After 12 years at the helm of New Zealand fashion label Ruby, Emily Miller-Sharma is still finding new ways to help people connect and create with the brand.
To celebrate 10 years of Parrotdog, The Spinoff is partnering with the brewery to share the stories of New Zealanders doing great things. In the first series of Birdseye View, we’re interviewing interesting Aucklanders about their relationship with the city and how it shapes their lives.
Emily Miller-Sharma was nine weeks into being a mother for the first time when New Zealand began its 2020 lockdown. After 12 years of running fashion label Ruby, she had been looking forward to getting away from the business for a time, both to raise a baby and to refresh her mindset. Instead, stuck in a central Auckland apartment (a spacious one, but still an apartment) with her partner and fresh baby, she found herself staring down potentially months of no business whatsoever.
No one expected her to have an immediate solution to the pandemic’s effect on Ruby, especially not while on maternity leave, but she had one anyway thanks to her comfort hobby of stitching. “The only thing that would calm me down was stitching stuff. And I wanted to help other people do that,” she remembers.
“Basically I was like ‘we need to sell our patterns’.”
So they did. Much of Ruby’s operations had disappeared overnight, along with every other retail business in the country, and Miller-Sharma realised that presenting the label as one that women aspired to rather than connected to, would only create distance from customers during a lockdown when stores couldn’t open and clothing couldn’t be tried on.
“We were like, fuck, we have to talk… and we can’t ask some person to write a press release for us or something,” she says. Instead, Miller-Sharma returned to work by communicating directly with the people who had supported her label over the years. “I was just typing out newsletters, and that gave us confidence to realise that we could just speak plainly, and I think that’s been helpful for us as a business.
“That was not a strategy, it was a necessity. And it was something that we’d always wanted to do, but we were too nervous.”
Providing more accessibility, to both the faces behind the label and the actual products, was suddenly the only option. Newsletters written in Miller-Sharma’s naturally enthusiastic tone covered the former, and selling their patterns would resolve the latter. Logistically it could work: the patterns would be sold online as digital copies, printed out at people’s homes (“I didn’t think anyone had, like, an inkjet printer still. But they did”), and be used immediately. Selling patterns meant effectively selling their IP, but Miller-Sharma wasn’t worried about that – allowing customers to make Ruby (or, more accurately, sister brand Liam) items at home with their own materials and preferences was exactly what she wanted.
“What we realised is the more we share – and this is kind of the same with the patterns – it’s actually just you shouting about who you are more. It adds more to the world and you kind of open your arms wider, and then there’s just more people that feel connected to that.”
Miller-Sharma is wearing Ruby. At least that’s what I assume when she greets me at Ruby headquarters in Newton wearing matching, cobalt blue, silk top and bottoms and a huge grin that never seems to deflate. Turns out it’s not strictly a Ruby outfit, but rather a sample she has made to convince head designer Deanna Didovich that they should offer an existing top in blue. She’s confident it will happen, “but these things take a while” – in part because the brand is already working with a different shade of blue, which will need to be phased out before another can be phased in.
When I ask what designers she likes when she’s not wearing her own creations, she rattles off a few names (Kristine Crabb, Penny Sage) but mostly shakes her head. “I couldn’t imagine wearing something that I hadn’t made unless it was from an op shop,” she says. “It’s just too weird. It would be like putting on somebody else.”
The business is in the process of renovating its soon-to-be new headquarters, an ex-uniform factory in the nearby suburb Arch Hill, but on the day I visit the Newton offices, Miller-Sharma’s cobalt blue energy matches our surroundings, where tables are green, racks are pink and colourful design options cover the walls. We pass through various departments (accounting, customer service, design, pattern-making, logistics, marketing) and at each stop, women smile and say hello. There are no men on the tour. Above the logistics department is a loft, where one copy of every single item sold at Ruby since 2008 is stored. Rows of garments in every colour, packed tightly, a capsule for New Zealand fashion across 15 years. Ruby workers often try on new designs or wear samples for an event, but the archive is strictly off-limits. Only Miller-Sharma and Didovich have regular access to it, usually in conceiving of a new collection.
The two women have been business partners for most of their adult lives, despite not knowing each other at all before Ruby. When Miller-Sharma returned home from Europe, where she made costumes for a friend’s band and drove them around on tour, she was looking for any work, having come home “fully broke”. Her parents had been in the fashion industry for decades, beginning as textile importers and then, as tariffs were lowered and local manufacturing dwindled, moving to importing garments for the likes of Barkers and Hallensteins, then later Huffer and Ruby.
At the time, in the mid 2000s, Ruby was a streetwear brand, started by university student Lizzie Shand in 1999, with Kate Gosling joining a year later. The Sharmas supplied pink hoodies to Ruby, a business connection formed thanks to Gosling being their next door neighbour. When the pair looked to sell the established label in 2008, the Sharmas stepped in. At the same time, Miller-Sharma was recently back home and temping, with no plans to settle down here. “I was going to stay for a year and then I was going to move away,” she says. But she started helping out at Ruby, and when Didovich was hired as the head designer shortly after, they clicked and got to work. Miller-Sharma was 24 and Didovich 23.
The two had never run a label, let alone a well-established one. In order to make a mark, they sought change. “We were really conscious that we were trying to find our own voice as designers. We were like “we’re not going to do hoodies because that’s naff”,” she laughs. Instead, they combined corporate with street, or at least with colour, and soon had their own distinctive hit: a wool suit (mini skirt and jacket) available in lilac and charcoal.
“At the time, mum was like, ‘obviously we should order more charcoal than purple’, but actually people were so excited about the lilac… When we were audacious and it worked, that’s when we knew that things were starting to hum along.”
Broadening the colour palette was one change the pair initiated, and so was increasing the size range. “When we started, the size range was size six to 12. That was the size range 15 years ago. We introduced size 14 quite quickly.”
In the late 2000s, that was a big move. Now, Liam (an arm of Ruby designed by Miller-Sharma and launched to replace Madame Hawke, an earlier sibling brand “which I didn’t really like the name of”) offers sizing up to 24, while Ruby goes up to size 20 or 22. The move, which was accelerated once they started selling patterns, is a deliberate shift away from the decades-long motif that fashion equals thin. The decision was simple for Miller-Sharma (“once we realised patterns were really popular, I realised we needed to”) but not uncomplicated. “Quite a lot of work still needs to be done around how to grade a pattern,” she says, referring to the scaling of patterns from a size six to a size 24. She looks at my blank stare and explains.
“There’s a very standard approach of how to size a pattern from a size six to a size 20. And that’s based on two generations of made to measure garments that have been made for the most common denominator. If you’re manufacturing at a large scale, you want to minimise cost so companies will just cut off the extremities in sizes. So the knowledge shrank. It’s still a very complicated thing to work out how to make a design on a body of a size six, size 12, size 16, size 20 make sense across all those sizes and have it actually fit the person.”
In short, you can’t just click and drag a pattern diagonally because a size 26 person is typically not seven feet tall.
“Take wide leg pants, for example: you don’t want to change the grade so that it tapers,” she says. But keeping the pattern the same for larger sizes would result in billowing flares.
The development of pattern-making that allows for grading beyond a size 14 is a cherished process for Miller-Sharma and one that goes hand-in-hand with selling patterns (and IP) in order to create a circular business. When Aotearoa shut down and Ruby ground to a halt, she realised how reliant on new product they and their customers were (Ruby puts out about 40 new designs every month), and how unsustainable that was.
“What I know, all the way down into my bones, is that as a company, and an industry, we can’t be reliant on the sale of new product forever.”
Instead, she’s looking to evolve Ruby as she heads into her 15th year at the helm, both for the business and for her own sake as the head of a family business. “I have definitely had incredibly stressful times here,” she says. “And I’ve wanted to leave. But I have felt like that wasn’t an option. So I’ve had to really learn how to operate within that.”
She pauses to consider her position. “I’m lucky that I’ve been able to afford therapy.”
With a sense of obligation and a legacy to be continued (most likely, she hopes, by her son in two decades), Miller-Sharma is looking to sustainability and, eventually, to slowing down. “I want our reliance on the sale of new clothing to reduce, and so I want the patterns to be part of that. But I think that it’s going to take longer than I thought,” she says. “I have to work out how to change that.”
In the meantime, she continues to be obsessed with making clothes and sharing that obsession with others. She acknowledges that even making one’s own clothes isn’t cheap but equally believes anyone can do it. “I reckon if you can chop an onion, you can sew.”
And clothes still bring her joy, whether she’s designing them, making them or just admiring them. Her favourite details are a “really cool-positioned dart” and a beautifully finished edge.
“If someone smiles at you, it gives you an indication that they’re likely a kind person. I mean, you know, they could be lying, but I guess in clothing a really beautifully finished edge is like a smile,” she pauses for a moment, before elaborating. “It gives you an indication of the care that’s gone into the garment.”
As she walks me out of the offices, having spoken at length and with genuine interest about my own relationship with clothing, Miller-Sharma promises to keep in touch.
She’s smiling as the door shuts.