Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Lauren Quinn. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Lauren, thanks for joining us today. What do you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry?

While challenging to generalize all of corporate america, it is a common practice in the apparel industry to design “fast fashion”, ie fashion for profit that is neither about fit nor ethical manufacturing. Our brand model is based on empowerment on both sides of the garment. This means we aim to lift up the people behind the hands that touch the garment through respectful wages and respect as well as listening to our consumer and designing a garment that will embrace the skin she is in rather than creating a garment that completely disrespects her figure and leaves her feeling less than she is.

For too long, mass apparel brands have been quick to design/manufacture swimwear and it has perpetuated a negative body image and discomfort with purchasing swimwear. And to think, we all make our best memories in a swimsuit! There has also been a shift over the past decades of offshore manufacturing in order to produce faster and cheaper goods. This has only further degraded the quality of the work environment and lowered the respect shown to the humans actually crafting the garments we wear!

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I organically fell into the apparel industry because I saw a white space in the market where women weren’t able to find quality swimwear that fit, if you weren’t a size 2 and didn’t want to drop $500 on a suit! I paired this with the objective of wanting to create stronger opportunities for creative women to contribute to a product where they were respected with time and wages as well as appreciated for their years of experience and what they brought to the process.

Bromelia swims in a saturated market of “swimwear designed for fit”, but we take it to the next level. Every garment we design, is designed for a specific women. We give this person a name, a body shape, and identify an area on her body that she wants to either cover or share with the world. We then sample it and take it to our retail location in Los Angeles, California in order to test in on many rounds of real women and get their unbiased review. We continuously tweak the patterns until it creates a strong level of comfort in our consumer and then we put in the market. Our styles are not just about what looks inspirational in an Instagram post, but rather they are garments that actual fit and wear well! Our goal is to create a second skin, for our customer to step into where she doesn’t dislike what she sees, but rather is able to own the skin she is in!

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Running a business is started with creation, innovation and action, but it’s sustained with resilience. When I founded Bromelia, I imagined that there was a list of tasks needed to be achieved and once they were tackled, the task was checked off your to-do list. Hard lessons learned later, I understood that there are few “forever” elements of a business. Whether that be creative elements like the UI of a website or logistics such as vendors, service providers, etc! What is comes down to is “best fits” for a company’s given needs at that specific moment in time. And a business’ needs change just like a person’s does, as we grow. So company resilience comes not only in growing during major challenging periods such as covid or a recession, but in learning how to be non-reactive to the micro day to day challenges that can wear a company down just as easily.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Pivot is probably the word our internal team uses most frequently and this concept can be a challenge for a team who embrace the details such as ours!! But we have learned that pivots can bring your greatest successes, so we love and embrace them. On not just 1, but 6 different occasions, the team and I had spent countless months building a relationship with production houses across the globe to make our goods. From missing the deadline by months, to not answering calls, to making major garment errors, to cancelling orders the day production is due to start, we have lived our fair share of production house nightmares! But with each factory pivot over several years, we got closer to finding the right team to not only improve our patterns, but build an efficient process to mitigate leakage of capital, maintain respect of those who make our goods and build the foundation for truly strong partnerships with service providers we trust and improve our product! If we never fell, we would have not had the opportunity to rise.

Contact Info:

• Website: bromeliaswimwear.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/bromelia_swimwear
• Facebook: facebook.com/bromelia_swimwear
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bromelia-swimwear-ethically-made

Image Credits
bromelia swimwear