Twelve Questions: Emily Miller-Sharma

Emily Miller-Sharma says she relishes the trust that comes from working in a family business. Picture / Brett Phibbs

Emily Miller-Sharma, 31, is the design director at Liam, the sister label of Ruby. She’s worked at the company, owned by her family, for six and a half years

1. Your parents worked in the rag trade - were you always only ever going to be a fashion designer?

When you're a teenager, you don't really understand what your parents do. I had no idea what dad did really, but I would just make my own clothes. Dad was going about his business making clothes, and there was fabric and textiles around, and I would go to his office and have a look at garments being made. But when you're a teenager you don't really put together that, logically, I could just work in his company. That never dawned on me, because for me, clothing was about going to Ike's Emporium in Devonport and buying whatever fabric I thought was cool at the time and then lying on top of it and drawing around myself and making that into a "dress". I was going to be a designer because I was making clothes all the time - it was separate from dad.

2. Was style really important in your home growing up?

I reckon my mum and dad have got pretty cool style. So did older relatives of mine, my grandmother, my great-aunt, my great-grandmother. My great-grandmother made all of the wedding dresses for the children in the family. My thing with clothing is the way it makes you feel, rather than what people see when they look at you, so lots of my memories of dressing as a child are of distress at something not feeling right - putting something on and feeling weird because what I was looking at was not what I felt like. Naturally I would want to put something on that made me feel cool. I had this one dress that I used to call my "mature dress" ... I was about 7 or 8. I felt really cool in it.

3. You work with your dad, mum and sister - what's the best thing about being involved in a family business?

Trust. I guess if I'm going to get all rational about it, that trust comes from an entire life of stored knowledge of each other. Because the picture of me my family have painted in their minds in terms of my ability, goals and motives is one that has been built over my lifetime, they have been able to trust me with more responsibility than I would have been given by someone who didn't know me so well. And it goes back the other way.

4. What are the challenges?
The lines between work and family life can get blurred. A stressful day at work can then progress into a stressful family dinner if we are not disciplined.

5. Why haven't you joined the brain drain and moved overseas?
I'm 31 now and when I was about 27 or 28 what kept me here, even though I'd had no thought in my mind that I'd be living in New Zealand at that time of my life, was my job. Now I'm at what is a really high point in my career. I don't have children and I've worked for a long enough period of time that I have a reasonable amount of experience so I'm good at what I do. If I think more broadly about our country, it's nice to have young people, like me, who are at that point of their career and living in NZ - so it's not just always the juniors and the people who have come back to have families who are working. It's people who are deeply invested in the career, their city and their country. I have thought wistfully about living somewhere else, especially on a Monday night when most restaurants seem to be closed, or when I need to get something at 7pm on a Sunday and there's nothing open, but then it's pretty cool here and we can only try to keep making it cooler.

6. What are you most worried about?
Humans' potential for a lack of empathy. I think it's important to care about each other. I don't want to sound like some sort of hand-holding hippie but I think we need to have respect for each other. It doesn't mean you have to go into people's pain and cry with them but it means, for example, if a co-worker has had a bad time in their family life, my expectations will shift and the way I talk to them will shift. It's easy to have that kind of connection because it's in front of you. But then you can also think about it at a wider level. It's important to have empathy for people who you don't know, can't see and have no connection with at all other than the fact they're human.

7. What do you do to help?
I try to build that into work. We have a girl who works with us who has a learning disability. She's 24 and this is her first real job. For us it's about acknowledging that we're part of society, we work in the fashion industry and we deal with one type of person all the time. We have a structure here where we can bring people in and engage with them, and make them part of this community if that's what they want. We also donate fabric remnants to sewing programmes at the women's prison and the refugee centre, and we've just started giving sample clothing to the women's refuge and sample shoes to the Cinderella Project which loans clothes to girls for their school ball. I can't help everyone but I can have a desire to try to help a person and talk about that with other people and maybe then they can pick it up and help someone else. I feel like if everyone had more empathy we'd be more connected as people and better off as a whole.

8. Is money important to you?
I see money as security. I see it as buying me a place to live that I like to live in, to eat the food I want to eat, drink the wine I want to drink and just to do the things I want to do without having to think too much about it. It means I can travel. I don't want to go out for a five-course degustation every day of the week, but I like to have the option of wanting to do that on occasion. I remember when I was at university and thinking about what I wanted from my career, and I wanted to be able to go to the supermarket and buy the nice cheese. That was the benchmark.

9. Do you consider yourself to be a spiritual person?
I think so. On the Census, where it asks for your religion, I usually end up writing paragraphs and paragraphs all over it. I do believe that there is something that we are connected to that I don't understand. We're here, we have feelings and we have consciousness and I know that there are times that I feel more connected to something. It's usually in times of extreme pain, distress or difficulty, I feel like something kicks in. Someone who's not spiritual might think that's survival instinct, but I guess I don't want to believe that!

10. Do you think about what happens when we die?
Yeah, I do, especially when someone dies, like, where are they, what happened to their soul and their consciousness? I don't know. It's weird to think of all these people in "heaven" - when I was young I used to think, "Doesn't heaven get overpopulated?" I do question, if my grandfather, who's not alive any more, is with me all the time or if he's everywhere. He's got to be somewhere though because I can't grasp the concept of ceasing to exist. There has to be something.

11. What does "cool" mean to you?
A person is cool because of their essence or their internal propulsion, their vitality and their own internal power. It's something you can't explain. Uncool is when someone is sluggish, bored, pessimistic, has nothing to contribute ... Cool adds something and uncool takes it away.

12. What are you most grateful for?
My whole life. I'm a very lucky person.