Not Just A Label confirms growth and expansion to Los Angeles

International platform Not Just A Label (NJAL) decided recently to move towards a Los Angeles residency. In an effort to expand the city and help build out the fashion industry, the company came from London with a new initiative. FashionUnited asked Stefan Siegal, chief executive officer and founder of NJAL, about how the company plans to facilitate growth and business in the fashion industry in Los Angeles.

Can you describe NJAL in your own words?

We are a direct platform to help emerging designers around the world to launch their designs and collections,. We have a meritocracy where the nurturing is done in a way where we want to highlight and support young designers throughout the world.

What is your mission by having a flagship in Los Angeles?

The U.S. is now our biggest market and we have stuck to a large scale project. Once in the city of New York, we launched a pop-up store. Now we [are focusing on] gathering designers in Los Angeles. What is great about Los Angeles compared to New York, [is that] here you still have a pretty huge manufacturing cluster and a huge opportunity for showcasing.

Why did you decide to choose Los Angeles?

There are more celebrity driven way of promoting your designs. The city also has this really interesting mix of design, manufacturing, retailing, and showcasing; and that’s where we want to tap into. We initiated a program with Make it in LA, where it's part of our expansion. We had to make the choice between New York and Los Angeles, and LA is the one we want to place our bets on.

With an emphasis on sustainability, how will NJAL have an impact on this part of the fashion industry?

Sustainability is the core of everything we do. We answer to fast-fashion by promoting these designers and the story behind these emerging designers. It’s competitive so that our core goal, in terms of Los Angeles, is that city and the community of design lives within the city of manufacturing. You have this ultimate responsibility towards your garment workers, [where] in other cities esp like New York you don’t focus much on it since manufacturing is always somewhere else. Even if you care about it, it’s still somewhat remote from you but here in LA people work and grew up with the manufacturing, there’s a different kind of awareness when it comes to sustainable manufacturing purposes.

Are there other cities in the U.S. that you are interested in expanding to?

We operate globally, now we are the us we can do much more for the U.S. What London has allowed us to do is to operate in the European market. With the office in Los Angeles now, we can basically do the same for the Americas.

Photo: Not Just A Label