The Foundation Nobody Tells You to Build

An Interview with Julia Heuer

There is a version of this story where Julia listens to the advice. Where she pulls back from the obsessive refinement of a pleated, heat-transformed textile that most people in fashion had never seen before. Where she redirects that energy toward brand image, toward shows, toward the kind of visibility machinery that the industry tells you is the real game. Where she becomes more strategic and less fixated.

That version of the brand probably does not exist anymore.

What I find worth sitting with is how close she came to believing the conventional wisdom. A few years into building, she genuinely thought the answer was to spend less time on the product. She had boutiques buying. She had all the signals that she was doing something right. And still the industry's gravitational pull toward image, toward relevance, toward the hamster wheel of seasonal shows and big retailer relationships, made the product feel like a liability. Like she was too focused on the thing that started everything.

The market eventually told her she was wrong to doubt it. Not because craftsmanship is always the answer. But because the window for products that are genuinely unrepeatable, that exist because someone was curious rather than because someone identified a gap, that window is opening again. And she happened to be standing in front of it with something real.

Esteban: You studied textile design, not fashion. You worked at one of the most important textile companies in the world for six years. And then you moved to Paris with a product and no idea what a lookbook was. What did those early years actually teach you?

Julia: I think what I learned, and it really took me a couple of years, is that I'm responsible for my own choices. Responsible for my own life, actually. When you study and then work somewhere, you're almost in a teacher-student situation. Someone tells you what to do. If it goes wrong, you can say you didn't know better. There's much less accountability. And I think this is really what I enjoy most about what I do now. To really be in full charge. To understand, okay, I am fully responsible for everything. There's no one else who's going to help me out of this. I chose to do it. I can't blame anyone else.

Esteban: That changes how you approach everything.

Julia: It gives me a totally different standing in life. I'm approaching life differently through that.

Esteban: The product itself, what made it different? Was it the technique, the aesthetic, the process?

Julia: What set this product apart from the beginning was that there was no purpose to be a fashionable item or a trendy item. My real interest was the beauty of textiles. Patterns, colors, really focusing on the textile part of a garment. I wasn't trying to please anyone in fashion. I also didn't really know the fashion world in that sense. So I just started doing this thing as I thought: this looks nice, this is cool, this is quite arty.

Esteban: And the shibori specifically?

Julia: Since I had no fashion education, I needed to find ways of creating a simplified pattern in terms of sewing that I would actually be able to do. And the shibori, because of the pleating and the shape it creates through the heat-transforming process, already has so much three-dimensionality in it that all I had to do is create a simple shape that would carry it.

Esteban: For people who don't know the technique, give us the foundation.

Julia: Shibori is an ancient Asian technique of tie-dying. You take a fabric, roll it around a tube, bind it centimeter by centimeter with a thread, push it together, and put it in the oven. In classic shibori, the fabric then goes into dying. What we do is different. I'm already printing the fabrics with my own original prints, and then using this technique to pleat and heat-transform the material, not to dye it. What comes out is a three-dimensional pleated fabric that is then sewn into garments.

Esteban: So the differentiation was low technical execution, but total creative flexibility.

Julia: Exactly. And this is how I love to work. It suited me perfectly.

Esteban: From the beginning it was mainly wholesale. What are the real economics of that model? Not in theory. In practice.

Julia: The pros are visibility. When Opening Ceremony bought in after two or three seasons, we were in one of the coolest shops in New York. Stylists were wearing it, posting about it. becomes because you have a bigger variety and you get better prices.

Esteban: And the cons?

Julia: Pricing. The margins are terrible. The wholesale margin, then the shop margin, they're so enormous that every cent in production counts. You're fighting for quality nonstop. Then there's timing. Two seasons, very heavy time conflicts, the bigger shops want deliveries faster and faster. You get into the fashion hamster wheel. Sales windows, sales commissions, all of these economic factors you don't control that squeeze your margins further. And then the payment insecurities. The bigger the shops, the worse the payment situation. No prepayments. Net 90 days. We had problems with bigger retailers going bankrupt and never getting paid. For a small brand, that's a lot of money. And no one is accountable for that. It becomes your problem.

Esteban: The wholesale landscape is also shifting. How exposed does that make you feel as a small brand?

Julia: I don't know if you can ever fully protect yourself from it. We need wholesale. We need to grow it. But our conclusion is that we need to really invest in B2C and have it be our stability. So that through B2C we can handle the waves and the more difficult side of wholesale. B2C became such an important part of the business over the past years, with pretty significant growth, and the margins are much better. So really, wholesale is crucial, also for quantities and production. But focusing on B2C is a very important part for survival as well. 

Esteban: Wholesale gives you the illusion of control until you realize it's just an illusion. The skill set to run a successful D2C is much higher because there are so many more moving parts.

Julia: I don't fully agree with that. In the very beginning, it can be straightforward to sell to wholesalers if you have a good product. You show a collection, buyers come, you have a couple of sales partners. Very few moving pieces. D2C is different. What's the marketing channel, what are the right products, is it email, is it paid social. Many more moving parts. They're both difficult in different ways.

Esteban: What has been the biggest challenge on the D2C side?

Julia: Understanding our client. When you start a web shop, you think: I'll put up some products and people will buy. But you have to analyze very heavily. What are customers actually buying? How much stock do I buy? What do I do with inventory that doesn't sell? There's such a big operation on the back end, customer service, logistics, that I originally didn't see. And it's getting bigger. The bigger role it plays in the business, the more we have to really understand how to provide a good customer experience.

Esteban: And communicating the product digitally. That's its own challenge.

Julia: This is something I'm still figuring out. In the beginning, it was always very important to me to keep communication on a very artistic and abstract level. But people said: I want to see how this actually looks on a person. They couldn't approach the product because they didn't have enough information about how it would make them look. So we've been working heavily over the past year to maintain the art side while also making it feel like a luxurious product that is worth spending a lot of money on. Because it is an expensive product. People need to understand what they're buying, why it costs what it costs, and they need to feel that urge: I really want this, I'm going to look beautiful in this.

Esteban: What's the missing piece right now?

Julia: Analysis. We have analyzed very little so far. What we're doing now is bringing in people who help us deal with all the data, get insights, understand what's working and why, and then use that to decide what we do next. These channels, for a long time, were untouched. We were creating, we were doing, but we never had the insights. We had abandoned checkout carts we never followed up on. Automations and processes that make complete sense to do and we just weren't doing them. So on all levels, we're now analyzing our situation and finding where the improvements are.

Esteban: What is the thing about how you've built this brand that you're most confident was right, even if it was unconventional?

Julia: The product itself. That it was born out of artistic curiosity, not a necessity or a market need. And I understood very quickly that this is a very special product that doesn't exist like this on the market. People come to us because they realize, wow, this is a unique universe, a unique product.

Esteban: What's the most practical lesson you would give an earlier version of yourself on the product side?

Julia: A couple of years ago, I would have told myself I was too focused on the product and not enough on the business and the image side of the brand. I thought I should have focused less on it. Whereas now, with all the shifts over the past years, I can say I'm happy I focused so much on the product and developed it to the level of quality it has now, because that's actually what allows us to survive. The product is the foundation the brand needed for the downs of this industry.

Esteban: The foundation.

Julia: Exactly. And I'm happy we did that. Because now what's becoming really important is that people want a great product. Not just the image around it. And luckily, we have that.

Closing reflection

There is a pattern I keep seeing in conversations with founders who build something real. At some point in the middle of the journey, usually when the business pressure is highest, they look at what they spent the most time on and think it was the wrong thing. Julia thought she was too product-obsessed. That she should have spent more time on image, on shows, on the visibility game. It felt like a rational diagnosis. She was surrounded by an industry that runs on image.

What she could not have known at the time is that she was building a product for a moment that had not arrived yet. The market for genuinely unrepeatable things, for objects that exist because a designer was curious rather than strategic, was not ready. And then it was. And she had the product.

The moment that stayed with me was when she reversed herself mid-sentence. She started to say she wished she had focused less on product, and then she stopped, rethought it out loud, and landed somewhere completely different. "Now I feel like, damn, luckily I focused so much on the product." That is not a rehearsed insight. That is someone actually thinking in real time. And what she arrived at is something worth taking seriously: the industry will always tell you that image is the game, that relevance is the currency, that the product is table stakes. Sometimes that is true. But for a certain kind of founder, the one who builds from curiosity rather than from a business plan, the product is the only thing they cannot outsource or manufacture later. Everything else can be learned. The thing that made the product worth caring about cannot be retrofitted.

Build the foundation before you build the facade.That gave us enormous visibility. And the bigger your quantities get, the easier production