About Us

The Stitches Fashion Program is the Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center's (CEC) strategic assistance program for Chicagoland's fashion entrepreneurs. Through the program, the CEC provides assistance, mentoring, and resources to early-stage fashion entrepreneurs including designers, boutique owners, sales representatives, and manufacturers. The CEC provides fashion entrepreneurs with the much-needed business expertise and counsel to help them compete globally while creating locally.

Although Stitches officially launched in May 2007, the CEC has been assisting fashion entrepreneurs for over five years. One fashion entrepreneur client success led to another, creating such a demand for our fashion services that we developed and launched the Stitches Fashion Program. The CEC's Stitches Fashion Program is the only place where fashion entrepreneurs can find the crucial businesses tools and resources they need to grow.

Program Structure

There are four main components of the Stitches Fashion Program. They are mentoring, the Fashion First Steps packet, educational seminars, and consumer outreach.

Mentoring

For high-growth entrepreneurs, we focus on mentoring, including one-on-one consulting, impactful mentoring workshops, and special interest groups.

  • One-on-One Consulting: The CEC meets one-on-one with emerging fashion designers and boutique owners to assist them in areas such as financing/raising capital, business strategies, and PR/marketing. Over the past few years, the CEC has provided counsel to over 150 fashion entrepreneurs.
  • Mentoring Workshops: The CEC hosts issue-oriented sessions for our clients who face particular issues. For these invitation-only sessions, we pick clients whom we think would benefit from a one-time, face-to-face, mentoring session. We match them up with experts based on a particular need. An example is our designer-buyer match up session. Here, emerging designers are paired with local retailers to offer general business guidance. The designers can also practice and develop a solid sales pitch to the buyers.
  • Special Interest Groups: The CEC hosts special interest groups (SIGs) to provide some of our top clients year-long professional development and peer-to-peer mentoring. Each SIG is a series of four sessions, with each session focusing on a specific business issue. The SIG group consists of three entrepreneurs facing similar issues (such as stage of business, type of business, etc). In each session these entrepreneurs are matched with two to three experts (chosen based on the topic of that particular session). The SIGs are invitation-only. The participating entrepreneurs are chosen by CEC employees.

Fashion First Steps Packet

The CEC benchmarked itself off of fashion programs in other US cities, such as Toronto, Los Angeles, and Dallas, finding that a valuable resource for early-stage entrepreneurs was a "Starting a Fashion Business" guide. Therefore, the Stitches Fashion Program created its own guide and put it online free of charge. The Fashion First Steps packet is housed here at www.stitchesfashionprogram.com. It covers a variety of topics including financing, sales, branding, and online development.

The Fashion First Steps packet is a great way to be introduced to not only our program, but to the fashion industry in general. Click on "Sign Up For the Fashion First Steps Packet" to access this information.

Educational Seminars

For start-up entrepreneurs, the Stitches Fashion Program hosts educational seminars throughout the year. These and the Fashion First Steps packet are the main services we provide to entrepreneurs who are just beginning their businesses. For these seminars we bring in experts to speak on a variety of subjects including legal advice for fashion entrepreneurs, sales representatives and showrooms, financing a fashion business and more.

Consumer Outreach

Another component of the Stitches Fashion Program is consumer outreach. We frequently bring together consumers interested in fashion with our clients and other industry professionals.

  • One way we do this is through the Stitches Fashion Program's Chicago fashion blog. The blog offers consumers and industry professionals a daily dose of what's going on in the industry, with a focus on Chicagoland.
  • Another half-consumer, half-industry component of the program is our runway shows and fashion events which we host and co-host throughout the year. Check the news section of this site and archived posts to see photos and read stories about our past events.

Past and Current Stitches Fashion Program Clients

  • Lara Miller, Lara Miller LTD
  • Kristen Amato, K.Amato Designs
  • Jessalyn Brinkmeyer, Pivot Boutique
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