The relationship between both of Haller’s worlds is a symbiotic one. She might become obsessive with an interiors color palette before those same shades bleed into her clothing collections. She’s just always chasing her instinct. Says Haller, “I’m just the type of person who says yes to anything that excites me.”
Below, the designer opens up about her many creative endeavors, her early fashion gigs at Wet Seal and Bebe, the unlikely job she landed as a teenager, and more.
Glamour: Why did you feel like it was a good time to launch your company when you did?
Jamie Haller: I started the brand in 2020. The thing that was really interesting in that time was the world was changing, and I was changing. I was physically becoming a different person. I was having another child. I was also really deepening my work in interior design in that COVID time period. I felt like I was becoming a new person.
I was changing, and I just assumed my style would too. I was going to become a new person, but I didn’t. I think I kept waiting. You get older and you’re like, “Oh, I’m not like that anymore. I’m more serious now” or whatever it is.
Once I was able to realize that I knew everything I liked already, it was all there. I could really lean into everything I believed and I felt very refreshed from my two years not talking about clothes.
With shoes, I was able to learn and fully immerse myself in something that I didn’t know. When you work in fashion for so long, there’s a language you pick up. There’s all these voices in your head when you’re a designer. There’s the voice of the buyer and the voice of the merchandiser and the voice of your boss and the voice of the customer.
You’ve got to balance out your vision and voice within that. So when you don’t have any of that preconditioning, there’s no voice. It’s just purely what you want. And exploration and doing something that is based on curiosity.
Was it scary? Was there a particular challenge that still haunts you?
When I started my business, I was 40 something. I had had the luxury of working for other people for twenty-something years, and I think that’s probably not what people do as much now. But I amassed so much experience and visibility and understanding of so many areas of the business. I had the luxury of seeing how things were sold, seeing what types of stores things were sold in, seeing how things would sell. I had the luxury of being there when e-commerce became a thing, and learning how to do it and understanding digital marketing. I had the luxury of learning about fit and patterning from a variety of different types of companies, and learning about denim.
So I was able to just amass all this knowledge through experience. Also, I was older and I had been able to create stability for myself in other ways where it was not like, “This has got to work or I’m going to fail.”