Cut from a different cloth

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Linda Lundstrom has just advised that a handbag should never be placed on the floor.

"It's bad luck," the Canadian fashion design icon explains. "All your money will go down the drain."

Superstition aside, it's a telling indication that Ms. Lundstrom is focused on her financial well-being. It was just over two years ago that her Toronto-based namesake apparel brand filed for bankruptcy protection on a $1.9-million bank loan. In April, 2008, Toronto manufacturer Eleventh Floor Apparel purchased the company and all of its assets, and installed Ms. Lundstrom as chief creative officer, a position from which she resigned in June last year.

Fast forward to the present, and Ms. Lundstrom has reserved for this interview one of the colourful meeting rooms at Verity, a networking and lifestyle club for women in downtown Toronto. Since launching her own consulting business earlier this year, Linda Lundstrom Works, these well-appointed, members-only spaces serve as her office. She has six clients, she says, mostly through word of mouth.

Broadly speaking, the niche Ms. Lundstrom has entered is referred to as fashion consulting. The term can be misleading, however, primarily because it gets confused with image or wardrobe consulting, in which experts help people decide what to wear. Nor does Ms. Lundstrom plan to do retail consulting, an area well served by many bigger companies that help businesses understand consumer behaviour, store operations and merchandising.

In many ways, her career move represents the arc of the industry: the most viable option – aside from a book deal, perhaps – available to those who, for one reason or another, are no longer in a position of creative or corporate authority but have a wealth of knowledge to share and aren't quite ready to hang up their hats. But as retail powerhouse and Club Monaco co-founder Joe Mimran points out, consulting can also be code for "unemployed."

"There are some people who are very active and really love the business, and for others, they just haven't found the right thing that they can dive into," says Mr. Mimran, who launched his own consulting business, Joe Mimran and Associates, shortly after Ralph Lauren acquired Club Monaco in 1999.

Since then, his biggest client has been Loblaw Cos. Ltd., launching the PC Home Collection and Joe Fresh, the cheap-chic clothing line that bears his name. "There are also people who like a variety of work and like to go from project to project and make their own time and develop their own calendars and work on the projects they like to work on," he adds.

Ms. Lundstrom's biggest asset is her 30-plus years of experience in apparel manufacturing and she sees this as an area underserved by consultants. Since converting her factory in 2001, she has been a practitioner and champion of Lean Manufacturing, the same efficiency-based system adopted by Toyota in the 1980s. She conducts Lean workshops that show clients how to increase output and cut turnaround time and reduce the need for more space, and believes this specialization, combined with her fashion savvy, bridges many spheres of business.

"I'm a hybrid, really," says the 59-year-old. "I know there might be a small audience that appreciates my peculiar combination of skills but I have to believe that there is an audience out there that would be interested in my services."

If Wanda Berk's consulting business is any indication, there is. Based in Toronto, she often works with private-label fashion clients and emerging designers to help source fabric, facilitate introductions with local manufacturers and help build and edit collections. She calls herself a "design and marketing consultant for the fashion industry" and has no website, saying she's in a position to be selective with the clients she takes on.

"I think every company is realizing that they can't afford a person with 30 years of experience [full-time]but they can certainly utilize them and bring them in and can have them involved for short periods of time," says Ms. Berk who is in her early 50s. "I think every type of business is finding that this type of outsourcing is a requirement now, in order to keep up with what's going on; it could be very costly otherwise."

Like consultants in other fields, these experts typically work behind the scenes. "I think [businesses]prefer people don't know I'm there," Ms. Berk says. "I had the days of ego, thank you very much. For me, it works perfectly."

Exceptions would include high-profile design gurus such as Philippe Starck or Bruce Mau who bring inevitable cachet to projects that bear their name. Ms. Lundstrom has been recruited in both starring and unbilled roles. Her first client was Eleventh Floor Apparel, for whom she helped source fabrics. In a series of follow-up e-mails, she reveals that she has been brought on board to create a capsule collection for Urban Cotton Co., a new Canadian brand that will be opening 41 stores across the country over the next six months. Last week, she spent two days in Santa Fe working on a photo shoot for a forthcoming line of products called "Craft It With Linda" in collaboration with a New York-based company. And that doesn't include the two apparel manufacturing classes she teaches at George Brown College and her myriad speaking engagements.

Translation: she's as busy now as she's ever been but without the responsibilities that come with a business that employs 150 people.

Ms. Lundstrom determines her fees based on the scope of each project and she says they range from $500 to $5,000 a day "depending on the requirements of my client and the size of the audience or group."

She will charge more for a large speaking engagement than helping to implement a Lean system. "This is the way I intend to earn my living," says Ms. Lundstrom, who actually prefers to call herself a practitioner rather than a consultant (her husband, Joel Halbert, was the CEO of her company for 25 years and he now acts as a "surrogate CEO" and chartered accountant for companies in need of a short-term problem solving). She seems more at peace being detached from the brand that bears her name than at any time in recent memory. "I had built this thing and I thought, 'if a painter creates a piece of art and somebody purchases it, you don't go along with it.' It becomes theirs and I realized it was a very difficult kind of process but no one can say I'm a quitter."

Mr. Mimran's biggest concern is that Canada is not brimming with large enough consumer or apparel brands to support a surfeit of independent consultants. "If you try to look at it from the designer end, none of them are big enough really to afford it. That's why you don't see any consultants who specialize in that area," he explains. "You can't try to mine a customer base that doesn't have the dollars."

Which is not to say that consultants with less experience won't serve a purpose, especially when it comes to larger projects. "You do need younger people to accumulate information," Mr. Mimran explains. "Based on the way the business is operating or trending, [it]needs to gather up that information and [it]can sometimes do that with cheaper hours versus more expensive hours."

But Ms. Lundstrom points out that there's no substitute for years of experience. "See these scars?" she jokes. "When I'm teaching my class [at Toronto's George Brown College] I give them examples of the time when a ship sank with fabric on it and what [I did]during power outages."

Frank Bober, founder and CEO of Stylesight, is proof that fashion consulting can translate into big business if it can be delivered globally in a way that non-fashion companies can understand. Having spent over two decades in both apparel design and private label manufacturing, the native New Yorker launched an online subscription-based site that delivers trend content and market forecasting to over 2,000 international companies.

"No one was addressing this fluid obtaining of information and then have it accessible in one place," he says by phone citing luxury retailers, electronics and automotive brands as clients.

Only premium subscription clients receive bi-annual in-person trend presentations from his team of consultants. "We're the antithesis of b2c; our criteria is how fast can you get off our site, not how long will you stay on. If we're doing an efficient job, [you]can get your information quickly and get to work."

Mr. Bober believes all businesses stand to gain from fashion consultant-provided research. "Everybody wears clothes and the apparel world influences lifestyle in so many ways," he says, noting that the entire style industry is an $850 billion worldwide. "We cover the whole gamut of activities, from colour to culture."

On a much smaller scale, Ms. Lundstrom thinks she's capable of the same thing, but even more customized for her clients. "I can look at a colour forecasting service or go to fabric shows and then I'll kind of filter it all into [something]that I think targets the market and the market I think I'm really skilled at addressing is women 35 and up."

She says she will measure the success of Linda Lundstrom Works less by how much money she makes – although she would like to earn enough to support her love of travel – than by the quality of what she contributes. "I want to provide value. I want to be valued," she says. "You know, I would hate to think that everything that with I've learned and everything that I've done – that nobody but me and my company benefited from it."