About this episode

Mara Hoffman discusses her journey as a designer, the challenges of sustainability in fashion, and her bold decision to close her brand after 24 years.

🎙️ Sponsors du mois🌐 Squarespace — la plateforme no-code, boostée par l’IA, pour créer et développer votre site web tout-en-un.🛡️ MAIF — Épisode Assurance & indépendants : les erreurs qui peuvent vous coûter cher | En partenariat avec la MAIF. — 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…

People in this episode

Host: Adrien Garcia

Guest: Mara Hoffman

Topics covered

• fashion
• sustainability
• entrepreneurship
• design
• personal reinvention

Keywords

• Mara Hoffman
• sustainable fashion
• entrepreneurship
• design
• Sex and the City

Sponsors

Squarespace, MAIF

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Parsons, Sex and the City

Places: New York, Brooklyn, New York woods

More episodes of TheBoldWay

• [CLIP] "The brand is bigger than its founders" | Shira Suveyke Snyder (Proenza Schouler) · June 12, 2026 · 16 min
• #535 Shira Suveyke Snyder (CEO) | Leading Proenza Schouler Into Its Next Chapter · June 11, 2026 · 1h 35m
• [CLIP] The moral wall: when sustainability stopped being optional | Mara Hoffman (Fashion Designer, Photographer) · June 11, 2026 · 20 min
• [CLIP] Patricia Fields, Sex and the City and a $250 yes that started everything | Mara Hoffman (Fashion Designer, Photographer) · June 10, 2026 · 11 min
• [CLIP] "It's like dying and giving birth at the same time" - Closing a brand after 24 years | Mara Hoffman (Fashion Designer, Photographer) · June 9, 2026 · 13 min
• Oser : le seul fil rouge d'une carrière de 21 ans | Hedwige Gronier · June 5, 2026 · 10 min

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the TheBoldWay podcast page.