Meet Martha Phillips

We recently connected with Martha Phillips and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Martha, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

I get my resilience from my children. I know our kids learn from our actions not our words. So I want them to know that it is never late to fulfill your dreams and that you only succeed when you never give up. They have seen me go through difficult times and get out of it victorious, lots of falls and lots of raises. But always hand by hand by God, and the attitude to overcome every challenge life presents.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I always loved fashion since I was a little girl. . I always read all the fashion magazines and I dreamed about some day being there, wearing fabulous clothes from the best designers. I guess I was just lucky that I found my career at a very young age. I started my business at 23. My parents trusted in me and my father became my business partner (meaning he put the money), I worked very hard, every day from 7 am to 10 pm, my business started growing very fast, ( I had a boutique) then I started selling wholesale, I literally slept very little hours, between being young wanting to go out and wanting to succeed. One day my father said: you don´t need a business partner, it is only you from now on. I was not afraid, they always supported me. I have been blessed with knowledge of fashion, some people learn it some of us were born with it. So the story of my brand is just a lot of focused work, risks and challenges. Innovation has been very important in my business as I take risks and navigate in new ideas that I create. I closed my store in 2010 when I moved to the USA, but 3 years later I was back on track as my customers asked me to return, so I started small, not from zero as I already had my customers, but only doing like personal shopping and styling. But really my brand was born on 2015 in the kitchen of my house in Virginia. That day I met my alter ego: Girl du Monde. From that day on it has been a rollercoaster, lots of ups and lots of downs, but always focused. Life gave me a hard lesson on 2019, very difficult to get out of that one, but I did, I moved to New York on March 2020 and COVID started 4 days later. Sooo, I had to reinvent my brand, and started to make videos on Instagram wearing the clothes, and people were buying it, when no one was buying clothes, I was selling, not only selling, but shipping to the whole world. People laughed at me, modeling the clothes at my age, but later I earned their respect and then everyone started doing it. During COVID, having so much free time I decided to accomplish my dreams of making a collection, so I worked on the collection “Amalia” inspired on a Mexican fashionista. It was a haute couture collection. I also made a denim collection called “denim and friends” inspired on my customers, and another pajama collection, this one I made big production and were made in Dubai. Then I decided designing was not for me. I like selling so I focused again in sales. So easy, bring the customer quality, design and good price, the rest, is history.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

Knowledge. If you don´t have it from inside, then learn, study until it hurts.
Focus. Delete every distraction from your life. In this quality I put my family first for many years, my business was good but not thriving, when my kids grew up and they didn´t need me anymore for their survival I started focusing on my brand and making it grow.
Never give up. Success my arrive tomorrow, I cannot give up today.

Is there a particular challenge you are currently facing?

Making people buying clothes online, specially people of certain age that are not computer savvy. People that still want to try on clothes before paying for them even knowing they can return it. I overcome this challenge trying on the clothes and sending them videos where I show them and explain the details of the items. They don´t want to go to the website and buy, so they order via message and I send them a link to pay with credit card.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.girlddumondenyc.com
• Instagram: @girldumonde
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/girldumondeny

Image Credits

There are two photographers to be credited: Alessandro Casagli and Juan Pablo Viades. The actual name the photo has the name of the photographer that is to be credited for it.