You have already experienced it a number of times, but Anna Orlinski and Gloria Falk are amazed at the Amira effect every time: if Amira Pocher shows her Instagram followers in a dress or shirt from her fashion label Mania, the Frankfurt entrepreneur's web shop immediately pops up the order numbers are high.

The Austrian, who is married to German TV presenter Oliver Pocher and has two young children, is a celebrity on social media, is considered a reference in fashion and beauty issues - and uses this reputation to establish herself as an entrepreneur.

In doing so, she is pursuing the same goal as Orlinski and Falk.

Chance brought them together, tell the long-time friends, both in their early forties, who have also been business partners for four years.

They had a conversation at a trade fair, the chemistry was right, and the idea of ​​a collaboration was quickly born.

"Just like us, Amira puts all her heart into it." Right from the start, Pocher did not just want and should be a famous face for the label, she works on the design and is involved in sales.

In any case, it was not planned to use the celebrity factor glamor to direct her niche in the fashion world.

Big names don't always bring luck

Big names, the women entrepreneurs had to learn involuntarily early on, don't always bring luck. Anna Orlinski can tell about it. The native Polish had laid the foundation for everything to come, quite casually, while her now eight-year-old son was an infant. At that time, together with her mother, she had designed a fabric scarf for herself for breastfeeding, big enough to hide the child and breast behind it, but also light and stowable, even with a pocket for utensils. So well thought out that many wanted it. "Mothers always came up to me and wanted a nursing scarf like this." Orlinski says the term never existed before. Her mother had to sew 300 pieces within six months, sales price 40 euros, demand increasing."Since I couldn't continue my previous job anyway, the idea came up to put everything on one card."

Orlinski, who until then had worked as a lecturer in personnel issues at various universities and had to travel a lot, was looking for a manufacture in Poland, posted photos in internet shops, advertised her scarf under the Mania brand via blogs and parenting magazines, and sold around a thousand pieces a month .

Even the drugstore chain dm became aware of the trend product.

She asked for an offer for several hundred thousand copies - the dream of all founders.

Orlinski calculated, lowered all prices for the masses and with a unit price of eight euros in the end was far above the chain's expectations.

There was no mega-deal, instead dm had a cheaper competing product manufactured elsewhere.

The dream of rapid growth was over.

"We then experienced an uncanny market loss."

Fashion for nursing mothers

The blow was right, but Anna Orlinski and her friend Gloria Falk, who is now involved as a business partner, had found their world, there was much more that they had been missing even during parental leave: fashion for breastfeeding mothers that deserves the name. Not just halfway practical clothes. Together with a designer from Poland, they have now designed dresses, shirts and blouses with which you can be seen outside, but which have carefully placed, well-hidden openings or zippers so that mothers don't have to take off their clothes to breastfeed.