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From her apartment near the bustling La Bastille district of Paris, fashion designer Kym Ellery says she's trying to set the record straight.
"Just because you're in another country doesn't mean … you're running away from something," she says.
It's been four years since she called time on her Australian company, liquidating the business, and by doing so, leaving a string of unpaid creditors — including tailors, jewellery makers, fabric mills and modelling agencies — together owed $2.6 million dollars.
These suppliers have watched on as Kym Ellery has gone on to success overseas, documenting her lavish lifestyle, while still selling to Australian customers online, from afar.
And in a recent exposé in The Monthly, these suppliers fought back, accusing her of taking advantage of their goodwill before they were ultimately hung out to dry.
In her first in-depth interview about the Australian collapse of Ellery Land Pty Ltd, her now-closed Australian company, Kym answers her critics and apologises to her suppliers, but also says business collapses are sometimes the price of working in the fashion industry.
She denies claims of financial misconduct, blaming delays in filing paperwork for a last-minute asset transfer to a related company in the weeks before her business collapsed.
The way Kym sees it, she's a victim too. She says media reporting on her financial woes just discourages other women from taking risks.
"It's interesting, why female journalists are focusing on these female entrepreneurs failing," she says.
"That's a really toxic situation that we can see now in our society … what we really should be talking about is how do you get a young woman like me to take risks. We want young, talented, creative, young people to be unafraid to take risks."
Kym says she's been hurt too and that in the world of high-end fashion, there's always a risk you'll end up a fashion victim.
"I'm not hiding from Ellery Land closing, and I don't expect anyone to feel sorry for me either."
Her former suppliers don't feel sorry for her. They just want their money.
'Flashy wrong things'
In a street-side workshop in the Bali capital of Denpasar, craftsmen are working on limited-edition jewellery, some hand-made, some with hi-tech laser welders.
This shopfront once supplied bold, contemporary designs to Kym Ellery's Australian business. Suppliers like this are the backbone of the fashion industry.
The designer behind the jewellery is a New Zealander we will call Jenny. He wants his name protected, because in the close-knit fashion world, speaking out to the press isn't a good look.
The collapse of Kym Ellery's Australian operations in April 2019 left the Balinese factory that produces his pieces $193,000 out of pocket.
Jenny didn't see it coming but looking back, he wonders whether he should have.
"She spent a lot of money on flashy wrong things, promoting her brand without paying … the people that are actually making the product for her."
Jenny reckons he's been around long enough to understand that failure is part of the fashion game.
He describes an industry that runs on goodwill. Good relationships can survive and outlast late payments and cash flow crunches.
But Ellery Land's debt just kept growing.
"The debt got a lot bigger because I let it get bigger, so I'm definitely part of the problem," he says.
After the collapse, he continued working and talking with Kym Ellery for a period until a dispute over payments soured the relationship again.
Jenny says this disregard for the workers at the bottom of the supply chain happens all too often in his industry.
"Brands are under such pressure to make beautiful things and to be successful that there's no room for them to see that," he says.
"If you're morally just, and you're making money, you should pay back people."
The runner
Maggie's official title was design and production assistant, but she was also a runner.
Part of her job at Ellery was driving to factories, running around fabric, trims and cutwork and picking up finished goods.
She worked with Ellery for two and a half years. She says speaking out would hurt her career, and for that reason we are not using her real name.
During those visits she'd often come face to face with the suppliers, who — on occasion — would complain about unpaid bills and the general tardiness of Kym Ellery's payments.
"I hated having to negotiate with people to send things or ask them to send things and try to tell them, 'Yep I'm getting you paid. I'm getting you paid,'" she says.
"There were a few times where suppliers would say, 'Well, I don't want to release the goods to you until you pay invoices,'" she says.
By the time Kym Ellery's Australian operations collapsed, Maggie had already moved on to another fashion label, Alice McCall.
Alice McCall itself went into voluntary administration in November 2020 and was liquidated earlier this year, with debts in excess of $1 million.
Maggie wonders whether Australia's insolvency system enables bad practices.
She says in the fashion world, aspiring designers can use the system to wipe the slate clean, leaving creditors with unpaid debts.
"Essentially you can go into voluntary administration and then start up another business later and there's nothing stopping you from doing that," she says.
"You can just start again and there doesn't seem to be any kind of recourse for that."
When Ellery Land collapsed in April 2019, liquidator Kate Barnet was appointed to salvage any assets for creditors.
"It's creditors' funds that we're trying to recover and get back to them the best we can," she says.
But the job also gave her a chance to look at Ellery Land's financial records.
Liquidators aren't police officers, and it's not part of their prime role to uncover wrongdoing.
But if they do suspect something suspicious, they are obliged to report their concerns to the corporate regulator, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).
It's then ASIC's job to decide whether it wants to investigate.
And that's what Kate did, when she looked at Ellery Land's books.
"There was some issues that were raised … in that case, we did report some issues to ASIC," she says.
After receiving the report, ASIC did not take the matter any further.
Kate won't reveal the issues she reported to ASIC, and ASIC won't comment on individual cases.
Some publicly available financial records, however, show an asset transfer in the weeks leading up to the appointment of a liquidator.
And that asset … was the "Ellery" trademark.
What's in a name?
In the world of fashion, there's a lot in a name. A Louis Vuitton handbag, without the Louis Vuitton trademark, is just a handbag.
And in the final weeks leading up to the liquidation of Kym's Australian company, a significant asset was its name, or its trademark — "Ellery".
Trademarks are assets, which can be bought and sold. And for those creditors who were ultimately paid nothing, it was something that could have been sold to recoup unpaid debts.
Records with Australia's Intellectual Property Register show that just under two weeks before Ellery Land appointed a liquidator, its trademark was transferred to another company — The Holy Mountain Pty Ltd — also owned by Kym Ellery.
The transfer of the trademark had the effect of protecting the Ellery trademark from being sold off to a company outside the Ellery empire.
The same company that received the trademark — The Holy Mountain Pty Ltd — was also one of the few creditors to get paid when Ellery Land went into liquidation.
Liquidator records show The Holy Mountain — owned by Kym Ellery — was a "secured" creditor, which means it was among those first in line to get paid when the company went under. It received about $170,000.
From Paris, Kym says The Holy Mountain received the money because it paid off an earlier debt before the liquidation began, and that's how it came to be a "secured" creditor.
She says the movement of trademarks and loans were all legal, decided before she knew the company was going into liquidation, and was only undertaken after receiving financial advice.
'I'm not hiding'
From her Paris apartment, Kym Ellery has decided to clear the air.
"It's easy for people to think that I breezed through it, but I absolutely did not."
She says she takes "full and absolute responsibility" for all decisions that Ellery Land made, but that ultimately the collapse of the company was due to a number of factors.
She puts it partly down to the nature of the fashion industry, where it can take months for a design to start generating profits.
"You have almost a nine-to-12-month cycle before you actually see the money from when you spend that first dollar," she says.
This, she says, creates a "cash-flow crunch".
Exacerbating her financial woes, she says, one of Ellery's distributors and a US supplier went under, which left her company more than half-a-million dollars out of pocket.
Kym claims the tipping point was a data entry error, discovered in January, three months before she went into liquidation.
"I was told the company was profitable up until the last moments. Unfortunately, there was some data entry errors made by the team into the system, and there was problems in having accuracy," she says.
She emphatically denies any financial impropriety. She says money and assets were traded between the Ellery network of companies before Ellery Land collapsed, but that these trades occurred at the suggestion of "expert financial advisors".
"We absolutely did not perform any illegal phoenix activity," she says.
Phoenixing occurs when a business owner transfers assets out of a company they know will go into liquidation, into another company they control, for less than the assets' actual value.
It can be used to hollow out a company just before it collapses, leaving few if any assets for creditors to fight over.
This practice can be illegal. But Kym Ellery says that's not what happened in her case.
Kym says there was a group of companies and related entities, and they were all abiding by agreements with each other.
And as for the trademark transfer, she says it was actually sold to The Holy Mountain three years earlier, in 2016, but that there were delays in filing the paperwork.
"The lawyer did the search, they said, 'Oh, someone just hasn't completed this process of actually transferring it and that's OK, we can do that now … It doesn't look good, but unfortunately, it'd fallen off the to-do list of the CEO."
She said she could not find the paperwork evidencing this transaction.
"I thought it would be registered somewhere but of course it is not because it was a transaction between private companies," she says.
She did not say how much she sold the trademark for.
She disagrees with the idea that selling off the trademark would have been good for creditors.
"I cannot agree with the hypothesis that my name should have been sold off," she says in an email.
"I cannot see how that would have been better for anyone when you look at everything in context — it is my name."
She describes a series of complicated intra-company transactions that she says were designed to help creditors and keep the Ellery brand alive and trading into the future.
Decisions, she says, were taken under the advice of a number of firms.
"All I can say is that ultimately I was doing my best," she says.
"The question is, you know, was I supposed to drown back in 2019 or am I allowed to have another go?"