The Fashion Translator

🎙️ In this inspiring episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Tricia Salcido, CFO of Softstar Shoes, about the art of evolving functional design into refined aesthetics without ever sacrificing comfort.

Softstar crafts handcrafted, foot-shaped footwear in Oregon, designed to give your feet the natural freedom and space they truly need. Having led the company for over 20 years, Tricia openly shares their remarkable journey of refinement: early on, the challenge wasn’t just creating healthy footwear, but reimagining its aesthetic. The mission became clear: how to harmonize natural foot health with fresh, desirable design, all while staying deeply...

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Lucy Quartermaine, founder of her namesake British jewellery brand, about designing pieces meant to last for decades while the business around them keeps growing at full speed.

Lucy has been making jewellery since she was nine, when her grandmother handed her a pot of buttons and some string. Her droplet motif, inspired by Dalí’s melting clocks and by her love of water, has been a bestseller for twenty years. She designs from the heart, keeps her focus on classics, and has customers who own dozens of her piec...

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Jemima Gray, founder of Cotswold Fox, a British countryside clothing brand, about launching with a couple of hundred pounds and a first product she now smiles about, then growing it step by step into a team, a warehouse and a first shop.

Cotswold Fox began as a business school assignment. Jemima embroidered a logo onto plain stock clothing, took orders through Instagram DMs and PayPal, and posted every parcel herself. Looking back, she says the first product was far from perfect, yet “people bought it and then that’s...

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Stephen Laundy, founder of Fashion Compass, about the key shifts direct-to-consumer brands need to make when stepping into the wholesale arena.

With nearly two decades of experience placing fashion, accessories, and footwear brands with agents, distributors, and retail partners across more than 40 countries, Stephen highlights margin strategy as the ultimate foundation for wholesale success. He shared how pricing structure often determines a brand’s readiness: when DTC pricing is set without factoring in wholesale margins, it leaves little room for retail partners to maintain proper markups. Even with st...

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Robert Patton, Founder & CEO of SHEATH Underwear, about his journey turning a hand-sewn prototype into a thriving brand, and the sheer grit, problem-solving, and single-minded focus required to bring his vision to life.

Robert sketched the idea for a dual-pouch underwear design while deployed in Iraq, then returned home, bought a sewing machine, and personally crafted the initial samples for his friends. When early manufacturing runs ran into significant fit and quality hurdles, his steadfast commitment never wavered. Instead of walking away, he channeled his ingenuity—spending three y...

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Carla Daniela, founder of Tailor Love in San Diego, about why a wedding dress only really works when it stops trying to please anyone but the bride wearing it.

Carla’s shop spent years doing general alterations before she narrowed her focus entirely to wedding dresses. Brides come to her stressed about pleasing everyone else at the wedding: their mother’s opinion, tradition, whatever’s trending. Carla’s answer is blunt: it’s her day, her dress. The goal, as Carla puts it, is a dress that “won’t fit anyone...

There is a unique magic in taking an idea from raw concept, sketching every detail, selecting the perfect textiles, and seeing it walk down the aisle.

For Richard and Lenka’s wedding at @the.castle.wedding, I was honored to design the bridesmaid collection.

Catch every step of the transformation and final looks in action! This is just Part 1 of our series—drop a comment with your favorite look and follow the journey ✨✂️

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Jerónimo Canale, Founder of Synced Graphics, about the power of aligning high-performing ads with a seamlessly optimized store experience. After early 3D content work for a kombucha brand generated real sales, Jerónimo expanded into paid ads to directly influence growth—refining Shopify offers and page copy to perfectly complement what the ads promised.

While performance agencies track ad metrics and Shopify shops monitor store metrics, Jerónimo treats both as a single ecosystem. By connecting how specific offers convert across different audiences, his team unlocks key insigh...

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, Claire-Lys Bastien Wald sits down with Sara DeLuca, Co-Founder and Product Lead at Dovetail Workwear.

Building an apparel brand for tradeswomen and women who work with their hands requires far more than shrinking men’s workwear or adding pastel colorways. Sara shares how Dovetail co-develops durable, fit-focused utility pants, outerwear, and workwear with real women in the field—from landscapers and carpenters to construction professionals. The conversation explores bridging high-performance durability with street-ready utility, leveraging industrial materials like burnished melamine buttons and natural palettes, and maintaining core brand integrity while expanding...

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Gabriel Cardier, Founder and CEO of Aurushi, about redefining adaptive apparel by solving functional hardware friction and prioritizing dignity in design.

While the broader fashion market often approaches adaptive clothing as a mere checklist item—relying on basic velcro or zipper additions—apparel worn with prosthetics, orthotics, and braces faces severe physical friction. High-tensile hardware, carbon fiber sockets, and titanium components rapidly destroy standard fabrics and cause garment failure. By testing high-performance, four-way stretch, and abrasion-resistant textiles through active movement, Aurushi bridges the gap between technical durability and every...

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Jessica Couch, Founder of Fashion Tech Directory, about why fashion brands keep struggling to adopt the technology built to help them.

Jessica spent 13 years watching fashion brands and technology providers try to communicate and mostly fail. Solution providers pitch in dense, data-first language built for other industries, while brands operate on a mix of quantitative numbers and qualitative, emotional signals that most tech vendors never account for. The result is a market where good tools go unused, brands get intimidated before they even evaluate a solution, and teams...

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Emily Petroff, founder and CEO of Switch Society, about what happens when you remove money from the equation — and give women access to fashion through community, circulation, and zero guilt.

Eighty percent of the American closet hasn’t been worn in the last year. Emily Petroff knew this, because she was living it. But instead of buying more or donating and moving on, she did something different: she put a post on Facebook, rented a meeting room at the Hilton, and invited women to come swap clothes. Twenty wo...

A few years ago, I found myself standing in a room in Algeria, completely immersed in color, craftsmanship, and generations of women celebrating together.

I wasn’t there studying cultural traditions.

I was there standing beside my dear friend Halla.

Yet, when your life’s work revolves around Design, Product Development, and Brand Strategy, it becomes impossible not to observe something deeper.

What struck me most wasn’t the beauty.

It was the continuity.

Every ceremony introduced something distinct, yet nothing felt disconnected from what came before. Every...

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Andy Fine, founder of Sartoro, about what it really takes to deliver a bespoke suit experience entirely online — and why the fit might actually be better than what you’d get in a store.

Getting a well-fitted suit has always meant navigating a trade-off: quality costs money, coordination takes time, and the tailoring process requires showing up in person. For anyone buying for a group — a wedding party, a corporate event — that equation multiplies quickly. Andy experienced exactly this friction as a young groomsman, and rather than accept it as...

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Shreya Bhan, Founder of BrushCode, about what happens when a fashion designer with 15 years of industry experience gets tired of waiting for the tools she needed — and builds them herself.

BrushCode is a trend intelligence platform built primarily for small and independent brands — the ones that have always been left out of the room where trend forecasting decisions get made. The platform works in three stages: locking in a brand’s DNA, surfacing relevant trends filtered through that DNA, and generating a confidence score before a single fabric gets...

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Parke Ballantine — stylist, creative director, artist, and facilitator. Together, we unpack the magic of that effortless presence we all admire. Parke beautifully compares it to a serene duck gliding across the water—calm and graceful on the surface, powered by deep, intentional movement underneath. It is a stunning blend of psychology, somatic practice, color and light theory, and ancestral traditions, proving that self-expression is a rich, lifelong journey of identity and memory.

Throughout her career across commercial sets, editorial campaigns, and executive consultations, Parke quietly cultivated a philosoph...

Gift Wrapping Is a Love Language. Not because the paper is expensive, or the ribbon is perfectly tied, or the fold is flawless. But because someone chose to spend time on something that would be undone in seconds. That decision — to slow down and make something beautiful before it is opened — can convey as much intentionality than the present inside.

A gesture that predates the gift bag

Humans have been wrapping gifts with intention for thousands of years, and almost every culture developed its own expression of the same impulse: presentation as care.

The...

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Melissa Dusenberry, Founder and Creative Director of All The Brilliants, about what it means to buy jewelry with intention — and why so much of the industry has made that genuinely difficult to do.

Melissa began her career as an art director in advertising, moved to Paris to find something more personally fulfilling, and discovered the jewelry world through a private high jewelry club for high-net-worth women in London. What she found there — a mix of deep history, ethical opacity, and almost no guidance for the conscious consumer — became the...

A girls’ meetup at @WHotelDubai turned into something I did not expect — a quiet education in Emirati jewelry culture.

The hotel had integrated traditional Emirati aesthetic throughout the space in a way that felt intentionaL. The gold pieces displayed were references to a jewelry tradition that goes back over four thousand years and carries more cultural weight than most people realize.

The UAE’s connection to jewelry dates to the Bronze Age, when the region was a major trade hub connecting the Indus Valley civilizations, the Mediterranean world, and everything in between. For centuries, Dubai’s histor...

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Tracy Vontelle Green, Co-Founder & CEO of Vontelle, about what it means to build a brand that solves a problem most people didn’t even know they had.

Vontelle started with a simple, physical frustration: glasses that don’t fit. Frames that press into your cheekbones, temples too short, nose bridges too narrow. Tracy and her co-founder Nancy went to Paris, measured their friends’ noses, drew sketches, and found one manufacturer willing to break the mold — literally.

What makes this conversation remarkable is how Tracy talks about resilie...

On the intersection of creative direction and sourcing — and what it looks like when the two are finally the same conversation.

Some materials communicate before they are ever cut and sewn.

Creative direction and sourcing are the same conversation.

We help brands find the materials that match the vision — and bring it into product.

If your collection exists in your head but not yet in your hands, let’s talk.

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Taylor Artman, Co-Founder & CEO of Surf & Turf Golf, about what it really means to build a brand from a social club logo that went viral to 650+ wholesale accounts, all without outside capital.

What stands out in this conversation is how Taylor thinks about growth. Not as a destination, but as a discipline — knowing when to say no, when to double down, and how to get out of your own way so the company can actually scale.

Ten years in, bootstrapped, and just now hitting what he call...

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Cynthia Kim, Founder of Love Classic, about what it really takes to build a niche fashion brand from a single product — and grow it with intention.

Cynthia started with thigh-high socks. Not randomly — but because she understood the product from the inside out: the fiber, the construction, the feel. That foundation is now informing how she approaches her first clothing line, launching in capsule collections this August.

What stands out in this conversation is how Cynthia thinks about quality and timing — how she navigated COVID’s disruption...

For a long time, Paris was the plan.

It made sense on paper.

Fashion capital. Creative energy. The city that shaped so much of what I thought I knew about this industry.

But life has a way of offering you something better than the plan you had.

Dubai was not what I expected to choose.

And then, it chose me — and everything shifted.

Not because Dubai is more glamorous,

But because it asked something different of me.

It asked me to build from a...

Ariane and I have known each other for years — long before Lys Link, long before any of this made professional sense.

What started as a friendship in Montréal eventually became something else entirely: a working relationship built on mutual trust, shared standards, and the kind of honesty that only comes from knowing someone well enough to tell them the truth.

We are a flight apart. We have never worked in the same room.

And yet this past year has been one of the most aligned professional experiences I have had.

The...

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Dario Markovic Ristic, CEO of Eric Javits, about leading a heritage accessory brand through D2C transformation, operational complexity, and the next layer of AI-driven growth.

Eric Javits has been built over more than four decades, but the brand’s recent evolution reflects a very modern reality: even established fashion businesses cannot rely only on product, reputation, or wholesale visibility anymore. When physical retail was disrupted, the company had to move quickly from a primarily B2B model into a direct-to-consumer structure — building customer data, digital operations, and a lea...

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Joseph Alexander Rein, Founder and CEO of LW PEARL and LW PEARL Atelier, about building a fashion business at the intersection of luxury craft, textile development, digital product workflows, and retail expansion.

Joseph brings a rare perspective into the conversation: one shaped by couture-level garment work, embroidery, luxury, and the realities of bringing a brand into market. Through LW PEARL Atelier, his team works across high-touch textile development, embellishment, embroidery, swatches, prototypes, and runway-driven deadlines. Through LW PEARL Brand, that same craftsmanship is being translated into a scala...

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Janice Tam, Co-Founder & CEO of TrueToForm, about how body scanning, 3D fit prediction, and sizing data are reshaping the way apparel brands approach fit online.

Fit is often treated as a size chart problem. But for apparel brands, it sits much deeper — inside customer confidence, e-commerce conversion, product development, return rates, and the emotional first experience someone has with a brand.

Janice shares how TrueToForm helps brands measure customers remotely, predict fit through 3D avatars, and make size charts more accurate over time. The conversation also ex...

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Cayla O’Connell Davis, CEO & Co-Founder of Subset, about the operational reality behind sustainable fashion — and why material standards, certifications, chemical safety, and supply chain decisions are becoming impossible to separate from brand credibility.

This conversation goes far beyond marketing claims.

From organic cotton sourcing and customer education to textile recycling systems and the hidden chemicals in everyday garments, Cayla shares what it actually looks like to build a product around long-term responsibility instead of short-term convenience.

We explore:

• Why sustain...

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Martin Engster, Founder of Engsta Rides, about building a brand rooted in automotive culture and translating that passion into apparel.What began as a personal connection to cars — shaped by early exposure, environment, and experience — gradually evolved into something broader. Not just clothing, but a way to express identity through what you drive, how you live, and what you connect with.Rather than approaching fashion through trends or traditional inspiration, Martin built his brand by pulling from a completely different world — automotive culture — and translating that into design, messaging, and product.F...

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Jaclyn Brautigam, Founder of Fordham Fashion, about the operational blind spots that prevent emerging designers from turning strong creative work into viable businesses.

Many designers are trained to develop products — but not to sell them. They are often left navigating wholesale, pricing, margins, and distribution without a clear roadmap.

From wholesale entry strategy to pricing structures, the conversation highlights how commercial viability in fashion depends less on the product itself and more on the systems built around it.

We explore: • Why many designers underesti...

Most people ask about price and lead time. I look at something else first.

Most people ask about price and lead time. I look at something else first.

When a brand asks, “Can you recommend a factory?” they usually mean capacity, pricing, and lead times.

I look for something else first.

I look for how the factory thinks when something goes wrong.

Because in production, something always goes wrong: A fabric arrives slightly off. A trim is delayed. A measurement doesn’t behave the way it did in the sample...

🎙️ In this special author feature of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Romain Liot, fashion entrepreneur and author of Reset Fashion, about why sustainability in fashion needs to move beyond intention, image, and simplified consumer narratives.

Drawing from his experience building Adore Me and navigating the operational reality of fashion from the inside, Romain brings a direct and sometimes blunt perspective on what has stalled progress in the industry. Not because sustainability no longer matters, but because many of the stories built around it were never fully adapted to the economic, structural, and supply-chain realities brands actually face...

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Nathan Trafford, Founder of Trafford Watch Co., about how product meaning is actually built over time—through use, memory, and personal context.

In a category shaped by heritage and craftsmanship, the real question becomes:not just how a product is designed, but how it lives with the customer.

From structuring design between function and emotion to maintaining a human-centered approach in an AI-driven landscape, this conversation explores what it means to build products that stay relevant beyond the moment of purchase.

We explore: • How funct...

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Kiefer Cohen, Co-founder of Sad Eyewear, about building an independent eyewear brand at the intersection of subculture, product discipline, and multi-channel growth — including their expansion into a first flagship retail space in Costa Mesa, CA, USA.

From subculture-driven design to disciplined product focus, the conversation highlights how independent brands navigate growth without diluting what made them relevant in the first place.

We explore:• The subculture collaborations act as both brand positioning and acquisition channels• Why staying within a defined aesthetic can outperform trend-chasing in saturated markets• Th...

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Elif Akaydin, Founder of Patent of Heart, about building a fashion brand where product, craftsmanship, and social impact are structurally interconnected — not just conceptually aligned.

What starts as a handbag brand quickly reveals a much deeper system: one that connects women artisans across India, Lebanon, and Turkey, while funding education for young girls through every sale. This isn’t about adding purpose to a product. It’s about designing a business where every layer — from sourcing to production to revenue — reinforces a mission.

From building cross-border ar...

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Sophia Pervez, Founder of Formanova, to explore what it actually takes to build AI tools that can operate within the precision demands of the jewelry industry.

While generative AI has rapidly expanded across fashion and content creation, jewelry exposes a critical limitation: accuracy. From gemstone color to millimeter-scale proportions, even minor discrepancies can lead to customer dissatisfaction, returns, and loss of brand trust.

From building in a category where detail is non-negotiable to rethinking how AI integrates into creative workflows, Sophia shares a grounded perspective on wh...

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, I spoke with Aleksandra Sivokoneva, Creative Director of Mana Fashion, about building a functional fashion ecosystem in Miami — through infrastructure, access, and community.

Most fashion conversations focus on visibility, branding, and product. But none of that sustains without the systems behind it. In emerging markets like Miami, the real challenge isn’t creativity — it’s the absence of structured support: sourcing, space, and industry connection.

From real estate-driven development to B2B services and local sourcing access, this conversation breaks down what it actually takes to build an environment w...

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, Claire Lys speaks with Mitchella Gilbert, Founder of OYA Apparel, about designing clothing for real conditions — where performance is directly tied to environment, health, and function.

Most apparel is developed within controlled parameters, optimized for appearance or perceived performance. But for individuals operating in high-intensity environments — military, medical, or physically demanding roles — the reality is different. Constant exposure to heat, sweat, and friction creates conditions that most products are not built to withstand.

From moisture management systems to wear studies across military and high-performance environments, the conversation explores how apparel...

🎙️ In this episode of The Fashion Translator, Claire Lys sits down with Darren Seigel, Chief Business Development Officer at TONA Activewear, to explore how performance apparel can support mental well-being, confidence, and community — without compromising on fit, function, or comfort.

Born from a deeply personal mission around mental health and suicide prevention, TONA set out to create what many brands never fully address: a truly high-performance legging that works for every body, stays supportive all day, and avoids harmful forever chemicals.

This conversation explores:• How mental health became the foundation of TONA’s brand strategy• Why compressi...