We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Olmos & Flores a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Olmos & Flores, thanks for joining us today. Do you have any thoughts about how to create a more inclusive workplace?

As a part of the LGBT+ community we have always tried our best for people who work or have worked with us to feel free to be who they are, to express creatively and to explode their talents. Most of our collaborators have always been woman and we have always tried to make them feel empowered and to learn from them and most recently half of our team are trans woman, we feel very proud of this as we feel we are a secure place for everyone to thrive and be successful. We feel that this has make us unique as beyond from being a brand we feel as if we were a family growing all together. We really care for other people needs and dreams and try our best to fulfill them because we think if the people who work with us are happy it reflects on the brand and ultimately what our clients consume.

Olmos & Flores, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Olmos y Flores is a Mexican clothing brand, led by the designer duo, Victor Olmos and Ali Flores, founded in 2009 in Guadalajara, Jal. The style of the brand consists of a particular aesthetic, full of sensuality, drama and passion; it seeks the individual expression of those who wear their designs.
In this fashion brand, the greatest muse has always been Mexico, extolling its values ​​from a different perspective and translated into our clothing as part of a new Mexicanness.
“The essence of Olmos y Flores lies in the representation of Mexican culture from a contemporary perspective.”
One of the most important objectives of the brand is to resume and preserve the value of our roots and traditions that make us stand out, for this reason in each collection we integrate artisan works that identify us internationally, such as palm weaving and hand-woven fabrics.
The brand was founded as a necessity to express something and to create something that we felt wasn’t out there to create a brand where we felt comfortable to be who we were.
We are very committed to be unique that is why we make original prints into our fabrics always collaborating with other artists so people feel they are wearing a unique piece of art.
We have experimented in doing every piece of clothing and accessory from swimsuits and briefs to corset dresses and ceramic earrings, we love to create with new materials and silhouettes .

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

From the beginning of Olmos & Flores we’ve had very clear that we wanted to say something this “something” was always been translated into images so our campaigns/ lookbook/videos have always reflected something about us and we guessed that’s something people were attracted to so our followers on social media were always organic. In 2018 we launched a collection called Ensenada were we displayed several accessories made from palm tree, one of them was a very big hat called the “Palapa Hat” made from 3 different iconic Mexican items, the cup was from a Sombrero Charro, the wing was a rug from Michoacán and the “ruffles” were from a Costeño hat. One day a person from Vogue magazine asked us for this hat to use in a photoshoot, this shooting came out to be with Bella Hadid and they posted a very beautiful photo where she only wore our hat. In this time Jacquemus had a similar yet very different hat in his collection and days after Vogue posted this photo with Bella he reposted it in his social media as his own, after this there was a whole discussion and gossip regarding both brands and whose was the original hat, many pages talked about this resulting in very good publicity for us and many more followers as many people got to know our work. Definitely one thing that we were not looking for but were benefited at the end it did not matter if someone copied or not as being creatives we are always getting inspired from other people but we were glad that many more people got to see and appreciated what we do and for us was a big push on our brand.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

We founded Olmos & Flores as two restless young men, we had zero savings or fundings and almost no one believed we could see this idea through. One person believed in us though, that person was Ali’s grandmother who lent us some money to start buying the first materials to make the very first product we made which was men’s underwear, we worked really hard to make the first production and to sell it so we could pay our debt. That was our foundation, a very big dream and a person who believed in us and little by little people were interested in us and in what we created .

Contact Info:

• Website: www.olmosyflores.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/olmosyflores
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/olmosyfloress
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWJsb24QkbMy4B1t2qk0hQA
• Other: https://mx.pinterest.com/olmosyflores/

Image Credits
Photos by Ali Daniel Flores