Sarah LaFleur says premium kidswear brands should skip influencers and sell through trunk shows

The internet cannot sell every tiny beige cardigan, no matter how tastefully it photographs next to a wooden Montessori toy. On How I Built This, Sarah LaFleur told a London premium kidswear founder that the smarter growth plan is not paid influencers, it is trunk shows, pop-ups, and the kind of terrifyingly elegant parent other parents secretly study at school drop-off.

That is the most useful claim in this Advice Line mashup, partly because it punctures the lazy modern reflex that every niche brand just needs creator seeding and a better TikTok. LaFleur’s point is colder and probably truer: if you’re selling quiet luxury for children, your customer may not want to be influenced. She wants to notice.

I’m not surprised that influencer marketing hasn’t really panned out because I’m not convinced that your customer necessarily follows influencers for kids, for kids wear, let’s say.

The caller, Monica, runs a British-made, minimalist children’s clothing brand, the kind of business that sounds beautiful until you remember children are basically marinara delivery systems with shoes. She makes small-batch pieces, sells direct to consumer, and says customers do convert when they can touch the fabric at pop-ups. That detail matters. This isn’t a commodity onesie business. It’s a taste business.

The playground is the ad buy

LaFleur’s advice was not anti-marketing. It was anti-wrong-marketing. For a brand selling modern, minimalist kidswear at a premium, the point of sale may need to feel almost pre-digital: a trunk show in the right neighborhood, a collaboration with a boutique, a founder whose own style is part of the pitch. The product has to be seen in the wild. Preferably on a child whose parent looks like they know what linen is for.

But I think it starts with a neighborhood and not on social media.

This is where LaFleur’s own authority helps. M.M.LaFleur was built around a very specific customer and a very specific problem, professional women who wanted to look put together without turning every morning into a hostage negotiation with a closet. So when she hears a founder selling expensive, intentional clothes for children, she doesn’t reach for scale first. She reaches for context. Who is wearing this? Who notices? Who asks?

The verdict: LaFleur is right, with one catch. Offline taste-building is slower, more annoying, and less flattering to a founder’s fantasy of waking up viral. But for fashion products that need texture, fit, and story, it can also be the difference between traffic and actual sales. A kidwear influencer can make a shirt visible. A stylish parent can make it socially legible.

Even the email advice came with a trapdoor

LaFleur also delivered a line that should make every brand newsletter manager stare into the middle distance.

Email, first of all, I think is just a declining channel. And that’s like just the hard truth.

Then she immediately complicated it, because M.M.LaFleur’s own blog and newsletter, The M Dash, became one of the brand’s strongest channels. That’s not hypocrisy. It’s the whole lesson. Product blasts are dying. Point of view still travels. If Monica wants parents to care about vinegar, fewer clothes, better clothes, and a slower family wardrobe, she needs content that feels like an invitation, not a clearance rack in paragraph form.

The other callers got the more classic entrepreneurship medicine. Jeffrey Hollander warned a brewery-theater founder in Ann Arbor not to confuse an overwhelmed founder’s need for help with the need to hand out equity like drink tickets.

It’s expensive to give away equity and it’s permanent.

That advice was less glamorous but probably vital. The caller was running a brewery, comedy theater, food operation, and corporate improv workshop business, which sounds less like a company than a calendar having a panic attack. Hollander and Raz pushed him toward hiring operators or setting up incentives before bringing in full partners. Sensible. Boring in the way seatbelts are boring.

Shazi Visram’s segment with an edtech founder had a similarly practical edge. The founder wanted to sell an SAT prep and diagnostics platform cheaply to individual teachers without wrecking district pricing. Visram cut to the channel-conflict problem.

Typically, it’s hard to sell the same exact thing for two different prices.

The fix there was to separate the offers or use free access with carefully chosen teacher champions, then turn the data into a district sale. Again, not sexy. Also how a lot of business actually works. The episode’s accidental theme is that founders keep asking for growth hacks, and the guests keep handing them smaller, more human rooms: the interview panel, the trunk show, the teacher pilot.

For Monica’s brand, that means the next customer may not arrive through a feed at all. She may be standing by the slide, looking at someone else’s child, wondering why that jumper makes every other outfit on the playground look like it came from a multipack.