Meet Yewande Durojaiye of Ladyee in East Atlanta

Today we’d like to introduce you to Yewande Durojaiye.

Yewande, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I felt it was increasingly difficult to find well made, ladylike clothing at the malls at decent prices and I had this burning urge to change this. I have always had a decent eye, even as a child, I would help my mum pick out work clothes. I have always been interested in color, fabric texture and the way clothes fit on women.

I have always been into all sorts of DIY, I remember dying my mum’s 70s style jeans, cutting sleeves off blouses, creating new necklines, shredding denim skirts, dying leather boots, etc as a teenager, even as a child I was always picking up scraps of clothing and stitching up clothing for my dolls.

After graduating from the university, I set out to work in my career field and did well, though I still wanted to do something creative within the fashion industry, I started creating fashion trend mood boards and would jump at every opportunity to help style a friend for an event. This gave me great joy and I was happy to do it for free.

I initially set out to create a line of pencil skirts for women of all sizes, I started studying sewn product manufacturing and delved into marketing, I eventually settled on opening an online boutique as I felt it would afford me the opportunity to provide more variety to my Ladyees (as our clients are now fondly called.)

So here we are.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
It has absolutely not been a smooth road. It has been very difficult to rise above the noise and the sea of large stores and boutiques, marketing has always been a struggle.

In addition, the landscape of fashion has changed a great deal. Fashion has gotten a lot faster and it can get a bit challenging keeping up with the myriad of trends, we have had to adjust the way we buy for the boutique quite a bit over the past few years.

Despite it all, we remain beyond passionate about providing beautiful, well-made clothing to our ever amazing clientele, we look at hundreds of style options before settling on what we bring into Ladyee.

Please tell us about Ladyee.
We specialize in providing our clientele a selection of well-curated, well edited on-trend clothing options. All our pieces can be dressed up or down.

We are most proud of our ability to consistently provide clothing our ladyees want to wear over and over, we want our girls to look fantastic every single time and they do. We provide beautiful well made on-trend clothing that fits well.

Our ability to sort through it all and only pick out the very best for our clientele will always set us apart, our eye for detail and what works perfectly on a woman irrespective of her body type.

If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
I would focus on the business side as much as I focused on the creative side in the beginning, the business of fashion is completely separate from the creative aspect.

Plus I would second guess myself a lot less. Much as I have had to learn everything about the business from scratch and by myself, I have learned that most of my instincts were and are almost always correct. I have learned to trust myself a lot more and focus in on the things I do exceedingly well.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.ladyee.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/ladyeeboutique
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/ladyeeboutique

Image Credit:
Ladyee

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