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Thanks to Mara for stopping by TheBoldWay! Mara Hoffman is an American designer who founded her eponymous brand in New York in 1999, straight out of Parsons. For 24 years, without ever taking a single outside investor or opening her capital, she built one of the most distinctive brands in American fashion — discovered early on by Patricia Fields, who bought an entire bag of her dresses to style Sex and the City. In 2008, she reinvented swimwear; in 2015, she had a moral wake-up call and spent the next eleven years turning her brand into a benchmark for sustainable fashion; and in 2024, she made the boldest decision of all: she shut everything down rather than raise outside capital. She comes on the show to tell us why "closing a brand is like dying and giving birth at the same time," why knowing how to end something matters more than knowing how to last, and how, at 49, she is reinventing herself between Brooklyn and the New York woods.

Timeline

02:30 — Buffalo roots, classical cellist father, dance, Parsons and BFA in 1999

05:30 — Foundational internships at Zuli Bet in Paris and Elisa Jimenez in New York: upcycling and hand-made before the language existed

11:00 — Patricia Fields, Sex and the City and launching the brand from a studio above Curry in a Hurry

22:00 — The print era, 24 years without a single investor, Paris showrooms (Anna Luisa, Le Clerc) and a financing dance between factors and credit lines

29:00 — The 2008 swimwear pivot, the silk price crisis, the switch to polyester and the ongoing battle against copycats

40:00 — The moral wall (2015): motherhood, environmental awakening, a first decision to close and her production director's flat "no"

52:00 — Eleven years of sustainable transformation: full audit, exit from synthetics, the "women-planet" philosophy and the loss of 250 stockists

1:05:00 — COVID, the D2C pivot, the 2023 relapse and the "low frequency" of scarcity

1:18:00 — The final decision: the investor deck never signed, two meetings and a gut no — "closing my brand will be the most important thing I'll ever do"

1:30:00 — Life after the brand: spiritual practices (TM, clairvoyance, psychedelics, The Artist's Way), creative doula-ing, AI, what she teaches her 15-year-old son, and the "hummingbird life" between Brooklyn and Cold Spring

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Nb: TheBoldWay ou The Bold Way, anciennement connu sous le nom de Entreprendre dans la mode ou EDLM , est un podcast produit et réalisé par Adrien Garcia.

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