Rachel Lim of Love, Bonito on Designing for Real Women

When I met Rachel Lim for the first time, I had expected to meet a businesswoman – a savvy one who knew the ins and outs of fashion of course – after all, she is the co-founder of Singapore-born brand Love, Bonito, which has recently opened two new outposts in Hong Kong. What I didn’t expect was to come away feeling like she’s a long-lost sister, a mentor and a new friend. But that’s what Lim is like, and by extension, what Love, Bonito represents. It’s more than just in the business of fashion, it’s in the business of women, and understanding and empowering women, is Lim’s greatest strength.

How Lim started Love, Bonito is a story told many times over. At 19, Lim started a fashion blog with the mission of redefining the fashion scene in Singapore. Two years later, in 2007, she turned her blog into Love, Bonito, a viable business that catered to women like herself, who often had to alter clothes bought from international brands in order to fit them.

Love, Bonito now carries UK 2 sizes all the way up to UK 16, and Lim says they are still constantly looking for ways to improve. “When we talk about Asian women,” she says, “we’re talking about paying attention to the proportions of the torso to the lower body, the hip circumference to the waist. Usually there’s a bit of difference in ratio to our Western counterparts. The other thing we pay attention to is skin tone – we have warmer skin tones than our Western counterparts who have cooler, pinker skin tones. So this makes a difference in the colours that we pick. Climate is another – in Singapore and in Hong Kong, we mainly experience much warmer weather and that informs the way we choose our fabrics that allow for breathability through the different seasons.

“I know the power that a good outfit can make a woman feel,” says Lim. “When we look good, we feel good. We stand a little taller, we speak a little louder and shine a little brighter. That was the main motivation for me to start Love, Bonito. And then I realised a lot of women actually related to this. That’s how we built momentum and really grew rapidly over the years. My personal story that came along with it was that at the end of the day, I saw how important it is for us to come to terms with who we are and who we’re meant to be while discovering our fullest potential.”

Love, Bonito found much success in Singapore, and in Hong Kong too, are proving itself immensely popular amongst office ladies, working mothers, students and more. It’s not a fashion brand as such – Lim refuses to call herself a fashionable woman. The brand is less about trends but more about what’s applicable to the daily life of an everyday Asian woman.

Love, Bonito’s COO Dione Song, says what really drives Love, Bonito is thoughtfulness. “We’re not coming up with designs for the sake of being on trend,” she shares. “We’re ensuring that every piece has the Asian centricity and the female centricity. In our business today, quite a significant part of our line, 30 to 40 percent actually, is about being evergreen.”

What Song is alluding to, is the creation of The Staples collection. “We call it our building block,” says Song. “It’s a wardrobe that is timeless, with great pieces that can be dressed up or down, and it fits different body types, different styles, different women – it’s been doing so well for us.”

Shop The Staples

Apart from not blindly following trends, Love, Bonito also takes care not to overproduce their pieces. “There’s a high degree of wastage in fashion,” says Song. “When companies produce too much or when clients dispose of products because they don’t hold. So it comes down to how we design our products, we want to ensure the mileage of the pieces so they have to be of good quality, and they have to be able to take you through different life seasons. And when it comes to really tackling wastage in terms of production, we don’t overload our initial launches, rather, we would observe how people are purchasing and replenish the stocks.”

Song’s words resonated with me personally, and I tell them this – that the jumpsuit I was wearing that day was part of their maternity line, and post-pregnancy, it still functioned beautifully as work wear. Lim lights up at this, as a working mother herself with a young son, she knows the very real pains of dressing for ever-changing bodies. “Ultimately we’re real women creating for other real women,” says Lim. “We understand the needs or concerns that women have, and that’s why we bring them along this journey together and encourage them to look at ourselves at a better light at the end of the day.”