The Fashion Brand Clinic Podcast - Season 4 Episode 04: From "The Saturdays" to Fashion Founder at Faves The Edit - Frankie Bridge and Leah Meredith
Thirty People in a Room Is Not a Failure
There's a moment in my conversation with Frankie Bridge and Leah Meredith where Frankie describes the run-up to their first Faves event. They'd aimed for 30 people. And she remembers thinking: is that too small?
This is a woman who has performed in arenas. Who spent her teens and twenties in S Club Juniors and then The Saturdays, dealing in album sales and stadium crowds. Thirty people felt like nothing.
It wasn't nothing. It was thirty people who genuinely wanted to be there, and that turned out to be the whole business.
I bring this up because I hear the opposite version of it constantly. Brand owners telling me they'll start doing events when they've got the numbers. They'll build the community when the following is bigger. They'll do the thing when they're ready. And what they mean is that thirty feels embarrassing.
Put thirty people in a classroom and ask most founders to stand up and talk to them, and they'd be terrified. But say thirty on an Eventbrite page and suddenly it's a disappointment. Same thirty people.
Customers are not a community
Leah drew the distinction better than I've heard anyone draw it. A customer buys from you. A community is engaged with you — and, crucially, with each other.
That second part is the bit everyone misses. Customers all face you. A community faces sideways as well. The Faves women go to events together, go for lunch, stay in touch. Some of them turn up alone the first time, terrified, and leave with friends. One of their original members is a shift worker whose social life didn't fit anyone else's hours, and who now has a group of people to talk to during the day.
You cannot fake that, and you cannot buy it. You can only build the conditions for it and then get out of the way.
There's a hard commercial edge to this too. Plenty of brands fill a room with hundreds of people and none of it is community — it's customers who happened to show up. Looks better on Instagram. Worth considerably less.
The front row test
Here's where Faves put their money where their mouth is.
At their London Fashion Week runway, tickets went to their mailing list first. Their Faves Insiders — the most engaged women in the community — were seated in the front row. Press and influencers were not, by default.
People were confused. Some were told, politely, that they were in the wrong seat. There was pushback from PR, who were used to requesting front row and getting it.
Frankie and Leah held the line, because a value you'll drop under pressure was never a value. If you tell your community they come first and then hand the front row to whoever has the biggest following, they will notice, and the trust you spent years building goes in an afternoon.
The feedback afterwards came from someone deep inside the industry: there was no clique, everyone was talking to everyone, celebrities and PR and community all mixed in together. She said it was unheard of.
I've worked in some horrendous rooms in this industry, so I know exactly how unusual that is. And it's a useful reminder that you don't need to be a bitch to work in fashion. You really don't.
What you say no to
The line I keep coming back to is Leah's: what we say no to is more important than what we say yes to.
They've turned down deals with real money attached, at points when a new business genuinely needed that money. Not because the brands were bad, but because taking it would have meant explaining themselves to a community that trusts them. Some brands wanted to buy into the concept early, because they could see it was working. They said no.
Saying no when you're comfortable is easy. Saying no when the invoice would have covered three months of runway is a different thing entirely, and it's the only version that counts.
Get them off Instagram
One practical thing before I let you go, because it came up early and I want it on the record.
Faves launched a newsletter almost immediately. Not as an afterthought — as the thing that made the community a community. Early access to links. Event tickets before anyone else. A space that isn't rented from a platform that could change its mind about you tomorrow.
I have worked with brands sitting on six figures of Instagram followers and an email list in the low four figures. That's not an audience you own. That's an audience you're borrowing.
Frankie's version is sharper than mine, because her whole career happened off social media and she's never been comfortable treating it as an income source. Faves' most engaged people are the ones who stepped away from social and chose to open an email instead.
Start with the five you've got
If you take one thing from this episode: you can build a community from one person.
Not a thousand. Not a hundred. If five people want in on what you're doing, work out what you can do with those five, and go from there. It's slow and there's no shortcut, but it doesn't require scale to begin. It requires you to actually mean it.
🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Frankie Bridge and Leah Meredith on The Fashion Brand Clinic, wherever you get your podcasts, or watch it on YouTube.
If you're building the marketing side of your brand and you'd like some company doing it, Magnetic is my six-month group programme for fashion brands — 25 places a round, so you're never a face in the crowd. Magnetic is now fully booked for 2026 but you can join the waitlist for 2027 HERE