Episode 148 | BEL KAZAN AND THE POWER + CHALLENGES OF OWNING YOUR OWN FACTORY
In episode 148, Kestrel welcomes Belinda Kazanci, the founder + designer of Bel Kazan, to the show. A collection of globally-inspired, effortless pieces, Bel Kazan is designed with the modern woman in mind.
“And then I realized the only way I’m going to be able to do the kind of business I want to do is by having a factory that meets my standards —which were: open air, there’s a garden for people to eat in, it’s clean, we provide lunches. There were just certain standards I wanted to meet, and I knew I couldn’t do it by using somebody else’s factory.”
- Belinda Kazanci, Founder of Bel Kazan
BEL KAZAN
In this week’s show, Belinda shares more on her backstory, how she grew up around textiles in Istanbul, Turkey, and how she originally got into fashion as a way to fund her musician life. Early in building her brand, Belinda realized that she needed to own her own factory to be able to make her business work. She purchased land and started building her own manufacturing facility in the second year of running her company, and at this point, has now owned her own factory in Bali for 15 years.
For Belinda, it was super important to be able to meet her deadlines for wholesale orders, as well as to offer responsible working conditions, which helped push her to build out her own production facility.
The below thoughts, ideas + organizations were brought up in this chat:
“Second year in, we started building our factory. I would say the third year of business, we had our own factory.”
“I did not want anybody working in a position that wasn’t responsible for them - that wasn’t good for them.”
When it comes to print designs, Belinda loves collaborating, and works with artists around the world to help develop her designs - many that she actually met through Instagram
Hand printing + Batik: the two different print processes that Bel Kazan uses
“Because everything we do is very traditional methods, if it rains, that creates an issue - we can’t really hang everything to dry because they don’t use machines to dry - the fabric hangs on these bamboo sticks. We do run into a lot of issues with weather, because it does rain a lot in Bali.”
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