Blackstrad sits down with The Fearless Artist Podcast

Michelle Lynne: Hey, everybody, and welcome back to the Fearless Artist Podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Lynne, and today I am with Mercedes Smith from Blackstrad Concert Attire Mercedes. Welcome to the podcast.

Mercedes Smith: Thank you so much for having me.

Michelle Lynne: It’s a pleasure. I know we connected on Instagram a few months ago, and I saw that you had a beautiful clothing line for musicians, which is what we’re going to talk about today. We started chatting, and you actually gifted Deanna and me one beautiful— I have a gorgeous skirt, the “cello skirt,” I believe that I can’t wait to wear—and Deanna has a beautiful maternity top that she has—and we just love what you’re doing. We wanted to learn more about you and introduce you to our audience because I think you’re filling a very specific need that a lot of musicians have. So maybe you can talk a little bit about the origin story of Blackstrad and why you created this company.

Mercedes Smith: Well, um, I’m the principal flutist of the Utah Symphony. I’ve been playing professionally for over 20 years now, so I’ve been getting dressed in concert black for a very long time. And, I guess my own orchestra recently kind of rewrote the dress code. There was an effort in the last negotiation to make the entire contract gender-free, um, then—um—of course, would affect the dress code. So then, people have really had to think very thoughtfully about how do you write a dress code that doesn’t talk about this for men or this for women, which was one thing—which is not really what I’m trying to fix—but we are trying to do some gender-free, non-gendered items. But one of the things that came up in the whole process of the orchestra meeting and talking about changing the dress code—‘cause part of it was that we were going to go, men specifically, we’re going to go from wearing tux and tails, white tie and tails, to an all-black, so it would…

Michelle Lynne: Okay.

Mercedes Smith: …like what the women wear. The women are just told to wear all black—dressy, modest, you know, cover your elbows, cover to the ankle—sort of that level of specificity, right? And there was a lot of debate about this; it’s a super-sensitive topic for a lot of people. People don’t want to be told what to wear… right? People have very strong feelings about it. We need to continue wearing tails or whatever. But a funny thing that came up was, um, one of the gentlemen said something like, you know, “I feel like it’s unfair that the women can kind of wear whatever they want to, even if it’s all black,” you know…

Michelle Lynne: Hmm.

Mercedes Smith: …and I have to wear this white tie and tails, like, that was not a balanced way to approach it. But then there were also men who felt like it was unfair that they had to wear that and that the woman sitting next to them was often wearing basically, like, athleisure—like running pants that were kind of like dressy running pants, but they’re not at all formal—they’re made out of an athletic material… it kind of occurred to me that, you know, I guess it’s easy, in a way, to wear that tuxedo for men. It’s a pain, it’s hot, it’s uncomfortable. I don’t want men to have to wear that, but in a way it’s easy because it’s very uniform. You just take that off the rack, you put it together, and bam, you’re ready. And I think a lot of people don’t understand how difficult it is to find women’s clothing that is truly formal looking and that is comfortable enough to perform in. I can’t tell you how many times I go to a store and I see a dress and I’m like, “Ah, this is—this would just be perfect if only it had sleeves, if only it didn’t have that slit going all the way up, or, you know, if only it was like reasonable to actually perform in, in some ways.”

Michelle Lynne: Where—yes.

Mercedes Smith: …there wasn’t a corset bodice and all these things that make it impossible to actually perform. And if you’re like a wind player, like myself or a violinist or needing to move a lot—

Michelle Lynne: Or singers.

Mercedes Smith: Yeah, singers—I mean, everyone. So I think, we haven’t really—women aren’t even admitting how difficult it is to get dressed for a concert because there just aren’t clothes that meet the dress code a lot of the time, especially when you talk…

Michelle Lynne: About a—yeah.

Mercedes Smith: …address, I guess, because very few beat all of the “cover the elbow,” you know, “cleavage, can’t be backless,” I mean, all these things. So I kind of wanted to set out to make a kind of capsule clothing line of mix-and-match pieces that would go together. And this is not just with professional musicians like myself in mind, but I was also thinking about like high school choirs, because I have a stepdaughter—she’s 16 years old—and a few years ago, she came home with the dreaded choir dress, which is, you know, that’s something the school owns, and that’s a great way of doing it a lot of the time because it’s fair for all students. If it’s expensive for a student to afford a particular kind of dress, the school already owns it. And I get that for choirs, they really want a uniform look, but for me, seeing this dress—this was not something she would ever pick out on her own. I mean, if you turned her loose with $50 or $100 at the mall, she would never pick a dress like that… And I think that there’s a lot of—well, teenagers in high school, but particularly girls who sing in choir, who are being asked to perform in front of their entire school, their friends, and family, in something that they don’t really feel confident in, something that doesn’t make them feel like themselves, like they can maybe perform their very best. And I know a lot of, you know, school ensembles are trying to move to an all-black dress code, but, you know, they find that difficult ‘cause they’re not used to doing that. So I’m setting out to create a line of clothing where there would be a lot of different options. There wouldn’t be just one dress that all the women had to wear and one thing for the boys to wear. Um, there would be a lot of things that you could choose from, including some items that really could be worn by a man or a woman, and it wouldn’t be weird. It would just be clothes that you could, that would fit either body type. So, that’s a big answer to your question, and I hope that makes some sense—there’s a problem with concert attire, and it’s still hard to articulate because I think there are so many problems with it.

Michelle Lynne: Yeah.

Mercedes Smith: Many points of view, and it’s also a difficult problem to fix. This is not just going to—there’s not going to be an easy solution to this.

Michelle Lynne: Yeah, I know. Thank you so much for sharing about this because I hear so much more depth to the story of just having a concert clothing line. Like, we’re talking about serious issues of gender and people feeling confident on stage and feeling that they can express themselves. I mean, we’re musicians, and I’ve heard many of my colleagues complaining about the all-black requirements and the things that they have to wear to be on stage and to match and to fit in, but they feel maybe even trapped in wearing this uniform that doesn’t reflect who they are as an artist, as a person, as you’re saying.

Mercedes Smith: Ha.

Michelle Lynne: Genres. I mean, they don’t have the same restrictions as us. I mean, ABBA notoriously was like buying the most ridiculous clothes because it was a tax write-off, I learned recently. So I mean, like, other… it’s the classical musicians who kind of get forced into this box. And for me, someone who’s so passionate about artist branding, one of the questions I ask in my entrepreneurship class with the students is, “Describe the stereotypical classical musician.” And the answer is always “black and boring.” We have to wear black and be boring, and then there’s no room for your personality to come through except in the playing—but it’s not about you, it’s about the music, and then all of the stuff that we’re trying to undo because we’re trying to say, “Well, actually, it’s not just about the music; it’s also about you, the artist,” so that you can build a following, a fan base, and bring new people to concerts—which is a whole other topic—but I’m hearing just so much more depth in your answer than creating clothes because people were too hot on stage.

Mercedes Smith: Because they’re so hot. But like, there must be a better solution than that, right? There currently isn’t. So…

Michelle Lynne: Well, you’ve made the solution. But it’s one thing to recognize a big problem like this, but it’s a whole other thing to be the person who starts to tackle it. So tell me about how you started to start Blackstrad.

Mercedes Smith: Okay, how do I start? Well, it was, honestly, I think exactly a year ago—maybe to this week in February—where I kind of had the idea, you know what? Someone should, I guess, kind of reinvent the choir dress, which I realize I’ve yet to actually release a dress. We are going to do that; it’s still in development. We’re doing it really soon. Um, but yeah, one thing was that the process to do this was so much slower than I thought it would be, and it required a lot of patience on my part. I started by doing a lot of research online—you know, the University of YouTube thing. You can learn a lot online on your own. There is a lot of gate—

Michelle Lynne: Keeping… yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Mercedes Smith: …in the industry, a lot in terms of manufacturing. There’s a lot of opacity in fabric—sourcing fabric. There are a lot of middlemen that get involved in everything to just jack up the price. Um, there always seems to be like a broker in the middle between a lot of things. It’s difficult to work directly with a factory. You often need to hire a management or you’re told you need to hire some kind of production company in order to work with a manufacturer, so that part was almost impossible to research. It was very difficult. Um, and part of what I did is I actually went to LA, probably 11 months ago now, and there’s a big textile/fabric convention, I guess, there. And I kind of got started there with like figuring out how much this fabric costs, where you get it, where does it come from, what is the minimum order—this is one of those things: you can’t just buy exactly what you need. Sometimes you’re gonna have to make a minimum order. So, I started just sketching things out. And so I would sketch these designs and send these to pattern makers. Um, some of them work for actual manufacturers and some of them are just independent pattern makers. So I actually worked with four different pattern makers at the beginning. So in order to go from like the sketch that I would give them to one sample top, it would be very expensive—hundreds of dollars, definitely.

Michelle Lynne: Oh, wow. Wow.

Mercedes Smith: Get one—um, if you want to own the pattern and to have like the digital version of the pattern and a paper version of the pattern and a tech pack and all the stuff that comes with it, it could easily be $1,000 to develop that top. And that gets you to the point where you can then take that sample and the pattern to an actual factory or manufacturer where they can make it, and they’re gonna ideally want you to make 300 of those tops or something, probably in order to get a good price. If you’re ordering in China, like a thousand tops—the same top—the price can get really low. Um, you can get it much lower, right? But if you’re trying to do a lower minimum order quantity, like 100, which is something closer to what I ended up doing—and I ended up manufacturing in LA—so there was a lot into just getting started and just getting one thing ready. Um, and it took many revisions because they would often make it and be almost perfect, and then we would tweak one thing with the sleeve and then something else would have to be tweaked because we did that, and I’m no expert in all of this, so I learned a lot about it. Um, but I kind of just dove in, and it was way harder than I thought it was going to be.

Michelle Lynne: How have you kept going if you were hitting all these obstacles, and what made you see that you could get it to… I mean, I was just looking at your website—it’s beautiful. You’ve got a number of gorgeous items. You’ve got a capsule wardrobe that I think many musicians like: one click and then you’re covered, right? Like, you’ve got what you need.

Mercedes Smith: I think it’s just like drawing on everything that you learn as a musician. If you really believe in yourself, and you really believe in what you’re doing, and you know you’re working hard in the right way, then surely it’s all going to come together, right? Um…

Michelle Lynne: Yeah.

Mercedes Smith: …it was just sort of declaring, “I’m going to do it.” Like,

Michelle Lynne: Okay.

Mercedes Smith: …starting the Instagram, saying it on Facebook, or like telling people, “I’m going to do it.” And then there was like this crazy accountability thing of like, “Now everyone thinks I’m creating a clothing line.”

Michelle Lynne: But I’m hearing—yeah, you said a year ago. I’m quite surprised it’s only been a year because you already have a number of products that you’re selling.

Well, I am a make-things-happen person. When COVID happened, well, we thought we were going to be laid off for two weeks, and, um, I—you know, I was in a small panic as we all were. And I thought, “Oh, two weeks, I can do real estate school.” So, like, I think we got laid off on a Thursday and Monday morning, like at 9 a.m.

Mercedes Smith: So I was like, “Oh, I have two weeks and we can’t travel and go anywhere, so I’m going to do this.” So then I got this real estate license really quickly, um, at the very beginning of the pandemic. And I started to do some real estate because I had always been interested in real estate stuff, and then I guess that sort of gave me the confidence that I can do things besides just play the flute. I’m not just an—

Michelle Lynne: Hmm.

Mercedes Smith: …not just an orchestral musician. I can sell houses. And then I just—I knew that we were not going to be very busy for the next year, so I decided to get an MBA. So then I finished the MBA and, like, learned all about that. The MBA gives you such a well-rounded view of maybe how to start a business and how all aspects of the business are run, from operations to marketing to finance. So I felt like—I didn’t want to continue doing real estate anymore, and I used some of that money, uh, that I made during the real estate time to help fund this fashion venture, basically.

Michelle Lynne: I mean, that’s a very fast turnaround. I think a lot of people responded differently. What compelled you to sign up for an MBA that just came outta nowhere?

Mercedes Smith: Well, you know, it’s funny—my mother reinvented herself around my age. She decided to totally change her life, and she went back to school. She finished her master’s degree, and then she got a law degree and became a lawyer. And actually, through her law career, she did many different things. She ended up being a forensic genealogist before she retired a few years ago. She showed as an example to me, like, you don’t just have to be one thing, and you can reinvent yourself. Maybe she felt like she had to at the time for whatever reason. So I guess I looked to my mother. It’s funny because she’s always—even still, even this year, it’s like, “You know, you should really go to law school, Mercedes.” And I’m like, “No, I can’t; I can’t do any more things—I’m maxed out.” Yeah, she was a role model in that way. And I think as musicians, if you can play music at a very high level, as we do, this is a very difficult job. If you can do this, if you have that level of dedication that it took to be relatively successful as a professional performing musician, you can do a lot of things. It’s going to be hard—it’s going to be hard, just like learning the flute was hard. Like trying to play in tune every day is still hard—like just the sheer amount of music I have to learn every week is hard. And it was also hard to figure out fabric and where to get it and how to sketch out a design and how to talk to a pattern maker. And all of these things were really difficult, but you can do those things. You’ll just have to—it’s a matter of how much patience you have with yourself to watch yourself be a beginner again at something.

Michelle Lynne: And…

Mercedes Smith: But I think—always remember, if you’re going to try something new, you’re going to be a beginner; it’s probably going to be cringy and awful at the beginning. If you don’t push through that, you’re never going to get to the beautiful thing at the end of the performance, hopefully. So if you want to talk about social media and how cringy I feel at…

Michelle Lynne: I am surprised you’re saying that because I thought your content was excellent, but I just want to thank you for what you shared because one of the biggest messages on my heart right now is that musicians can be more than one thing, and everything you just articulated so beautifully. It is hard, and we do hard things. Our careers are hard, so you can transfer those skills to any other industry that catches your interest. I mean, you decided to start crushing it in real estate and an MBA and possibly law school. Mom’s listening—

Mercedes Smith: No, no…

Michelle Lynne: Right? And you know, for me, like the whole speaking, coaching, teaching, lecturing thing opened up, and, and—yeah, the discipline, the focus, the commitment, all of those skills that we’ve learned at our instruments—we can transfer to other things. I mean, we’ve got people in our mastermind building websites; they’re building their mailing lists; they’re selling digital products; they’re coaching in other areas besides music, because we have the skills, and we can transfer those skills—and doing other things doesn’t take away from our music. If you can create room for all the things that bring you fulfillment—and you’re just lit up talking about your clothing line—I know that you’re right in the center of doing what you’re supposed to be doing. I mean, you saw a need in the market, and you’re fulfilling that need. And that’s also something I love so much: when we see that there’s a problem, a lot of people will just complain…

Mercedes Smith: I love complaining, and then I love trying to do something about it. And that’s what I would recommend to everybody: complain to your heart’s content, take action, and do something about the problems you see in your workplace or in the world, or whatever you’re hoping will be better. You can often do something yourself about it. It will take work, it will be awkward, you will have to learn, you’ll feel like an idiot at the beginning, and then you’ll get better at it.

Michelle Lynne: I hear you, but I’m just not sure everybody gets from that complaining tipping point to taking action, and you’ve done that so beautifully. So tell me about your social media, because, I mean, I think your content’s great, and I coach musicians on social media content. So, yeah—how was that beginning for you? You’ve got some beautiful videos coming through. You’ve got great hooks.

Mercedes Smith: Well, yeah, I mean, the whole social media thing is not what I love to do. I, before I started Blackstrad Concert Attire, I was not on social media all the time. I’m like a Facebook person, partly because I’m a geriatric millennial, but I like information. I love sharing information. I love sharing articles and,

Michelle Lynne: Yeah.

Mercedes Smith: …writing little paragraphs of what I thought about something. That’s kind of more my cup of tea, personally, and that’s how I often engaged in social media. When it’s for a business, you know, I hope it’s not about me. I hope it’s about Blackstrad Concert Attire, but you know, for me, starting that Instagram felt super cringy. And a lot of the videos I make, I still feel a little embarrassed to put them up. Maybe they’re not even very good. Some people like them—I appreciate that you’ve been very encouraging to me just now. That’s helpful to know that you think they’re good. But, um, again, sometimes it takes me; I’ll make a real—you know, I think I’m a genius. I’m like, “Oh, that’s a great real idea.” I was like, “It’ll be really easy. I’ll just film this and this and this, and then I’ll just put it together and I’ll do a little voiceover.” And I was like, “I bet it’ll take me 30 minutes.” All the way from filming—it’s like three hours later, I finally get it up. Then it’s like, you know, it gets almost no views. And then like two people followed me, and then one person unfollowed me. And it’s like, you know, you get better at it. You’re not going to be able to put out this perfect product at the beginning—even with— I mean, we’re talking about trying to play concerts. If you can look at your own work and just see incremental improvement every day or every week, just use that as a source of confidence and inspiration to yourself.

Michelle Lynne: Absolutely. And I’m glad you’re mentioning that because I often share the story of—if you scroll back and look at my first content with TFA, my first time talking on camera, it was all bad. It was very cringy; it was rambling. You know, the first Instagram Live that I did was with Deanna, and I remember I was sitting in the corner on the couch and I was kind of like waving my phone around, and there was no light on my face. And then during COVID, I started doing proper Instagram Live interviews—which was kind of a prequel to this podcast, actually—but like, this is all, as you’re saying, a step-by-step progression of getting better, and we delete old stuff so you can’t go back and look at how bad it started. I mean, TFA went through a neon-orange phase for a while. I was pulling pictures off Unsplash and using those as my content. I was doing it all myself. It sounds like you’re working alone, which is like massively impressive.

Mercedes Smith: When I—

Michelle Lynne: Yeah.

Mercedes Smith: …the team at Blackstrad is totally me, myself, and I. There is no one, I mean, other than the people literally sewing the clothes that—

Michelle Lynne: Okay.

Mercedes Smith: …everything—the packing of the, this and that, the organizing of everything, all the emails, all the social media—it’s all me. So, yeah.

Michelle Lynne: Yeah. I couldn’t have done it all alone. That’s for sure. Um, coming back to your 5,000 followers, we love to talk about how we believe social media for musicians is more about connection and networking than it is about going viral because you can go viral. And honestly, if you—let’s say you hit, you know, 100,000 views on one of your things and you had 100, 200 orders come in overnight, if you’re working alone—these are the kind of crucial moments where it’s like, “Can I even handle the massive amount of income? Do I want to be huge like this, or am I happy being a small business where you do, I don’t know, how many orders on your own time, plus your performing career?” I mean, these are bigger questions we have to think about as entrepreneurs. I don’t know how you’ve approached thinking like this.

Mercedes Smith: Well… I mean, everyone wants to be an overnight success—wouldn’t that just be wonderful? But almost no one is. And so many of the people that we think were overnight successes—just because we heard about them today and didn’t hear about them yesterday—doesn’t mean that they didn’t spend a decade getting to where they are. I think we have to remember that, and talking about like what content resonates—surely something that went viral had something about it that resonated, right? Um, you know, what was really great—I think when people first realized that someone was making concert attire for musicians, for women specifically, everybody shared that. Like, once people really got it, like once they had a super-concise, clear message, people hit that share button and then it kind of went everywhere, which was great. But it’s also dealing with the consequences of going viral, and this is kind of what I wanted to bring to the musicians listening, who are afraid to post—first of all, the influencers that you’re mentioning, they have people working for them making content for them, helping edit their videos, helping make everything look perfect, so already most musicians don’t have that. So we falsely compare ourselves to people who are in completely different spaces than we are, and we think we need to look at that.

Michelle Lynne: So that’s why I’m always saying—I think 5,000 is huge. Especially if you’re making 5,000—let’s say we turn those into sales. That’s a healthy—like, that’s where we want this business to be going. Anyone selling anything—to, you know, TFA, we only have 3,500 followers, but our membership is full, mastermind is full, we’re selling our social media sprint program. I don’t think if I had 3,000 people knocking on my door for coaching, I could coach 3,000 people. So…

Mercedes Smith: No…

Michelle Lynne: We want the visibility of the following, but we also want to make sure that we’re nurturing that community. So that’s why we always encourage our musicians: don’t worry about the numbers and the likes and the comments; focus on the connections. And you and I met through Instagram. I know you’ve done a number of great influencer collaborations lately with other, um, more prominent musicians. Um, how has that been for you? Has it been fun to work with some other musicians?

Mercedes Smith: Yeah. You know, at the beginning I was so scared to reach out, and I think my advice for someone who’s trying to contact an influencer without being weird is that you can be pretty persistent. These people are getting a lot of DMs; they’re getting a lot of them. You’re going to get lost in the shuffle—they’re not going to see your comment. You may have to make several comments and a DM, and it may take several months for them to actually register, like, “Oh, I’ve seen her before,” and for them to actually click on one of your videos and see what you’re doing and like it and have it resonate with them. I just started contacting a few, and like, the very first one I contacted was a woman who lives here—actually, locally. She lives an hour away in Provo, Utah—a pianist—and, um, she ended up getting busy, but she ended up making this great video that got shared, you know, thousands of times, and that was a tremendous help to me… But I think it’s been fun to reach out to these different musicians and see them wearing my clothes and that they love them, and it has increased sales, certainly, certainly increased my followers. Um, I just think everything you can do for more visibility is great. And again, you have to put yourself out there and do it. It’s going to take some courage, just like walking out on stage does.

Michelle Lynne: I was going to ask, “What’s next?” Are you also envisioning like—well, you’re mentioning the dress—is that also like a choir dress potentially that you’d like to fabricate?

Mercedes Smith: I mean, absolutely. I mean…

Michelle Lynne: Mm.

Mercedes Smith: …I hope that high school choirs can just move to a regular all-black dress code the way most professional organizations do, where they don’t require all the women to dress identically. That doesn’t make sense to me. But yeah, we’re definitely moving more toward looking into group sales. I’m actually going next week to the Texas Music Educators Conference, which is apparently one of the largest meetings of educators anywhere in the United States—states—and it’s in Texas, which is where I’m from, actually. And we’re also going to have some prototypes of the menswear line and the non-gendered kind of jacket that I’ve been working on. And, hopefully, looking forward to meeting a lot of ensemble directors there and also just learning more about what the needs of ensemble directors are today. And I have done surveys, and I was surprised to find that over 50 percent are truly seeking a non-gendered option, um, so that they didn’t have to require all students to choose one or the other—so that is based on research. There is a demand for that. And…

Michelle Lynne: Yeah.

Mercedes Smith: I mean, people are doing it, I guess, but it’s mostly just saying that the boys can wear the girls’ clothes and the girls can wear a tuxedo if they want,

Michelle Lynne: Right.

Mercedes Smith: …not really making something in between or giving a range of options—that’s really what I…

Michelle Lynne: Yeah.

Mercedes Smith: …people need: a range of options that meets the needs of everyone, hopefully, so that everyone can feel confident to look, feel, and perform their very best.

Michelle Lynne: I think that’s a beautiful mission. I think I’m so impressed hearing what you’ve been able to achieve. I’m looking forward to continuing to follow you and to making you the best “skirt video” that I will.

Mercedes Smith: Oh, thank you.

Michelle Lynne: With this beautiful skirt that you—yeah, me too, me too. How can people find you? How can we follow you? How can we buy one of your capsule wardrobes?

Mercedes Smith: Um, well, you can visit our website—it’s blackstrad.com. Um, you can visit us on Instagram, which is @BlackstradConcertAttire. We’re on Facebook too—just look up Blackstrad Concert Attire—and I think on TikTok we’re just @Blackstrad. 

Michelle Lynne: Great. Well, Mercedes, thank you so much for your time and for sharing about your vision. I was really, um, just touched to hear about the deeper meaning behind all of this and just wish you so much success with it going forward.

Mercedes Smith: Thank you so much. It’s been fun.

Michelle Lynne: Okay, everybody, thanks for listening. I’ll see you in the next episode. Make sure you follow Mercedes and be fearless.