The Glossy Podcast

Ken Downing, the fashion director and svp at Neiman Marcus, will see just under 100 fashion shows this season. That's a light year. It used to be about 120 overall -- and at one point, it was that many shows in New York alone. Things are changing. As designers change the ways they show their collections -- be it on the runway, in private appointments at showrooms or at presentations -- the buyer's...

As other designers reconsider the role that runway plays in their businesses, Alice McCall is just getting started at New York Fashion Week. For her debut runway show, which took place Saturday morning, the Australia-based designer said she embraced the exact elements of the production that others find to be distracting. That included planning the music; choosing the hair and makeup, and coordinat...

Celine Semaan, the CEO and designer at the sustainable fashion and accessories brand Slow Factory, realizes that running her own fashion brand is, in and of itself, an unsustainable exercise. During New York Fashion Week, Semaan hosted an event about sustainability, technology and human rights in the fashion industry because, as she put it, she wants to do her part to mobilize the industry to taki...

Vicky Yang, a talent and digital strategy manager at the talent agency The Society Management, has picked up a few new tricks over the last several years. While managing modeling jobs and schedules for the company's roster of talent, Yang now also deals with the daily schedules, PR and brand contracts for the group of influencers (called "creatives" internally) she now represents. Yang joined the...

Designer Audra Noyes has put in hours working at luxury fashion houses Lanvin and Ralph Lauren. But she's always had her sights set on putting on a fashion show of her own. And her brand, Audra, held a spot on the official NYFW runway calendar for nine seasons. But this year, she’s taken business behind closed doors, deciding not to host a show but to instead host private appointments with editors...

Taking his company public was a longtime goal for Bonobos CEO Andy Dunn. But a week before he was about to sign a private equity deal to raise more capital for the menswear brand, he got a call from a friend: Preston Bottomy, the vp of fashion group business development at Jet.com and Walmart.com. Now, in addition to being acting CEO of his brand, Dunn is the svp of digital consumer brands at Walm...

Three years ago, designer Mara Hoffman went through what one could call an existential crisis. After running her eponymous label for 15 years when she hit a wall. Feeling like all her brand was doing was adding more “stuff” to the world -- and causing harm to the environment -- she knew she had to completely overhaul her business, or walk away from it all together. Hoffman said the process to make...

At The Fashion Institute of Technology, staff and students are focused on fixing the industry. That’s a big ask. As Michael Ferraro, the executive director of the Infor Design and Technology Lab at FIT, puts it, “industry problems” and how they can be solved were at the center of a recent collaboration that brought together students, faculty, IBM executives, Infor employees and representatives fro...

Glossy senior reporter Hilary Milnes discuss Rent the Runway's in-store strategy, data and unlimited subscriptions with Hampton Catlin, senior director of engineering at Rent the Runway.

Chriselle Lim launched her blogger and influencer career on YouTube in 2010, creating videos centered on makeup tutorials and style advice. Since then, her face has been closely tied to her brand as she's built her Instagram following (@ChriselleLim now has 1 million followers) and her lifestyle blog, The Chriselle Factor. As her brand has matured, though, Lim has come to realize that her business...

Katie Finnegan is shaping the future of Walmart’s relationship with technology. As the principal of Store No. 8, an incubator that’s owned by Walmart but operates as an individual LLC, Finnegan is playing the long game. Her company acquires businesses that are at the forefront of the next generation of retail technology, mastering capabilities like personalization, virtual reality and robotics in...

This year on the Glossy Podcast, we discussed the forces of change, driven by digital technology, that designers, brand founders, and the agencies who work with them were forced to adjust to. We explored topics including how Instagram is changing the way people interact with brands online, the rise (and fall) of see-now-buy-now and designer burnout, what the digitally native brand market looks lik...

Rachel Shechtman is the founder of the concept store Story in Chelsea, a neighborhood in New York City. Story changes its inventory and physical layout every few weeks, and each new remodel is based around a theme. The merchandise carried by Story is usually sourced from small businesses who get facetime with both potential customers or other retailers that are looking for new merchandise. Accordi...

Scott Tannen, the founder and CEO of Boll & Branch, has experience on both the brand side and the investor side of the DTC startup world.

Designer Dan Liu, who owns both his namesake label as well as the fashion brand Tatsuaki, needs fellow designers to pick up the pace. Designers used to have months to design new collections, and that window has been dwindled down to about two weeks. It’s not just designers who are in jeopardy, either — department stores, according to Liu, are at risk of going extinct thanks to the institutions nav...

Luke Grana, the founder of the apparel startup Grana, joins the Glossy Podcast to discuss the state of digitally native retail, why he decided to launch his business in Hong Kong, and what defines a modern, successful brand.

Nadine McCarthy Kahane, founder of online jewelry marketplace Stone and Strand, joined the Glossy Podcast to discuss her company's experiments offline, its influencer partnerships and how it has tried to compete with Amazon.

Rachel Zoe launched her brand in 2011, as direct-to-consumer businesses were booming online. But even though she already had a following from her time spent working as a celebrity stylist and sending out her then-newsletter, The Zoe Report (now a media company), Zoe targeted traditional retailers first. Zoe didn’t launch her own e-commerce site for the brand until 2016, in fact, but since finally...

AYR, the direct-to-consumer brand for women’s apparel, has an origin story that sets it apart from the sea of other digitally native brands selling women’s clothing without the middleman. For its first two years in business, it was incubated by the more mature direct-to-consumer brand Bonobos. When Bonobos decided it needed to focus on its core business in 2016, AYR spun off into an independent br...

Brooke Taylor Corcia, the founder of online fashion and lifestyle store The Dreslyn, wanted to launch her own company to get a more accurate representation of West Coast fashion into the e-commerce lexicon. Three years after launching The Dreslyn as an online destination for access to the chic side of West Coast style, Corcia spoke to Glossy about the art of restraint in building an online store, ...

Bando, the e-commerce site selling kitschy office supplies and accessories designed for the Instagram generation, has struck a balance between mass and niche. The brand’s strong, mostly pink aesthetic, cult-like customer following and best-selling items — like agendas that say things like “I Am Very Busy” — have become its biggest signifiers, and the brand has grown to around 50 employees after a...

When Elaine Kwon realized just how much fashion and luxury brands don’t understand retail’s new digital world order, she started her own e-commerce management firm, Kwontified, to help them figure it out. Kwon had been working at Amazon, helping luxury fashion brands find success on the platform once they'd signed on. She joined us on the Glossy Podcast this week to talk about focusing on shipping...

James LaForce started his career hand-delivering printouts of press releases that highlighted the biggest news and best gossip from parties the night before. He would drop them off at the home of the society reporter at Women’s Wear Daily and return to his office by foot. Things have changed. LaForce joined us on the Glossy Podcast to discuss that mindset, the separation of social media and e-comm...

Designer Daniella Kallmeyer got her first internship in the fashion industry when she handed Luca Luca designer Luca Orlandi her resume at age 15. She went on to more internships with brands including Proenza Schouler and Alexander McQueen, but by the time she decided to launch her namesake ready-to-wear brand, the path to getting a new label off the ground had changed. In Kallmeyer’s words, “ther...

Hal Rubenstein, one of the founding editors of InStyle magazine, joined the Glossy Podcast to discuss retail's "too much stuff" problem, the crime of athleisure and why he's skeptical of all influencers, except maybe Selena Gomez.