- Binu Wickramasinghe and Shahili Gomes-McCoy of The Design Collective on the role friendship played in building their business
Love is a many-splendoured thing, because, like all things splendid and great, it comes in many different forms. One of the purest forms of love is that from the family you find – your friends – those amazing people you meet along life’s way and form deeper connections with than you would some of your family.
Our friendships push us and challenge us in ways that no other bonds we form will. They are our biggest supporters and our harshest critics and have the gumption to say things to our face that the other people in our lives wouldn’t.
On 30 July, the world marked International Friendship Day. Now, Friendship Day, for all the ‘bah humbug’ types among us, is admittedly a very capitalist tradition – it was originated by Hallmark Cards Founder Joyce Hall in 1930, and was intended to take place on 2 August each year.
It was essentially a marketing push to sell cards – while not the biggest such occasion (unlike Valentine’s Day), Friendship Day has seen a respectable following of friends marking the day with an appreciative gesture to the friends in their lives who truly make their lives better with their presence.
In 2011, 30 July was proclaimed the International Day of Friendship by the UN General Assembly with the idea that friendship between peoples, countries, cultures, and individuals can inspire peace efforts and build bridges between communities. The UN’s take on Friendship Day places emphasis on involving young people, as future leaders, in community activities that include different cultures and promote international understanding and respect for diversity.
Friendship is a cornerstone of humanity. We have always been social creatures drawn to one another because we understand that no man is an island, and sometimes you just need someone to lean on (other than your family, of course).
The quotes around friendship are many: “A friend in need is a friend indeed,” “There are friends, there is family, and then there are friends who become family,” and “A good friend is like a four-leaf clover; hard to find and lucky to have,” are some notable examples.
Two sentiments on friendship that Brunch finds particularly apt when it comes to friendship are “Time and good friends are two things that become more valuable the older you get” and “Anything is possible when you have the right people to support you”. These quotes also hold especially true when thinking of Binu Wickramasinghe and Shahili Gomes-McCoy, the team behind one of Sri Lanka’s most esteemed fashion and lifestyle retailers The Design Collective (TDC).
Binu and Shahili have been friends almost their whole lives, and like fine wine, their friendship has aged splendidly. In 2017, Binu and Shahili took Colombo by storm with the launch of TDC, a multi-brand concept store that took a brand new approach to fashion retail and also marked their transition from friends to co-founders and business partners.
As a graduate from Imperial College Business School with a keen eye for fashion honed in London and Copenhagen, Shahili was inspired to create The Design Collective concept store as a platform for South Asian designers. Binu found motivation for TDC from her expertise gained from working in the fashion industries of Delhi and London and in the dream of bringing a similar project to life in their home country of Sri Lanka.
The cornerstones of The Design Collective brand were making beautiful fashion accessible to all women while celebrating the heritage and beauty of Sri Lankan and South Asian design in a unique retail space. This vision came to life in a boutique that brings together designers from Sri Lanka and South and South East Asia into a unified space that allows each individual designer to shine in a larger environment that still has its own strong visual and stylistic language.
Launched in August 2017, TDC started its journey with 23 designers (from Sri Lanka and South East Asia) who were carefully chosen by Binu and Shahili to be complementary to each other and the ethos of the store, whilst at the same time offering TDC’s clients a range of products at a range of prices.
Now, five years later, as a primarily physical store, The Design Collective has delivered to Binu and Shahili’s vision of delivering incredible fashion for incredible women and men of Sri Lanka. With a portfolio of over 50 Sri Lankan and South Asian independent clothing and beauty brands, it has become the best multi-brand concept store in the island.
In addition to its flagship store The Design Collective Store at Gandhara Street, TDC has also opened a smaller store, The Design Collective Edit, which serves as a second platform to showcase its labels apart from the flagship store, as well as a thriving e-commerce platform.
In the spirit of International Friendship Day and ahead of their fifth anniversary in August, Brunch sat down with Binu and Shahili for a quick catch-up on what it’s been like for them going into business as friends and how they make the TDC concept work.
Excerpts of the interview below:
How did the two of you meet and what drove you to go into business together?
Binu: We’re childhood friends. We’ve been friends since we were six years old. We met at school when we were at Visakha Vidyalaya. I studied Fashion Design as an undergrad degree at the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) Delhi, one of the best design schools in Asia, and then went on to do my Master’s in Management at the London College of Fashion, which is one of the best in the world.
I have always wanted to work with start-up designers and wanted to give back to Sri Lanka, so The Design Collective is a combination of my passion to give back to the fashion community in Sri Lanka and to help budding designers.
Shahili: I studied business at the University of Manchester and read my Master’s in Strategic Marketing from Imperial College London. I have always been passionate about fashion from more of a brand perspective and have always wanted to build a local brand from Sri Lanka. It was the perfect combo of our skill sets to build something together and that is how The Design Collective was born.
What was the most challenging thing about getting TDC off the ground?
Binu and Shahili: TDC was launched primarily to give a platform for local designers to showcase womenswear. We now showcase many other designers from the region and have launched menswear, kidswear, and homeware. We started as a physical store but now we have moved to having an online website that delivers globally, connecting local designers to the international market – giving Sri Lankan designers a platform to showcase and retail in the global arena.
The most challenging thing was to get all stakeholders involved on board – getting the first local designer to understand what we were about and to believe in what we wanted to do. TDC has now been around for five years and has become a credible space, but it wasn’t the case when we started out. There were a few designers who took a chance on us and they have stayed with us for the last five years – we have supported each other throughout these years.
What was the most unexpected thing about working with a friend?
Binu and Shahili: Since we have been friends since we were six years old, we can’t say we’ve had many surprises.
How do you separate work and friendship?
Binu and Shahili: This has happened in a very organic way; not all of our calls are about work, sometimes it’s only for a catch-up on gossip.
What’s your favourite memory of working with each other?
Binu and Shahili: Launching TDC in 2017 and having our launch party. We worked incredibly hard to make sure that whoever came to the store understood how great the space is for designers to showcase their brand, and how much we both wanted to celebrate them.
It was an unforgettable day where our friends, family, and the designers all came together to celebrate the space/platform.
What advice would you give other friends looking to go into business together?
Binu and Shahili: Make sure your skill sets are different and you both do different things. Make sure you are good at different things. Trust each other. Have loyalty and respect for each other, and above all, communication is key.
