her new venture is a fashion label called Something Very Special, a joint undertaking with her partner Matty Bouris. Life has thrown her numerous curveballs, forcing Ainsley to adopt the mantra, “adapt or die”. Here, she grapples with the mixed feelings of monetising your passion and shares how she turned her biggest hurdle into her greatest facilitator.
What do you do and what’s your official job title?
My partner Matty and I launched our clothing brand Something Very Special just over 18 months ago. She’s still just a baby and so at this stage, I wear a lot of hats: co-designer, art director, photographer, production manager [and] bookkeeper, [as well as doing] admin, sales and social media.
Take us back to when you were first starting out. Did you study to get into your chosen field, or did you start out with an internship/entry level role and climb the ladder? Tell us the story.
Straight out of high school back in 2002, I completed six months of a two-year fashion design course. I quit when the offer to move to Santa Monica with close family friends came up. I never obtained any kind of official qualifications outside of some mediocre patternmaking and sewing skills, but the knowledge and experience I gained from leaving my little hometown [Sunshine Coast, Queensland] certainly put me on the track to a full-time creative life.
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After three years of travel, I returned to my hometown and almost immediately (accidentally) fell pregnant with my now 16-year-old daughter, Ula. It didn’t take long to figure out Ula’s dad wasn’t giving ‘soul mate’ and so in 2007, I entered single motherhood. I found myself at home with lots of spare time to get creative. I dusted off the sewing machine and started sewing Ula clothes and then eventually started a fashion brand that sold from my close friend and mentor’s store, Alterior Motif.
At some point during one of my showings with Penny [Lane], Alterior Motif’s owner, she offered me a position as a sales rep[resentative] for a brand she was repping on the side, One Teaspoon. My second child was born a week later – I called her Sticks and Stones Agency. Eventually, my partner at the time and I had 12 brands under our banner and a shitty little blog for emerging and established creatives that we eventually tuned into Sticks and Stones Mothership.
Meanwhile, since I was 15 years old I would randomly run into (and secretly crush on) this guy called Matty Bouris who moved away from our hometown to Sydney to pursue his own career in fashion. When I was 33 and newly single, I decided it was a good time to sneak into his DMs. Turns out the crush was mutual and six months later, we were officially dating. We are now six years in and since we both have careers in fashion, it just made sense to start our own thing. We gave birth to our lovechild Something Very Special in December 2021.
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What challenges/hurdles have you faced getting to where you are now? Can you tell us about one in particular?
In 2015, Sticks and Stones evolved from a fashion agency to an online platform that was created to showcase a diverse range of beauty and talent not being represented by the fashion industry at the time. Within the first week of launching, Instagram deleted my Sticks and Stones account after I posted an image of twin sisters standing side-by-side on a beach in high-cut one-pieces with their natural pubes spilling out the sides.
Clearly, at the time, Instagram did not approve of women that kept their natural hair intact. We had almost 100,000 followers and were relying on the platform for influencer income while we built and diverted traffic to the Sticks and Stones Mothership, the online platform.
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For the first couple of days, we had no idea what we were going to do to support our family. I had Ula and my partner at the time had two kids of his own. Over the next two weeks, media platforms from all over the world were reaching out for interviews about the very issue that I wanted to combat on my own platform – the lack of ownership women felt they had over their own bodies and the rigid beauty standards that reinforce harmful expectations on them.
By the end of that two weeks, Instagram had reinstated my account with a public apology. My following tripled, Sticks and Stones Mothership kept breaking from too much traffic and Sticks and Stones Agency is still mentioned under the women’s bodies section on the Wikipedia page [about] Instagram. I had been reading self-help books since I was 15 and almost all of them spoke about the law of attraction and trusting the process. But it wasn’t until this event that I think I truly understood what that meant. What seemed like my greatest hurdle at the time ended up being my greatest facilitator.
What do you want people to know about your industry/your role?
I’m a full-time creative and so design and photography come very naturally to me. But when you have your own brand you have to become a businesswoman. There are so many other parts of the business that need me right now and I have had to learn, fast. While I have been a bookkeeper in one of my past lives, I had no idea about how to maintain a healthy cash flow and businesses are not sustainable without it. Something I would have liked to have been told [is] your business is nothing without a healthy cash flow. Learn how to manage money before you look for an investor.
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What’s the best part about your role?
I would say the challenge is the best part. Designing clothes is easy. But designing clothes that are sustainable and that sell well while staying true to the integrity of the brand and its DNA is a whole science. We still have so much to learn. We have spent the last year throwing a bunch of shit at the wall to see what sticks.
Products we thought would sell didn’t and products we thought were super risky flew out the door. It’s been a year of experimenting and taking on feedback, but we have not let the feedback dim us in any way or water us down. Instead, we have made little adjustments where we needed to and continued to fearlessly move forward with super fun, bold designs that are created to support our customers in their very special moments throughout their own creative journeys.
What would surprise people about your role?
What might look like an incredibly fun, light and enjoyable role from the outside can actually be extremely emotionally taxing, at least it is where we are now in the early stages. I’m sure [Fashion Journal‘s] creative readers can understand how it feels to monetise a creation. You put all of your time, energy, love, emotions and inspiration into this product that people will either love or hate.
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A big challenge for me is ask[ing] for feedback. Sometimes I really just don’t know if my heart will be able to handle it. But by rebranding these challenging moments as learning opportunities, we have been able to stay positive and move forward without crying ourselves to sleep at night.
What skills have served you well in your industry?
The ability to adapt and trust the process. I have always been extremely adaptable and as they say, adapt or die. This trait has served me very well in all of my businesses and in my personal life. At times when everything seems to be going wrong, it’s very easy to spiral into a negative mindset and attract more negativity.
To pull myself out of these moments I tell myself everything is exactly how it’s meant to be in this moment. The bigger the challenge, the more prepared I will be for a BIG life. This is not the time to panic, it’s the time to re-evaluate, adapt and come back harder.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to be in a role like yours one day?
Start with your why. Why do you want to do what you do? This will help you define who you are creating for and allow you to stay focused and connected to your goals and purpose. For us the why is we want to support fellow creatives on their own journeys of self-expression and self-discovery. We make bold pieces for bold energy and special pieces for special moments.
What about a practical tip?
Start now. Go to the store and buy a nice notepad and a good pen and start writing down all of your ideas and goals. Do it now.
Read the rest of the How I Got Here series here.
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