Welcome to Insider Trading, PEDESTRIAN’s career-focused column asking the people in the jobs you want how they got there. As part of our Australian Fashion Week coverage, we’re talking to Courtney Zheng, the 29-year-old Sydney-sider who founded her own label in 2023, taking a collection to Paris before she even had a website (or social media).
Zheng, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, grew up spending her after school hours at her mum’s fashion manufacturing business on Sydney’s Kippax St. She studied a “really hardcore” finance and politics double degree, but when her grandmother — a former fabric mill worker who opened her own manufactory — died, Zheng felt a pull to fashion. “I’m not a very woo-woo person, but I felt that it was my responsibility to carry the family legacy on,” she told PEDESTRIAN.
In 2023, she launched her namesake label, making a name for herself with her signature dark romanticism for the ultimate cool-girl wardrobe: luxurious fabrics, languid silhouettes, and unexpected details that keep you guessing.
Ahead of her Australian Fashion Week debut, we caught up with Courtney to talk her origin story, lessons from failure, and what it takes to really make it in fashion.
Insider Trading: Courtney Zheng
PEDESTRIAN: Hi! Welcome to Insider Trading. To start with, what is your official title?
Courtney Zheng: I was actually joking with my team the other day when we were leaving our new design studio in Alexandria, NSW. Basically, everyone who works for the company has so many responsibilities that the job description itself doesn’t cover even a portion of it. I was saying that I should get everyone’s official job titles printed on the front and then a huge list of everything else they do on the back.
PEDESTRIAN: I love that. So what would yours say?
CZ: Mine would be Creative Director on the front and then, on the back, E-commerce Manager, Social Media Coordinator, Product Developer, and Production Manager. Just everything you could possibly imagine.
PEDESTRIAN: What does your day-to-day look like?
CZ: It is just so varied. I am actually not the most structured person in terms of working a nine-to-five day. For example, this whole week I’ve been working till the early hours of the morning and then getting straight back up and answering emails on my phone in bed until I get up and do the same thing on my laptop. Otherwise, I spend a lot of time at our atelier in China. I’m there for two or three weeks every month or six weeks. I work in the atelier with our pattern makers, seamstresses, and sample machinists, and go to the fabric markets to source all my fabrics and trims.
PEDESTRIAN: How did you get your start in fashion?
CZ: I come from a family of manufacturers. My parents immigrated to Australia in the late ’80s. My mum is from Guangzhou and my dad is from Shanghai. Grandma on my mum’s side was a fabric mill worker and she started doing that when she was really young. After China opened up to the rest of the world, she started her own factory.
PEDESTRIAN: And how did that lead to your mum’s business?
CZ: When my mum came to Australia, she didn’t have a single dollar. Her third gig was selling T-shirts at Paddy’s Markets and she would go all around Australia driving a van and selling like Levi’s jeans and Hard Rock Cafe t-shirts. She eventually door-knocked on Just Jeans or Jay Jays and told people she would start offshore manufacturing for them. She became one of the biggest suppliers on Kippax Street — which is the fast fashion hub of Sydney — and that’s where I spent all of my childhood. I would literally finish school, and if I wasn’t at after-school care, I’d just be dropped at the office and wait for my mum to finish work.
PEDESTRIAN: Did you study design at uni?
CZ: I actually think that fashion is a vocation that you can learn on the job. I didn’t plan to do this with my life; it just happened. I studied a really hardcore finance and politics double degree.
PEDESTRIAN: I’m sure the finance side helps on the day-to-day.
Kelly: You would think so, but I’m just a sucker for nice fabrics and I don’t work within a budget like I should. If I really want to put something out in the world, I don’t care if I don’t make money on it. A lot of brands will push their costings down so far that they are using low-quality fabric and potentially unethical practices. For me, I just price them how I price them and majority of the time customers are receptive because they know it’s small batch and high-quality fabrication.
PEDESTRIAN: When was the moment you decided to launch your own brand? It feels very different from the type of fashion work your mum was doing.
CZ: It’s so different. It’s polar opposite different. My dad actually passed away in my early 20s. That was a real shock for my entire family and my sister and I had to jump into the family business. I wouldn’t be who I am today had it not happened, because it made me grow up really quickly and become independent. A couple of years later, my grandma on my mum’s side passed away. I’m not a very woo-woo person, but I felt that it was my responsibility to carry the family legacy on. On a trip to say goodbye to her, I started sourcing fabrics for myself. Usually I would have gone to the fabric markets and sourced cotton and linen for the commercial ranges we were developing for The Iconic, but this time I started looking at silks and wool.
PEDESTRIAN: How fast was that launch process?
CZ: From when my grandma passed away to when I started my brand was probably from May to September the same year. Within three or four months I was ready to go. I had a meeting with my agent, and she told me she was doing a Paris showroom the following January. So I made a whole collection in two months and went to Paris with her. My first season in Paris I didn’t even have a website, I didn’t have social media, I didn’t have anything except a rack of samples and a lookbook. It was the best training ground I could have imagined. It changed my perspective entirely. It made me realise that to compete on a global level, you need to be competitive. You need a point of difference.
PEDESTRIAN: How did that change your approach?
CZ: I became a lot more considered in what I was designing. Over the past two years, I’ve gotten to a place where I’ve let myself get more creative, now that we’ve built that customer and wholesale base. Two years ago, I never would have imagined that I’d be selling $3,000 garments, you know? I remember the first time I sold a dress for $1,200, we were literally ringing the bell in the office! And since then, we’ve sold hundreds of that style.
PEDESTRIAN: Was there a moment where you suddenly went, ‘This is real’?
CZ: From day one. I take everything so seriously and I know I’m super privileged to have had the ability to do this full-time from the start. Fashion students who want to start their own brands often have to work multiple jobs and try to do this on the side, which is impossible. I’m eternally grateful for my mum who put everything on the line to invest in my business.
PEDESTRIAN: What would you say to somebody at school looking to become a fashion designer or launch their own brand?
CZ: I think you need a huge amount of grit. You need to be prepared for failure, and have the resilience to get back up after failure and do it all again.
PEDESTRIAN: What is a lesson you’ve learned from failure?
CZ: Failure is so important because without it you don’t grow. One example is when a large wholesale account defaulted on a payment and I was left with a lot of stock. It was really tough cash-flow wise, but you have to be prepared and get your business to a point where you can work with a factoring company. It’s also important to have a healthy balance of D2C [direct-to-consumer] and wholesale revenue so you can diversify the risk.
But the most important thing is team. I’m so lucky I’ve got a team around me who are absolute operators. When things go wrong, they are the people I lean on. For example, last night we were supposed to have a suitcase come to Sydney with all the runway samples and that flight didn’t make it.
PEDESTRIAN: Oh my god. What did you do?
CZ: We had all the models booked in and Bridie Gilbert, who is styling our show, has almost no availability. This was at 8pm last night. I called my team and no one was even phased. They just said, Okay, cool, let’s get on the phones to all the agents, reschedule the models, and get everyone in on Sunday, even though it’s Mother’s Day. They are solution-orientated rather than stressed.
PEDESTRIAN: Do you have a work outfit or a uniform that you just throw on every day?
CZ: It is literally just Adidas trackies and any random top at the moment. But in saying that, I’m very much all or nothing. When I dress well, it is very well put together. When I’m in Paris, I plan every single outfit before I go. In Sydney or China, I honestly just wear trackies. I love basics made of extremely premium fabrication that are so luxurious it’s tongue-in-cheek — like $80 trackies from Adidas with a $1,000 Tom Ford silk knitted racerback tank. And then sneakers or slides, I’ll wear Miu Miu X New Balance sneakers or Loewe clogs, just really nice basics that you wear every single day on rotation.
PEDESTRIAN: Describe your inbox in three words.
CZ: Chaotic. Every time I refresh it there are 100 new emails. I’ve got 25,988 unread emails right now. I used to try and do the daily sweep, but now I’ve just relinquished control because there are too many.
PEDESTRIAN: How do you think AI is going to impact the fashion industry?
CZ: I think AI is incredibly powerful and I use it in my day-to-day. Realistically, it’s going to shake up every industry. The best way to go about it is to use it in a considered way and work with companies founded by good people. I think those are the ones I’ll be looking to work with in the very near future.
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Lead photo: Getty / Instagram.
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