Interview #226—Chrissy Lafian

by Tara Kenny

Chrissy Lafian is the founder and Creative Director of Suku, a fashion and homewares label based across Naarm and Bali, best known for their bright, bamboo bed linen.

Originally from Makassar, Indonesia, Chrissy left home as a teenager and eventually settled in Naarm, where she worked as a graphic designer and in retail before establishing Suku in 2013.

All Suku products are made in Bali by a small team of Indonesian artisans at a studio managed by Chrissy’s grandmother, with an emphasis on traditional techniques such as batik.

Chrissy spoke to Tara about giving the people who make Suku products the credit they deserve, how caring for her staff has helped the brand survive for over a decade, the performative nature of retail, motherhood and more.

Given you left Indonesia as a teenager, how did being away from home at a young age change your relationship to it?

In a way, I’m always romanticising the place, because I left at a really young age and during those years away the country itself changed. It kind of works though; Indonesia has changed to whatever it is now, but I have a romantic relationship to it that plays into everything I do.

Can you talk about your relationship with your manufacturers in Bali? Specifically, I’m thinking about how a lot of Australian labels use offshore factories in Asia or the local labour of Asian immigrant seamstresses, but this labour is often unacknowledged and left out of brand narratives. Suku has done such a good job of putting your manufacturing staff front and centre and really respecting that work.

Yeah, I agree with you. Because I’m Indonesian, when I started the brand I felt like I understood the resources back home better and it was a natural thing for me to work with those makers. It’s probably a cultural thing, but I was brought up to give credit where it’s due–it was natural for my brand’s narrative and focus to be about the Indonesian artisans who actually make the products. I also work with my grandma, so it felt so important to share the spotlight with her, because none of this could have happened without her help.

When I first started ten years ago, there were a lot of brands that were made in Bali, but I would only know that because I deep-dived into their manufacturing. Even now, it’s not always part of the narrative. There’s nothing wrong with outsourcing your production if that works for your brand, just as long as you're being transparent. It’s important to include those makers into your narrative. I wish more brands would share and actually show where their products are made.

In an interview for Assemble Papers back in 2013, you mentioned that a lot of products are missing stories. Through the Suku journal, Instagram, playlists and videos, you’ve created a strong narrative around the brand. Even early on, customers would share photos of their Suku sheets to include themselves in the brand’s world. How do you approach this storytelling process?

It wasn't really something I planned. When I started the brand, it was only online, so I needed to connect with my community without a brick-and-mortar shop. When you want to have a conversation, you need to be the first one to share. So by starting a journal and sharing our story from my end, I felt like it opened that channel of conversation. Back then, social media wasn’t really a place to share your intimate space as much as it is now: I just asked my friends, housemates and random creative people that I looked up to if I could show their spaces on the Suku journal. Then Covid happened and it felt natural to keep honestly sharing our story on social media.

Ten years ago, when you bought something for your home, there wasn’t much of a human touch, even for something like bedsheets that’s so intimate to you. Even expensive brands like Sheridan would just have a product page with sheets on it. For me, I connect with products through human touches. We started putting actual people into our campaigns and showing the connection between people and their spaces. Things were very sterile back then.

It’s wild how much things have changed. I know that your background is in retail, having worked at Fat4 and Zimmerman before starting Suku. Between 2021 and the middle of this year, Suku had a physical store in Fitzroy, but now you have a showroom in Collingwood that’s open by appointment and on certain days. What are your thoughts on retail in the age of online shopping, both in general and for Suku specifically?

I worked in retail for eight years before starting Suku, and in the business’s initial years also did it alongside. One of the reasons I started Suku was that I was so burnt out from retail. If you’ve worked in retail, you know that it's not sustainable to be that active and energetic all the time. This is especially so since the pandemic–people are tired of always having to put on a performance. Like hospitality, retail can be very performative. You open your store and you’re expected to be smiley and happy and energetic from nine to five. At the end of last year, me and all my team were burnt out. Obviously, we wanted to create an amazing space where people can come and be happy and have amazing service, but as a small business, you only have so many resources to do that every day.

So I thought, how can I sustain this? For me, sustainability is always beyond just fabric. It's about how I can sustain my business, my team, myself and my mental health so I can do this for the long run, especially being a mum as well. It’s tiring to perform at home and at work. The solution was to do a showroom that didn’t have to be open all the time. With a shop, there are days when people don’t really come in and shop, but you’re always in the mindset to perform. By opening less, we can offer more quality in terms of service. Since opening the showroom, my team and I have become more calm and we appreciate those days when we open and meet customers.

I feel like more small businesses will operate like this in the future. Unless you have backing from investors to open many, many retail stores and that's the focus of your business, then that's a different story. But with online shopping, we don’t really need to be open in-person all the time. It’s more about creating a fun retail experience. Hospitality is always a good industry to look at for an example. More and more restaurants are open less and have a greater focus on seasonal cooking. They don’t cook food that’s not in season. I think retail will be like that; connecting to the available resources to create something meaningful. We’ll see more retail pop-ups for small businesses too.

Let’s follow the thread that you mentioned, on thinking about sustainability broadly. Suku is often presented and discussed as being an ethical and sustainably produced brand, but obviously those are buzzwords that are kind of thrown around without any consensus on what they mean. What do they mean to you? How do you approach ethics and sustainability for Suku?

Like I said before, sustainability shouldn't just be about fabric anymore; it’s about the way you do business and the way forward. I agree that there's a lot of buzz around those words and they can be very hypocritical, because if you’re producing, you’re creating waste. There's no way that you can produce without waste, but I try and think about how to do it more responsibly. Some brands might produce sustainably, but their actual products aren’t sustainable, because they rip easily. You have to think about durability: how many times you can use something, as well as how to create packaging that breaks down easily and a product that doesn’t. What’s the point of having a fantastic sustainably-made fabric if it breaks after three washes? It’s about longevity for me. I get so happy when I can keep something for ten years.

There are so many products—even those that are expensive—that look really nice online and are well-designed, but they’re really poor quality and break down quickly. How can you encourage customers to be more aware of quality and to prioritise it over trends? It’s a conversation about avoiding fast fashion, but beyond that, valuing quality and ‘thoughtful consumption’, if that’s even a thing.

Well, we start by creating a good quality product. But it’s not really something that you can market, because everybody will say they make a quality product. Quality is like trust that you build and maintain every season. It comes with people giving reviews and telling their friends. But the proof is really in how long we’ve been a brand, because if we didn’t have good products we wouldn’t be here ten years on.

Fit is also so important. We go up to a size 22. Online, lots of things can look amazing. It’s so easy to sell to someone who’s a size 10, because everything will fit like the models they see online. But outside of that, clothes fit and look a bit different. I really put an effort into the pattern, or in getting a plus-sized model to come and try the garments for fit. You need to put extra attention and love into the work, because having clothes that fit perfectly is a part of quality.

So many small to medium-sized Australian fashion labels have closed in the last few years. It’s a huge achievement to have survived since 2013. How has the business changed over the years and how have you managed to survive in such a difficult industry?

It is a difficult industry, Australian fashion. It’s tough, I’ll give you that! The key is that I really care about the people I work with, especially those in Bali whom I’ve worked with since we opened. If I could be selfish, I could easily just give up. I've got a baby now and there's nothing for me to prove. When I started, I was younger and there was a lot to prove. But I really care about the people I work with in Indonesia and they really care about the brand. My production controller in Indonesia started with me from the beginning and we're so close now. If there’s no ‘people touch’ with what you do, it's easy to give up because it's just money. But if you really care about the people or your team, it's hard to give up. At the end of the day, if I give up, what are they going to do? The key is my emotional commitment to them. It’s a huge motivator.

My advice for a business would be to find that motivation that will stop you from quitting—for me, it’s people—and everything else will come with it. Because I care about the people, when something happens, like Covid, I find a way to make it work and stay afloat.

There’s this perception of Melburnians wearing black and being very uniform that Suku totally defies. Do you think colourful sheets can be a gateway to more creative dressing?

I think it’s changing now. Back in the day, I used to just wear black. But people can definitely find joy by putting colours in their space. In your space, you can do whatever you want because you’re the only one who will enjoy it. No one’s going to know that your sheets are red or pink, unless you want them to! But you can put a mask or guard on when you go out and see people by wearing black.

Has motherhood changed your relationship to creativity and work?

Yeah, definitely, even though I was like, ‘It's not going to change me!’ But it does–it slows you down and gives you perspective. I say to my friends that I can really feel the ground now. Before, I was so not grounded, I was all over the place and go-go-go.

Now, I actually don’t want time to go faster. I want time to go slower because I want to watch my child grow. I want more time with him, so it slows me down as well, but in a good way. When you’re always go-go-go, you can’t really appreciate what you do or even your work. You don't appreciate what you have achieved because you're just looking for the next big thing, whereas now there's more time to really think about my work, my team and how I do things. I like how that perspective from motherhood has changed me. Other than that, it's all chaos. But I love chaos!

This next question is one Liminal asks all their Asian-Australian interviewees. What does being Asian Australian mean to you?

To be honest, I’ve always felt that to be an Australian for me has been freedom. Maybe because I come from a small town in Indonesia, where there are so many rules for everything and you have to act a certain way. I can only speak from my experience as a first-generation immigrant in Melbourne, but I’ve always felt at home here because the creative community has given me so much freedom to express myself. So to be Asian Australian has actually been freedom and I'm very grateful for that. I don’t know what it’s like for other Asian-Australians.

One last question. What's inspiring you at the moment?

My child. He's two now and he sees things differently. He's using his imagination, and just seeing him and seeing things from his eyes is so inspiring. You just see everything from that first-time perspective again, like when it’s your child’s first time seeing a rainbow. He’s two now and I’m just holding on to time.