Amanda Perna Left Calvin Klein For Sequins & Feathers. She Has No Regrets.

Here, meet Amanda Perna of Florida-based House of Perna. She’s a former Calvin Klein dress designer and two-time Project Runway contestant who has spent 14 years designing joyful, print-filled clothing sold everywhere from her own boutique to Nordstrom and Anthropologie. As the third place winner of Verizon’s pitch competition, Amanda credits Verizon Small Business Digital Ready with helping her propel her fashion business into the digital marketing world. Here, she shares the lessons she’s learned along the way.

What was your “Okay, I’m really doing this” moment when it came to launching House of Perna?

Amanda: I loved working for Calvin Klein. I literally learned from the best dress business in the entire world. I think as a creative person, I just needed to share my view of the world with the world and felt like, no, I think things should be covered in rhinestones and sequins and feathers. I couldn’t do that at Calvin, obviously.

I took a real leap of faith. I was in my 20s and living in New York and making nothing in fashion. I was like, you know what? I owe it to myself to at least try. And once again, if it doesn’t work, I can go back and find another job and I’ll be fine. And now here we are, 14 years later and I’m still doing what I love.

What’s one thing you wish you knew sooner?

Amanda: I wish I knew to trust my gut. I think a lot of times, especially since I started my business in my 20s, everybody told me who we should be, what we should do, how we need to do this. And I think I trusted a lot of the wrong people because they were experts that took me down a path that wasn’t right or authentic for me or my business. I trusted them when they told me to make beige pants. We work in color. Why are you coming to me for beige pants? There are plenty of great beige brands for you. We’re not that.

When did your community show up for you in a way you didn’t expect?

Amanda: We unfortunately had a FedEx truck that caught fire and we lost all of our merchandise for a year. I didn’t think I was going to survive it, business-wise at all, because we had just come back out of COVID where we struggled to get through.

My team was like, ‘We need to tell people what’s happening.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know. It’s nobody’s business. We’re fine.’ Of course we weren’t fine. So we posted a video and I was literally hysterically crying and I was like, ‘I am having a literal fire sale. Please come buy anything you want from us. I’m discounting everything. Please just help us stay in business.’ My town showed up for me in such a beautiful way. And it enabled us to stay in business. And I was like, ‘If people are fighting for us to stay in business, who am I to just back down now and close?’

What’s one small move that created big results?

Amanda: Definitely the implementation of AI. I think a lot of creatives are afraid of AI with good reason. But being able to streamline our systems, and we’re a small but mighty little team, so certain things would take us forever, like making a line sheet, for example. Now we can have that template set up, drop it into AI and have that document done. It’s still our viewpoint, still creatively how we want it to look, but in a way that is faster to be able to send that to you as a customer.

How has the Verizon Small Business Digital Ready program helped propel your business forward?

Amanda: I was completely blown away by the level of programming. It’s not overwhelming. All of the courses are short, so you can consume it in an amount of time that you get good information. They are so easily digestible and it’s from actual people who have lived it.

I learned about different ways to do email marketing. We thought we knew what we were doing, but there were certain little things that I got in this course and I was like, ‘What? That’s all we had to click and this would reach more people.’ And I think for all of us as smaller businesses, I don’t have millions of dollars to invest into a marketing coach. But Verizon Digital Ready made it where I can take these courses and understand things in a quicker path.

What’s your advice for someone who wants to launch their own fashion brand?

Amanda: First, do your research. Figure out what category you want to be in, what your pricing should look like, who are you serving? No brand is selling to everybody, so being everything to everybody gets you nobody. One of our client profiles, she’s in her 60s to 80s. She’s not on Instagram, she’s on Facebook. … So I think it’s just really knowing who you’re targeting and focusing on them.

Thanks Amanda! Learn more about the free Verizon Small Business Digital Ready Program and House of Perna.