We were lucky to catch up with Sael Bartolucci recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Sael, thanks for joining us today. Getting that first client is always an exciting milestone. Can you talk to us about how you got your first customer who wasn’t a friend, family, or acquaintance?

Back in 2016 when my partner at the time, Jenna and I started House of Hiatus we knew we wanted first and foremost for the business to be wholesale. We had worked in retail both on the design and merchandising side and we knew we did not want to be a fashion brand, we were creating a platform for hotels and resorts to develop cool, comfortable and sustainable robes. This meant producing anywhere from 100 to 2000 units, depending on the size of the partner resort. We studied the hospitality business, focusing on the US market and knew we had a gold mine of resorts close by in Palm Springs, California. So once we made samples of the robes we decided to cold call hotels in Palm Springs and set up appointments with their managers and see if they were interested in the line and really to get feedback on what we were offering. In 2016 linen robes were not common, Instagram had not really taken off with businesses yet, nor did hotels have IG accounts the way they do now. I would say 80% of the managers we spoke to said they had classic heavy white terry robes and sometimes did not have a robe in-room at all! We got our appointments, drove to Palm Springs and spent a whole weekend exploring all the wonderful resorts in the area, often showing up at a front desk if we could not reach them by phone. It was a success. We landed our very first hotel, the Arrive and had great interest from a few others. We knew we had created something special that was filling an empty niche in the field of hospitality and more broadly in the travel and leisure world.

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

I grew up in Italy, raise by and Italian father and Texan mother. At 19 I moved to Philadelphia to attend a textile school where I deepened my love of fabric, fashion, interiors and collectibles. After college I had the opportunity to move to LA for work and freelanced for various fashion brands, where I really learned the challenges of this often glamorized industry. After a few years I decided to pivot into making furniture: my perspective changed and I went from designing 2D into 3D and started my own line called Isotrope Design. I also got my masters in Fine Art at Art Center in Pasadena, California where I rekindled my love of history, theory and making art. Here I learnt so much about myself, my power as a story teller but also my limits as an artist and this inhibition opened my eyes in an almost reactive way. I started reconsidering design and my ability to take classic objects and shapes and revise them in a way that is both functional and surprisingly contemporary. I LOVE thrifting and finding antiques that fit my environment (wether its my body or my home) regardless of their era or style.
When I started House of Hiatus I knew I wanted to apply this very concept of taking something that many own and use and make it better. It was time for the ‘ol terry cloth robe to make space for something easier and perhaps more exciting to wear, an item that was both universal (in gender and sizing), classic and yet felt fresh and modern.

Because House of Hiatus is a unisex travel and leisure line, we offer shapes that are friendly to all genders and sizes. This inclusivity sets us apart from a lot of similar robe brands. We also offer fabric that is durable and very washable because so many of our customers are hotels, we know our robes and garments are getting much more wear than something being washed say, only once a week. We use cotton/linen blends as they prove to be more durable than pure cotton or pure linen and a range of colors to chose from. We offer 3 styles of robes, the classic Open, the Hood and the Caftan. Hotels and resorts tend to carry these 3 robes but we also offer pants, slippers, a sun hat and a travel bag. All the accessories are created with traveling in mind, so they are packable and easily washable. We love getting feedback from our online shoppers and seeing customers that after staying at one of our partner hotels want to buy a robe for themselves!

We are still considered a small business and we make everything locally here in LA, which gives us the chance to really overlook our production and limit our carbon footprint where possible.
This tailored approach with our clients also allows us to work with both smaller bed and breakfasts as well as bigger hotel chains, because we do not have quantity minimums that brands that produce overseas have.

We also sell via our website! So anyone can tap into the hiatus lifestyle! Seasonally we make new colors and fabrics exclusively for the website. We also LOVE collaborating with friends and artist. We recently had some robes left over from a large production and a friend offered to play with a dye removal technique he was experimenting with and created a gorgeous batch of one of a kind robes for us that we called the Gem Collection. We also just launched our fourth style of robe, the much anticipated Open Hood Robe, a hybrid of our two best sellers. This holiday season has us excited for the launch of a new item that will pair wonderfully with our beloved Pant, so stay tuned on our Instagram & mailing list!

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

We make all our garments here in Los Angeles. I knew from the beginning I wanted to oversee all of the production from start to finish, and this meant doing everything locally. I am not a fashion designer by trade, I am somewhat self taught in that sense, though I did take fashion courses in college while majoring in textile design. What I did have were beautiful caftans and traditional djellaba robes I had collected through the years and knew I could use those as my jumping point in designing the House of Hiatus collection. I had friends who were working with a pattern maker in downtown and I met up with him in 2016 to see if he was willing to help me “frankenstein” the vintage pieces I had and modernize the design. We immediately clicked and he offered to also make the samples and eventually oversee the production. Seven years later I am still working with Alberto and his small family business. All the fabric is also sourced in LA. We have a few local vendors depending on what we are looking for. Often for our online collection we use dead-stock fabric, to reduce our impact on the environment and often a wonderfully economic way to introduce a higher end fabric to the collection that otherwise would be cost prohibitive. We are always in search of natural materials that are both durable and stand out. For many years we also custom dyed in order to really have unique colors and follow our own inspiration, but this added step in the production is often hard for big quantities as different lots of natural fabric take dye differently and the result can have inconsistencies. There is a big learning curve when dealing with large units in production, as much as the artist in me wants to lean into the unexpected, consistency is key to quality and reducing variables limits risk for mistakes. My advice would be to always look for new vendors and be open to alternate production, because having back-up is so important. You never know when the next fabric shortage will happen or if you get a big opportunity and need help overnight. Having options is key to success and stability.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

In March of 2020 my then partner, Jenna had to relocate her family to Michigan so we decided she would stay on as a consultant. Then the pandemic hit and we quickly realized it would be hard to juggle the long distance business partnership. I knew I wanted to continue steering the ship through the storm and see what would happen. To my surprise the lockdown brought online sales up, as most humans were stuck at home and wanted to be comfortable and in loungewear! As per the wholesale side of the business, most resorts staid open because they had open spaces for guest to enjoy vacationing at a distance, so orders were still coming in. I rolled up my sleeves and with almost no help worked through the next 24 months taking it day by day, as the whole world did. The pandemic ironically brought us 2 of our biggest wholesale accounts and with them a new understanding of how to scale up our production and the new needs the company had in order to grow accordingly. My advice is always have a plan B (and C!) and try to keep to the plan. Producing garments is like doing math: you have to follow the steps and not cut short any of them or it won’t add up. Any issues I have had have been a results of oversight on prep and production. Learning from these mistakes is key to improve on the business model and overall performance.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.houseofhiatus.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/house_of_hiatus/
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/houseofhiatus
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/saelbartolucci/
• Other: www.pinterest.com/house_of_hiatus/

Image Credits
Yael Nov, Arrive Hotels