From Fast Fashion Designer to Slow Fashion Founder: Dani Des Roches

What is it like to work as a designer for a fast fashion brand? And what is it like to build your own sustainability minded small fashion brand, from circular design practices to figuring out your pricing?

That’s what we’re getting a glimpse into in this episode with Dani Des Roches, designer and founder of the upcycled brand Picnicwear (@picnicwear), recognizable by its groovy 60s/70s aesthetic, bold and playful use of color, and most notably its use of vintage towels as its primary material.

Before that, Dani attended the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City and was behind the scenes as a sweater designer for household names like Urban Outfitters and Express.

Feeling dissatisfied with the industry, Dani started her own B2B design studio, Kismet Concept Studio and of course her Direct to Consumer brand, Picnicwear, which creates high-quality pieces using 95% pre-existing materials.

In this conversation, Dani is giving us a look under the hood of the operations at big fashion brands and sharing what she thinks we should all know about how these brands operate.

She’s also getting transparent about her own journey building a small slow fashion business.

If you want to learn more from Dani, Dani is leading a Circular Fashion Design Workshop that we’re hosting over at Conscious Fashion Collective.

It will be an educational and interactive event for designers, industry professionals, sewists, and sustainable fashion advocates wanting to learn more about sustainability in fashion.

You’ll learn how brands and designers can use circularity as a foundation for design, what a holistic approach to circular apparel design looks like, and tangible strategies to integrate circularity into apparel production and post-consumer reverse supply chain.

>> Get tickets for the circular design workshop led by Dani here!

Or join the Conscious Fashion Collective Membership to attend for free.