Fashion & Founders The Podcast · Victoria Smith

How to Start and Scale a Fashion Brand with ALIGNE CEO Ginny Seymour

·37 min·2 clips

Ginny says she is building Align for working women and confident females.

1. Fashion & Founders The Podcast features Ginny Seymour and Align, a women’s ready-wear contemporary brand built in East London and now expanding from New York. 2. Victoria Smith hosts Ginny Seymour as CEO and re-founder of Align, and Ginny matters because she now leads the brand’s U.S. growth after moving to New York. 3. The episode asks how a fashion founder starts, scales, and protects brand identity while moving from a UK base into the U.S. market. 4. Ginny says she did not grow up dreaming about fashion, studied political science, and expected to become a lawyer before realizing she loved business and numbers. 5. She describes applying to Saks.com’s training program, being rejected because she was Canadian, writing to the president, and being invited back after he heard she had told Saks they were wrong. 6. Ginny says the Saks program taught her that the company wanted critical thinkers from majors like chemistry, biology, and political science, not just people from fashion. 7. She says that experience shaped how she hires, because she values a way of thinking more than a specific university background. 8. Align’s early marketing leaned on ShopMy, gifting, and product seeding, which Ginny says brought clarity about which creators drove sales. 9. She says the Daphne blazer became the first purchase for many customers and that the brand reached $1 million in U.S. revenue without paid ads. 10. Ginny says she leads all creative direction, choosing colors and collection concepts with designers handling sketching and fit. 11. She describes Align as filling a white space for design-led affordable pieces that felt missing in the contemporary market as premium contemporary moved upward in price. 12. She says the company’s shift started after moving to the UK in 2020, then joining a startup, then being given two weeks to write a business plan for a new version of Align. 13. Ginny says Align 2.0 relaunched on August 1st, 2023 after a restructuring and a gradual wrap-up of the previous brand. 14. She explains that U.S. growth accelerated after a September 2024 PR hire, a press day in New York, and a follow-up trip during New York Fashion Week. 15. Ginny says Nordstrom reached out after a customer-service no on wholesale, then slid into her DMs because it wanted to talk about Align. 16. She says she resisted wholesale at first because she wanted two years of direct-to-consumer customer learning before letting partner retailers shape the brand. 17. Ginny links Align’s values to female athletes, especially Lucy Bronze and the Lionesses, and says she wanted advertising to reflect the strongest version of a confident female. 18. She says Align launched a co-designed collaboration with Lucy Bronze and also works as Gotham FC style partner for tunnel looks. 19. The interview is conversational and practical, with Victoria Smith asking direct questions about marketing, expansion, DTC strategy, and founder advice. 20. People interested in fashion operations, DTC growth, and founder strategy will get the most from it, while listeners looking for celebrity gossip or a purely trend-driven chat may skip it.

As heard by us

A clear fashion founder conversation about identity, wholesale, and growth.

Fashion & Founders turns a fashion founder conversation into something practical: how brand identity gets set before scale takes over. Ginny Seymour comes across as deliberate about what Align is, from the viral blazers to the UK base, the New York presence, and the Nordstrom…

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Why you'd press play

Hear how Align defines itself before leaning on wholesale, Nordstrom, and athlete-led campaigns to grow.

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