Natalie B Coleman
launched her first collection in 2011 and has since grown from strength to
strength. Every season Natalie amuses with her tongue in cheek titled
collections but when it comes down to clothes, it’s a serious business.
Fabulous, high end fabrics finished to perfection with interesting prints,
great detail and flattering draping have become her staples. Launching your own
brand is not an easy task though and Natalie recently started to work with
Microsoft to make her working life that bit easier.
As a Microsoft
ambassador, Natalie’s passion for style and design has been enriched through
the apps and services she has discovered; such as having her favorite fashion
sites pinned to her Start screen and the 'Fashion’ app which allows her to
follow the feed of all her favorite bloggers.
I had an opportunity
to chat to Natalie about everything from the AW’13 collection, through her favorite food to stories from video sets. I hope you enjoy discovering a bit
more about Natalie as much as I did.


Natalie B Coleman collections
are inspired by women and their stories, who inspired your AW’13 collection?
I think it wasn’t a specific person, each collection is
almost like a diary page so it’s kind of all the women who are around me,
whatever books I am reading and music I am listening to. It’s always kind of
the same type of person but maybe she’s growing up a little bit. Starting to
grow up a bit more, I hope, like me. At the moment I’m working on my AW 14/15
and that’s going to be much more grown up again, much more sophisticated. It’s
still going to have the sense of humor in it, the elements I hope to carry
through each collection but I feel like the Natalie B Coleman girl is growing
up.
How do you see her
staying fun & flirty?
Women stay fun and flirty their whole lives, it’s just
natural.
You launched your
first collection in 2011, how did you find the move from working for brands to
working for yourself? Do you still find that you get to be creative or do you
get distracted by running a business?
I think I’ve learnt more in the last 3 years than I’ve
learnt my whole previous life. It’s just been like being thrown in at a deep end.
I didn’t have any business experience or any knowledge of how to run a
business. All I ever worked at was design so it’s been a really big learning
curve but I think I’ve been quite practical as well and not trying to do too
much, not have unrealistic goals. I have put in a lot of hours but it’s been
ok, it’s been an experience. It’s hard but I have a lot of secondary kind of employments;
my production is in Portugal, I’ve got some really good interns that help me a
lot and I have a lot of friends who work in photography, film and things which
means that I can do some collaborations as well.
Apart from fashion,
what do you like?
Food. I love food. I’m obsessed with food. I go to bed with
cookery books. I love reading about food, I like eating food, so much more than
the cooking, even though I like cooking but my husband cooks all the time so
he’s kind of taken over the kitchen. We just eat a lot.
Any favorite food
spots in Monaghan or Dublin?
There’s a really cool bar just outside where I had a party
the next day after the wedding, it’s like an old pub / restaurant which is
really nice. It’s the River Bank, it’s in the country side [Monaghan] and I love
going there. They serve really good, homemade pub food and there’s an open
fireplace. We travel a lot with work. I love Asian food, really fresh tastes. I
eat a lot of sushi and Italian. I eat everything and everywhere! In Dublin, I
haven’t been here that much recently but I think I’ll be moving back here after
Christmas so I’m sure I’ll be eating out a lot more. I really like the Winding
Stair on the Quays and Saba is great for Asian food.
The names of your
collections, they’re very unusual. Where do you get the ideas from?
They mostly reflect what is going on with my life. The
Sarah’s suitcase was when I was getting married so it was all very girlie,
frivolous and frothy.
The most recent one
is called ‘I belong to me’, is that some kind of statement after you got
married?
Yeah, 3 months after I got married (laugh). My husband has a
good sense of humour, he’s very easy going.
I had a smashing party which I always wanted to do. Myself
and a lot of friends got together and we had a lot of old delph from parties
and different functions that were really cheap and cracked, just not really
good for anything. So we had some drinks & music and we just smashed it all
up. It was great, I took a lot of pictures, it was like a big release. I think
I want to do another one again, a bigger one. So the idea came from this
smashing party. I was looking at things breaking apart and china when it’s broken.
I was looking at a lot Cubist artists as well and I started developing the
prints from there, the shapes and the mood of them. It’s kind of a bit punky in
its attitude.
(See video of the new collection HERE)
(See video of the new collection HERE)
When it comes to your
own wardrobe, are most of your clothes your own designs or do you ever shop on
the high street?
No, I don’t shop, I don’t have time to shop! I’m going to
New York next week so I’m definitely going to pick up something. Each place I
go to I like to get a teacup and a saucer, I collect tea sets. I spend a lot of
time on shoes and bags but recently I got more into jewellery.
Would you consider
going into jewellery design?
Maybe in the future it would be nice to do a collaboration
with somebody who was more gifted in that area, more of a crafts person But
yes, I would like to learn a lot more about jewellery. I designed my own
engagement ring and it’s beautiful, well I love it.
I have a lot of vintage pieces, I love second hand stores
but mostly I wear my own clothes.
Natalie's engagement ring
What social media
have proven best for engaging with customers and promoting business?
Twitter, it’s really good. I’ve gotten a few different
magazine pieces through twitter and that time that Marina and the Diamonds
contacted me, through twitter. I was wondering because I got all these new followers
and then I looked back and saw a tweet from her which I wouldn’t have noticed.
One of my pieces was used on a video clip for Rick Ross. It was from Spring Summer
12, the song was a number 1 in US charts, it’s called Amsterdam, the female
singer in the song is Antonique Smith and she’s wearing one of my pieces in it.
I didn’t know anything about it, their stylist picked it out, it’s only that
somebody contacted me on Twitter. That’s people looking at the piece in a video
in America, googling it, finding my name and mentioning it. It’s really
interesting, it just makes the world so small. Which is great, except you can’t
hide anymore. I spent my life trying to hide, not a very good career to go into
for somebody who likes to be on their own a lot. I spend a lot of time on my
own in studio so it’s a balance.
Is there a designer
that you admire most?
There’s a lot of designers that I love. Historically I
always loved Balenciaga, I like Vionnet because she was amazing, even for women
who worked for her she brought in proper pension schemes for them, she was
really female–orientated and a very strong kind of a woman. For a lot of female
designers it was very difficult because it was more of a men’s world and they
were very visionary so I admire all of the female designers during those
periods, Chanel as well.
I like Celine a lot at the moment, I like the clean lines
and simplicity, it’s very clever, I love Celine, I think it’s my favorite. I
like Marc Jacobs as well, I think I would really like to go out for a night
with Marc Jacobs if he wasn’t in his pious state. Back in his partying days, I
think that would be fun. He’s got a really good humor.
There’s a lot of designers that I like, I love Danielle
Romeril and what she’s doing at the moment, I think it’s great, she’s great.
There’s a lot of great Irish designers, I always loved Una [Burke], she’s a
good friend of mine and I love her pieces.
What made you move
back to Monaghan? I know you lived in London for a while.
I lived in London when I was doing my MA at Central St.
Martins, then I moved back to New York, back to the people I worked for before
for a while. Then I came back to Dublin and I didn’t know what I was doing, it
was before I set up the label and I was a little bit lost and I owed a lot of
money from my Masters. I just moved back to the countryside, to my dad’s to try
and figure out what to do. I love going home, it’s so peaceful, I’m a bit of a
country girl so it was nice. Then I converted one of the garages into a studio
and just started working there. I’m over and back between Bristol and Monaghan
now, on ‘glamorous’ Ryanair flights (laugh). I think I may be moving back to
Dublin in January, hopefully I’ll have a place in a centre of town which should
be good.
How did you manage to
start your business in Monaghan?
It was pure stubbornness I think because it was so
difficult. I wasn’t even driving at the time, I was in the middle of nowhere,
with no internet, no home phone line. I got those eventually but it was a year
into it before I did. No internet, no phone line, really bad coverage, I’d be
out in a ditch going ‘Can you hear me?! Now?!’. I had to go in sometimes into
town and sit outside the local hotel to pick up their internet. It was crazy,
in some ways it was really good because I was so cut off from everything, I
just worked, I was really obsessive, I was just working all the time and I was
really involved in what I was doing. It was just before everything started
taking off, when I was doing my first trade shows, just before I had to focus
on all of the production and make all these different changes, decisions and
moves. It was a really nice time for me, I was just doing what I loved without
any big stresses.
How do you manage
now, between Monaghan, Bristol and all the travelling?
I work with these [pointing at Surface RT and Nokia Lumia].
Have you seen it yet? [the tablet]. It’s really cool. When you’re travelling,
it’s so useful, it has a USB port so when you’re away and you’re going to trade
shows and you take pictures you want to upload, you can do that, it’s so handy.
You can plug in your phone, camera, hard drive, printer if you need something
done on the go, it’s great. There’s this
really great thing called OneNote; when I’m on the phone and if I’m at Premier Vision,
you’re walking along and it’s just so hectic. I’d go to OneNote and I’d just
speak to it for example: ‘leather at booth 103’. When you go home, you go to
your OneNote on the tablet and it’d be typed up there so you can put it in your
diary. They’re synchronised together (the phone and the tablet) so it just
makes life a lot easier. It has a great camera on it as well.
As we carried on, I
learned that the model on the set for ‘Sarah’s Suitcase’ video never drove a car
before. ‘Come on you’ll be grand’ Natalie said. Not surprisingly, it was better
than that. I look forward to Natalie’s next move: be it new collection, move to
Dublin, new story or pretty much anything; with her charm, witty sense of humor and hard work, she will surely make it work.
Wow what an amazing experience! Love the fashion photos! xx
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