The major challenge for me was finding skilled workers. There are a lot of semi skilled artisans in the fashion industry. A lot of them also don’t see beyond what they know, you might get a lot of “this is not possible” just because they haven’t seen it before. Its definitely an advantage if you are trained.
Also at the beginning deciding the audience i wanted to appeal to was not something i thought of, it made everything stressful trying to appeal to everyone. Your target audience determines a lot of things, from branding downright to price points. Are you a luxury brand or are you looking at mass production. It’s important you decide from the go, yes, you can change the brands direction as you go but you need to have a direction in the first place.