We recently connected with Khairi Mdnor and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Khairi thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
My wife Nathalie and I were on a trip to Myanmar with a 3 year old in tow about 10 years ago and during our stopover in Bangkok, we chanced upon a pair of kids harem pants and absolutely loved how effortless it was on our daughter. Even though Nathalie is a design director at an architecture firm while my background is in lifestyle marketing and event production, we were always drawn to garments and ethnic wear during our travels, given our respective background and influences (Nathalie’s father is a Belgian tribal art dealer while I was raised in a multi ethnic Asian household)
During the early days of our courtship in New York, when Nathalie was moonlighting as a deejay at jazz bars and local eateries while I was hosting sport recreation meet ups with the creative community downtown, we never stopped dreaming of creative projects we’d like to work on together. When we dreamt of opening up a Brazilian bar and fleshed out some ideas about the look and vibe and came up with a name for it, JOAO eventually became an event production outlet. After a successful run of underground ping pong events for PUMA, we created a platform called RECESS to bring the creative community and their colleagues and families together for the love of recreational sports. The INTERMISSION mixtape series was another creative outlet for us to curate music from our family of deejays, friends and collaborators from all over the world.
We always knew we wanted to do something that we could connect our travel adventures to but wasn’t sure what it was when we first secured a domain name for the brand 2 years before it manifested. S U P E R F U S S Y is truly an organic culmination of stories from our adventures together, morphed into an apparel collection that reflect our love of travel and culture, ease and functionality.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
During the early days of S U P E R F U S S Y the collections were solely focused on kids wear featuring colorful harem pants, kurta shirts and puebla dresses. Our research in ethnic wear led us to small batch artisans in Mexico, India, Indonesia, Morocco, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Thailand whom we cultivated relationships with till this very day. From Fatima in Morocco who helps make our Fez style kaftans or Duran and his family who embroiders our Alevi kaftans, we are grateful for the community of artisans we work with. Almost every piece we design is named after a place that we either drew inspiration from or traveled to. While our focus has shifted predominantly to adult apparel, a natural evolution driven by constant enquiries for adult sized options, our commitment to sourcing and curating distinctive vintage pieces for all ages remain consistent.
A substantial part of our collection is designed to be gender-fluid, empowering our customers to embrace their individuality and personal style for any occasion. Aside from being able to share our wardrobe, we are most proud of celebrating the diverse age span encompassed by our clientele. Packing and traveling light is a big ethos of the brand and our sincerest hope is that anyone and everyone can find a piece that they love from our collection.
We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.
S U P E R F U S S Y is accessible online thru our webshop and/or at our weekly pop ups around vintage and flea market scenes in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Ojai, Santa Barbara and Palm Springs, updated every week on our instagram, our primary source of social media presence. We absolutely love meeting and connecting in person and that shared love and learnings is a two way street that often inspires us, which explains why we would drive up as early as 3:30am up to Palm Springs to set up shop! Not only is the sunrise drive spectacular, it’s also a wonderful way to feed the mind and catch up on podcasts we are short on time with and listen to uninterrupted in its entirety!
Have you ever had to pivot?
During the pandemic, my entire event production business went up in flames but I’m glad I was able to pivot to S U P E R F U S S Y which back then was always a side hustle passion project (eternally grateful for the small business PPP loans as well) The entire episode made me realize how much I love working on the brand and I am forever grateful for my partner Nathalie for doing some heavy financial lifting during that dark period. The most important thing is to always have faith that there is abundance in the universe and that everything happens for a divine reason, as cliche as it sounds. I’ve always had many interests and always willing to learn and put myself in uncomfortable positions but those lessons have made me the person that I am.
Contact Info:
- Website: superfussy.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/superfussy
- Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/khairimdnor
Image Credits
We own the rights to all of those images.