Alice Kim asked other women’s fashion founders to collaborate. Several of them said no. Their reason: we’re in the same category.
When she told me that on Possibilities, I said “What?!” out loud. Then I thought about how many times I have watched smart, capable women make the same decision in their businesses and careers.
So, is your competition your biggest opportunity? More often than we admit, yes. The business you are guarding against may already serve your customer, reach people you can’t, or hold the piece you are missing. Collaboration over competition is not a nice idea. It is one of the fastest ways to grow.
Alice is not a newcomer who wandered into fashion with a good idea. She started her career as an investment banker, then spent more than 20 years inside Prada, Diane von Furstenberg, Victoria’s Secret, and Shopbop. She knows how this industry thinks, how it buys, and what it overlooks. Today she is the founder and CEO of PerfectDD, a clothing brand with three U.S. patents behind it. So when she says the industry has its idea of competition wrong, I listen.
The One-Seat Era Is Over
For a long time, a woman who earned a seat at the table was often the only woman there. When there is one seat, you protect it. You hold information close. You see the next capable woman as a threat rather than an ally.
Alice described it exactly that way. Women competed with each other because there were so few at the top. The scarcity made us guard what we had when we should have been sharing it.
That was never how I am wired, and it is a big part of why I wrote my book and started this podcast. Just because you succeed does not make me a failure. Your success and mine are not binary. There is room in this world for a lot of us to thrive.
The good news is that the mindset is shifting. The harder truth is that many of us still run our businesses as if the one-seat rule applies.
The Customer Everyone Else Overlooked
Before Alice found collaborators, she found a market that an entire industry had walked past.
According to the research Alice cites, the average bra size in the United States is a 34DD. But she was a small framed woman, with a DD, and that niche was not being served. As she says, the data has always been out there. It’s not hiding. But as Alice put it, perception is reality. If the runway only shows you one body type, you start to believe that is what most women look like. Designers designed for the perception. Millions of women were left pinning, layering, and sizing up.
Where others saw a niche, Alice saw the average. That is the first lesson of this conversation: the biggest opportunities often sit in the places other people have decided not to look.
And the same blind spot that hides a customer can hide a partner.
Open Your Closet: The Case for Collaboration Over Competition
Alice’s answer to “same category” is the best one I have heard. Open your closet. How many sneaker brands are in there?
Nike. Adidas. Vans. Golden Goose. They are all sneaker companies, and you bought each one for a different reason: a mood, a function, a moment. Nobody wears one brand head to toe. You might pair a PerfectDD top with someone else’s pants and someone else’s jacket.
Your customer is already shopping across your so-called competitors. The only person treating them as rivals is you.
Alice pointed to the collaboration between Allbirds and Adidas as proof. Two shoe brands, known for different strengths, built something together that neither would have built alone.
One Plus One Can Equal Three
I said this to Alice, and I will say it again here. One plus one can equal three. Yes, that is bad math for those of you with an education. But it is the right math.
Collaboration over competition is not about being nice. It is a growth strategy, and when a partnership is accretive to both brands, the results can be exponential:
→ You reach a customer you could not reach on your own
→ You borrow credibility, capability, or distribution you have not built yet
→ You create something in the white space between you that neither of you owns today
Alice thinks this way about her own business. She has talked about partnering with other brands and licensing her patented fit technology so it can live inside other companies’ clothes. That is a founder who stopped asking who is in her category and started asking who could carry her solution further.
If you are an executive who still thinks in terms of category lines, I say this with love: be a little more creative. We are competing in a global marketplace. The leaders who win will be the ones who think holistically about who they can build with.
Stop Waiting for a Seat at Someone Else’s Table
Alice raised a question in our conversation that has stayed with me. They say business deals get done on the golf course. So what is our equivalent?
I don’t think the answer is to take up golf, or to network more like men. I think the better question is why we keep waiting for access to someone else’s network when we could be creating our own opportunities together.
Alice shared something from her own experience. When I asked whether being a woman of color had affected her access to funding, she said she hasn’t faced roadblocks because of her ethnicity. What she has noticed is that the angels who immediately take her call are fellow Asians. She doesn’t see it as preferential. She sees it as familiarity and the relationships you have built.
That is how trust works. So let’s be that familiarity for each other. Share who your advisors are. Ask where other women are putting their money, as Alice now does. Make the introduction before anyone asks.
Alice and I met through a mutual friend. And before our conversation ended, I told her I would introduce her to Beth Mazza, another founder who talks about making the pool bigger. That is what building our own table looks like. It is not a networking event. It is a habit.
How to Find the Business Opportunity in Your Competition
Philosophy is nice. Here is how to put this to work this week. Look at the people and companies you currently think of as competition, and ask:
→ Who am I treating as a competitor who might actually be a collaborator?
→ What customer need are we both overlooking?
→ What could we create together that neither of us could create alone?
If one name comes to mind for all three, reach out. The worst answer is no, and you will be exactly where you started. The best answer could change the shape of your business.
As Alice put it, there’s room for all of us.
If you want a thinking partner on where your next opportunity is hiding, if you need me, you know where to find me.
~ Monique
