The Business of Community

Finest Dearest on tour with Drowning With Our Anchors in 2008.
Pictured here in Tijuana with our beautiful friends from Maladie and other TJ bands.

In our days as band mates in Finest Dearest, Carly and I spent a lot of time deeply involved in the music community in San Francisco and across the US. When you're in a indie band where you have to do everything by yourself and with little or no money, everything sort of revolves around a barter system of favors: you book us a show in Minneapolis while we're on tour, we'll try to do the same for you when your band comes to San Francisco. During our travels, we also discovered a whole group of people that wanted to help bands without ever expecting anything in return, and we never got over this kindness. A good example was during our US tour a couple years ago. One night in Austin, TX, it became clear that we had nowhere to stay after the show. By midnight we were reaching out to everyone we knew to see if they could help out when our friend Phil texted us that we could stay at his friend's house nearby. This couple we'd never met left their doors unlocked and around 2 AM the five of us crept in as quietly as we could to crash for the night. We never even met them because they'd already left for work by the time we got up in the morning. This sort of thing happened a lot over the times we toured during the last five years, and I really do mean it when I say that we never forgot the kindness.

So what on Earth does this story have to do with fashion? A lot, actually. We're discovering daily the bond between members of the online fashion community (I'll be writing more on this later), and we're so happy to be a part of it! Now that we're starting this new venture, we are bringing a lot of what we've learned through our band experiences into the business. Without going into too much detail, we are really excited about the idea that as Fancy French Cologne grows, we'll be in a position to bring people that we believe in up with us. This was something we felt really strongly about in Finest Dearest, and definitely continue to care about today. You'll have to wait for more details as the site develops, but rest assured that we're doing our best to stay true to this spirit of community with our business.