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Yulia Zalyubovska: "Thanks to quarantine, we now understand our client better"
A month ago, my first interview in the "Brand Heroes" section was published - a conversation with the Head of Sales of the Anna October brand, Ella Abdullayeva. My next heroine, whom I want to introduce to you today, was her colleague by profession, Yulia Zalyubovskaya - Head of Sales of the Ukrainian brand KSENIASCHNAIDER , and it was Yulia who became the central link in Ogonka's interaction with him. Thanks to her, we have been working with the brand for a long time, productively and with great pleasure. I asked Yulia about how she got into the fashion industry, what the work of the Head of Sales consists of, how the quarantine affected the brand's activities, and about the peculiarities of the Asian market. I recorded this interview in the brand's Kyiv store on Vozdvyzhenka - we also did not ignore it. Enjoy reading.
— How did you end up in fashion? Tell us about how your love for this field began, about your studies abroad, and about how your professional development took place.
— It all started at university: I studied at the Institute of Journalism of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, and I was always interested in fashion. I thought about working in fashion journalism and even did an internship at the Ukrainian Buro 24/7. But even before graduating from my bachelor's degree, I realized that I had cooled off to this area, and I wanted to work for a brand. KSENIASCHNAIDER was my favorite brand, and when I saw that Ksyusha Schneider was looking for an employee, I immediately responded. It was in 2014. At that time, the brand management consisted only of Anton (Schneider) and Ksyusha, and Anton was still living in Moscow at that time and visiting Kyiv occasionally. I came without any experience, did a test task — and they accepted me. And Ksyusha taught me everything. We worked at her house, I even sat with her child for a while — then it was a very family business.
Since I was the only person on Ksyusha's team at the time, I learned absolutely everything: marketing, sales, and more.
It was thanks to this work experience that the doors of the fashion industry opened for me, I understood how everything works from the inside on the brand side, and I am very grateful to Ksyusha for that. I didn't work there for long then, because I entered a business school in Barcelona, for fashion marketing, and went there. For a while I continued to work remotely, but, you know, it's not the same. But we continued to keep in touch. After that, I worked a lot with brands in Paris, with the shoe studio SIX London, with LITKOVSKAYA. Then I went to Istanbul for six months, where I worked at the accessories brand Manu Atelier — and returned to Kyiv. Literally immediately after my return, Ksyusha called me for a meeting — and I returned to KSENIASCHNAIDER. It was 2017. I came to work in marketing because it was my specialty and it was closer to me, but later it turned out that there were enough marketers in Ukraine, but there were literally no people who understood how the entire wholesale system, the wholesale sales system, worked. Therefore, I smoothly transitioned from marketing to sales and have been doing only sales for two years now.
— It's amazing how long this story has dragged on. What did you want to become after graduating from Barcelona? What did you dream about then?
— I wanted to continue working in marketing, I dreamed of going to Paris and working there. But I was faced with the fact that it is very difficult to do this with Ukrainian citizenship. There is bureaucracy, everything is arranged in such a way that businesses are obliged to hire French citizens, and if they want to hire a foreigner, they must prove that they cannot find a Frenchman with the same qualifications. And it turns out a vicious circle: you cannot go without a work visa, and it is impossible to get a visa without a work permit. Faced with this, I resigned myself to staying in Kyiv for the time being. I adore Kyiv, and I am very comfortable here.
I just like to set myself challenges: for example, go to another city on your own and do whatever you want.
So I went to study in Barcelona alone, then moved to Istanbul to work. I really like this feeling: you grow a lot as a person in such conditions. I hope there will be another opportunity to arrange something similar for myself.
— At KSENIASCHNAIDER you are involved in wholesale sales. Tell us how it works from the inside on your side: what is sales, what are your current responsibilities?
— It all starts with creating a collection — it's a designer's job, but I also get involved and help out. When we already have some things, we do the shooting, I set wholesale prices, make a linesheet — a catalog of things with these prices, work directly with the production, which buys fabrics and sews things. Then I set the market price — and after that, the promotion of the collection begins. The standard scheme before quarantine was this: I send out invitations to the Fashion Market in Paris during Fashion Week along with a linesheet, lookbook, and all the materials for the new collection.
Personal connections are more than just selling.
I send out materials to both cold contacts and warm contacts — those we work with or communicate with, but haven’t worked with yet. We arrange meetings, schedule the market, and come to Paris with the collection. At the Fashion Market, we meet with buyers from various stores, communicate, show them the new collection — they take photos, choose, make decisions, and send orders. This is your side of the job, as a client. After returning to Kyiv, I collect all the orders and form a general production plan, according to which the production department will purchase fabrics and sew things. At the same time, I confirm the order, issue an order confirmation, and continue communicating with clients. Marina handles payments and logistics, and I handle the rest of the communication with clients and production. In parallel with creating the collection, I also continuously work on finding new clients: I get to know new contacts, connect with someone on LinkedIn, look for new cool stores, for example, when traveling I go in and take contacts, and so on.
— We met Ksyusha several times in Paris. Who initiated the brand to start exhibiting there? Was it your suggestion, because you knew, having worked in Paris, that it was cool?
— This is not my merit, before me a girl from Moscow was in charge of sales. When I returned to work for the brand, the team had already been traveling to Paris for several seasons, and I started traveling with them. Together we worked with many cool showrooms: Polly King, Paper Mache Tiger.
— How does your communication with Ksyusha and Anton take place, how different is it? Is Ksyusha responsible for women's, Anton for men's, or is everyone responsible for everything? How do you influence the women's and men's collections? You said that you help during their creation - how exactly?
— Yes, Ksyusha is feminine, Anton is masculine, when it comes to collections. If we look at it from the perspective of the brand as a whole, Anton is about brand vision, and Ksyusha is about operations, that is, he invents something, and she embodies these ideas. I work more with Ksyusha, I had a direct relationship with men's, but I never fully dealt with it — this is Anton's universe, he does it completely independently. Working with Ksyusha, we review our bestsellers, think about what new things can be done based on them, study the Asian market, draw a general picture of the future collection. At the time of creation, we measure something in the office, everyone expresses their opinion, including me. That's how it works.
— Tell us more about the production. Do you have it in-house, or is it outsourced, or both?
— We have our own production, but there are some things that we outsource: accessories, some types of knitwear. Most of our clothes are still denim, our specialty, and our production is actually working on this.
— Indeed, the first association with KSENIASCHNAIDER is jeans. And for me, as for many others, it is definitely a denim brand. How are things going now: jeans are still the number one seller or are you changing towards something else, for example, jackets, T-shirts or some new things?
— As long as we exist, we have been trying to change, to get away from the image of a denim brand. But everyone knows us for denim, and we realized that it’s enough to fight against it — it’s just our thing and we need to develop and emphasize it. Internally, we have simply come to terms with the fact that we are perceived as a denim brand. In general, everything is as you say: denim is the best-selling category.
— What percentage of the brand's total sales does denim represent compared to other items?
— Roughly 70-80%.
— Wow!
— This is all of our denim, including jackets and everything that can be bought in sets. And if we talk only about jeans, I think it will be 50% for sure.
— You are officially a denim brand. That was a very interesting question, for some reason I thought that everything changes over time.
— In Japan, some concept stores still place orders with us only for the demi-denims model — they are only interested in these jeans because they are cool and everyone loves them.
— I know that you shot to fame and became world-wide popular when demi-denims was released and Asia saw you. Tell us about working with the Asian market, about communicating with them. How many stores do you work with there, is it easy or difficult for you to work with this market, are there any favorite stores there?
— Yes, they really took off in Asia — the first to buy them were the Koreans Rare Market. They are influential and many Asian stores emulate them — I think, thanks to them, in particular, other players learned about us, became interested and wanted our jeans. At the same time, this was supported by influencers. At some point, there were a lot of Asian stores with which we work: in Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan. In addition, I had been communicating with Tokyo Fashion Week for a long time — ever since I came to work in marketing. They wanted us to come, but it was expensive for us, so we tried to get grants from them. They consulted for a long time, looked at our samples — and as a result, two years ago, they invited us, paid for a trip to Tokyo and organized a show at Tokyo Fashion Week. It was very cool and funny in contrast: before that, we did a show at Ukrainian Fashion Week and it didn't cause a boom, but in Tokyo there was a queue of people who couldn't get to the show, and the space there was much larger than in Kyiv.
It was a real explosion.
We have consolidated our position in Asia — it was all in-house sales through our joint efforts. About a year and a half ago we started working with a distributor in China, because China is a very specific market and it is difficult to do business with them directly. We talked to different distributors and started working with DFO International — we continue to work with them to this day. They completely cover the Chinese market, which we still don’t understand: they negotiate with stores and do marketing — our products are on the cover of Vogue China, on millionaire stars, and so on.
— How many stores do you have in Asia?
— At one point there were about forty, that's just in China. We work directly with Korea and Japan. We have warm friendly relations with the Desperado store — it's a concept store in Tokyo, which was one of the first to buy our demi-denims. We know them personally, we see each other in Paris, we're very friends — and they still buy jeans from us. When the KSENIASCHNAIDER show was in Tokyo, they hosted Ukrainian brands and had a party — everything was in Ukrainian flags, it's very nice. It's a completely different world, and it's cool that they like our product. Sometimes I think that if I hadn't worked in fashion, I would never have met amazing, eccentric Japanese people in my life.
— I agree, fashion is about fantastic contacts. How different is an order from Ogonyok from another European or Asian store?
— It's difficult to classify by territory, because each store is unique - with its own concept and approach.
— Is there a universal key? When you get to know the stores, can you guess what kind of things they will order? Depending on the selection of brands they represent, or according to some other criteria.
— Yes. Most often, either the store owner or the head buyer buys things conditionally for his friends, for people who are similar to him. And by the person, by his style and manner of dressing, it is immediately clear that he will like it here. I think you have approximately the same situation: friends of Vika, the founder of Ogonyok, buy things in the same style that she wears.
— Where did quarantine find you? How has your work changed since it began?
— We were in Paris when it all happened, and it had a big impact on the market. Major American clients basically didn’t come there, and Italian showrooms closed earlier because Italy, unlike Ukraine, already had a bad epidemiological situation. Many clients were even afraid to place orders online because it was unclear how events would develop further.
— Who is selling you now from the American fashion giants?
— They all disappeared due to quarantine. Before that, there were Shopbop, Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdale's. Neiman Marcus went bankrupt. Most of them are still doing poorly because the stores have dead stock — it's time to order new stock, and they need to sell a lot of old stock. That's why they only order new stock from their biggest brands like Prada, and smaller brands are still on hold.
— My personal insight into why giants were knocked down during quarantine, but people like us weren't is people. What offline gives that no online can give is the warmth of communication, interaction, and support. Our customers spent money with us because they love us, and it's mutual. During quarantine, we developed communication, came up with a lot of activities, and took off. In this regard, I have a question: have your relationships with relatively small stores that sell you changed, have new customers appeared, has the overall course of the company changed during quarantine?
— We have a very similar situation. It’s also more difficult with large clients, because there is no warm personal communication between us. Most of our B2B work has grown into B2C and introduced us to the client here in Ukraine. We opened a showroom in Kyiv a few days before everything closed for the lockdown, and at the same time we started selling online very actively, like everyone else. We had a website before, but it only had organic sales. We didn’t develop the retail sales direction in any way, we mainly focused our efforts on stores and their support. We even communicated collections on Instagram that were new to buyers, not to the average Ukrainian buyer. With the onset of quarantine, our business as a whole was restructured and became more focused on the end consumer, particularly in Ukraine. We also started conducting various activities online, for example, we launched the viral flash mob #quarantineindenim. We are very grateful to our clients and friends who supported us. Our B2C story has taken off very quickly — if it weren't for quarantine, we would have continued to work according to our wholesale scheme, which did not give us a clear understanding of the end consumer. And thanks to quarantine, we now understand our customer better and are more focused on them.
— How has the ratio of B2B to B2C changed in percentage terms today?
— It's changed a lot. Previously, B2B was about 85%, but now it's much less, about 40-50%, that is, it's divided equally.
— How much has the situation with earnings changed with this distribution? Earning from wholesale, you could plan for some stability. And how are you trying to achieve it today, how do you plan?
— The situation hasn't changed that much in terms of money, it's more about changes in the system. With wholesale, everything was clear and understandable: we placed an order, formed a production plan, received an advance payment, bought fabric for this advance payment, sewed, shipped the goods, received money. Everything is very clear and stable. And now how will it turn out: some month is very successful, in terms of money it turns out even better than with wholesale, because we sell at full price, and in some months there is less activity - and we sink. There is no clear understanding of what will happen tomorrow.
— Are you still doing it exclusively wholesale? So now the people who run the store do everything themselves, including production for it? So your work has decreased?
— You can't say that it has decreased. I still look for clients, communicate and write, send out new collections — it has remained in the same volume. I still hold meetings — just now not in Paris, but on Zoom. Yes, there are fewer clients, but now I devote more time to each of them — we work according to a new system, we are constantly coming up with something. We are not that snobbish brand that just sent out a collection and forgot about the client until the next purchase, no, I still maintain communication. This is a story about relationships, personal connections — it is more than just selling.
— Where in the world do you dream of selling? And what do you need for that?
— I really want to go to The Broken Arm in Paris. What do you need? I think we need something wildly interesting, like the second demi-denims.
— A month ago, Pablo wrote to me on behalf of KSENIASCHNAIDER — he is now selling the brand's men's collections. Tell me about him. Do you have so much work that you hired another person in sales, or did you decide to focus only on women's?
— From the very beginning, I was only involved in women's collections, and at some point Anton started making men's collections. As I said, I was never fully involved in them, I only supported Anton. And Pasha is not a man from the street — he was a production manager, he was involved in creating merch for special projects. And now he has moved from production to men's sales — it was logical for us and it turned out very organically.
— Let's finish by talking about you. What is the basis of your wardrobe and does it resonate with the values of KSENIASCHNAIDER? I mean, for many, the basis of their wardrobe is jeans, and you work for a denim brand.
— I'm more into basic, simple things and their interesting combination. A mix of different things, a combination of high fashion and mass market.
— What is your favorite wardrobe item?
— This summer I rediscovered our Dua Lipa jeans and wanted to wear them every day. I felt super sexy in them.
— How many pairs of jeans of your brand do you have?
— A lot (laughs). About ten.
— What would you be doing if you weren't KSENIASCHNAIDER?
— Everyone is very versatile now, and I don't see myself solely as a salesperson at Schneider. I could be a sommelier, I really love wine (laughs). I go to tastings, I love hearing about wine. Lately, I've been hooked on natural wines.
— Biodynamics? What is your favorite grape region?
— Yes. I love Austria very much.
— The question in every interview I have is: what is Ogonyok to you?
— It's you (laughs). Ogonyok is 100% associated with you. And I'll tell you about my first impression of the store — I was there for the first time this summer. We went in without introducing ourselves, and the girl who greeted us immediately read our style and started offering us KSENIASCHNAIDER items — it was wow, and I was very pleased.
End
Before the interview, Yulia and I walked along Vozdvizhenka and Zhytny Market in Podil just before Halloween. Everything was covered in pumpkins — we were very lucky with the entourage. There we met a very charismatic woman who sold pumpkins and told us very loudly that "Americans never dreamed of the sweetness of our Ukrainian pumpkins. Our land is special."
Below are three tips that Yulia is happy to share with those who are starting their journey in fashion, as well as wine, the same Austrian one.
From Julia
1. Develop your eye: travel, watch good movies, read books, visit exhibitions, follow cool brands, and read professional fashion media.
2. As in any other field, it's great to get a specialized education. This will provide a good foundation and open up new perspectives.
3. Try it! If you want to work in the fashion industry, persistently write to the brands you like - and you will definitely be hired as at least an intern. Extra hands for a brand will never be superfluous, and for you it is a chance to gain invaluable experience.
