Aside from those more egregious offenses, my hands-on ADD nature when put to good use has given me so much purpose in my adult life. To me, working with my hands brings me presence of mind and peace. It commands me to slow down, focus, and create. When I reflect on our current moment, it feels as though we, as a culture are lacking the ability to live slowly. I think that is why I am so drawn to textiles and physical mediums - What could be slower and more intentional than the art of making, maintaining, and repairing textiles?

Hi!

I’m Maddy, I’m the owner of Mend Mother.

At our core, we are a Raleigh based clothing repair and alterations business run by women. Because I am a restless soul, we take things a bit further than just services - we teach sewing workshops, host clothing swaps, and participate in a myriad of other pop-up events. My goal: to extend the useful life of textiles through any means necessary!!

Fashion Design Education Pipeline to Corporate Fashion Design

I feel lucky my parents were open minded/generous enough to pay for me to go to college to study fashion design. It’s a completely impractical degree, but to me it felt like the closest thing to an applied arts degree. I was a terrible student in school in almost every subject besides art and writing. To say my academic confidence was low is an understatement. My guidance counselor even went so far as to encourage me to aim low when thinking about college. Like any 16-17 year old I wanted the opposite of whatever that adult was telling me to do. My mom was also not having it. She spent many nights at the dinner table limping through math homework with me. In the end, I did get into the schools I aimed for, Mr. Barbeau be damned.

I started my fashion design degree at Syracuse University in 2013 with no sewing skills whatsoever. This was the age of neoprene digitally printed dresses, the rise of athleisure, and I loved me some H&M. Sustainability was a small kernel of my formal education, the extent of which being “use organic cotton” and “recycle!” As a young student entering the industry, you just don’t really know what you are signing up for. You spend 4 years learning about fabric, sewing, print design, and developing a creative process. You study iconic designers and dream of going to fashion week to watch as new designs flow down the catwalk. Fashion school (or at least my program) trains everybody to want a creative director’s job, and if we are being honest that is probably like 0.001% of the industry. You intern, you hustle, you take the unpaid internship and work a second job, and take the abuse from your unhappy bosses and tell yourself “this is what I’ve been dreaming of!!??.” Sometimes you work at a luxury fashion brand as an intern and the working conditions beyond the show room are that of a sweatshop. The interns had their own “room” aka a glorified closet where we were packed in like sardines. At this particular company (who’s co-founder is the ex-wife of Harvey Weinstein), I had the pleasant experience of dyeing tulle and silk on a stove top with no hood in a shared kitchen where seamstresses were microwaving their lunches. If you know anything about the chemicals involved in dyeing textiles, this method is a massive OSHA red flag.

When I graduated in 2017 I moved back to Wisconsin and had no idea what I wanted to do. The first job I found was a seamstress doing alterations at a men’s custom suiting store downtown. Up until that point my sewing skills were geared towards creating garments from scratch. Alterations are a different school of thought, much more focused on problem solving. While I worked that job, I lived at home with my parents and spent two very cold winters designing and creating many upcycled garments.

I was motivated to work within textile sustainability. I didn’t exactly know what that meant at the time but I knew I wanted to work within solutions. I dreamt of working at brands like Reformation or Outerknown. I ended up getting an Assistant Designer job at Kohl’s corporate headquarters in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin.

It was crash course in mass produced apparel and taught me so many organizational professional skills. Evidently, a big company like Kohl’s has structure, benefits, and comfort. I worked within the women’s plus size team. The conversation during fit sessions was often “how do we get this garment to fit and flatter as many bodies as possible.” The answer is: you can’t. Fast fashion has made it commonplace to accept ill-fitting clothes as the norm, and clothes are so cheap. Why would you want to pay to get it altered? It’s sort of strange how the more expensive the garment, the more willing we are to get it tailored. You would think it’s the other way around.

I don’t think you can really understand the scale of the apparel industry without working within it. At a company like Kohl’s you design and produce 6 seasons a year for 2,000 stores nationally. Our t-shirt programs alone would be in the hundreds of thousands of units per season. If you have ever been to a Kohl’s, you know how much product is stuffed on those racks. But it’s not even just what is produced for stores, it’s also all of the production and fit samples, the color strike offs, the paper print outs, and the clothes you buy from other retailers for “research.” All that stuff gets tossed. I remember asking one of the upper level management guys what happens to the massive bins that would sit by the elevator bay, filled to the top with production samples. He simply replied “you really do not want to know”. The truth is that they probably get incinerated or just shipped off to other countries. Some will say incinerating unwanted clothes for energy is a form of “recycling,” but I don’t buy it.

I think the most shocking piece of getting a design job at a big company was the absence of “design.” You research, you copy, you email, you produce. In school you are connected to every piece of the process, but here you don’t even know what the production factories look like. There are no on-site sample rooms, and when you want designs tweaked, it is communicated through strings of emails and comments in a PLM system where the producer is likely linked to a behemoth corporation like Li & Fung Sourcing.

LA, Upcycling, Recycling, and COVID-19

It’s March 2020 and I am working for a satellite vendor in an office of 30 in Los Angeles. Our main client was Target. We just got the order to work from home. I had left Milwaukee 9 months earlier to escape the cold and live the big city life. If you don’t know what a satellite vendor is, that’s normal. I think most people don’t know that large companies like Target, Walmart or Kohl’s outsource design work to small teams completely disconnected from the larger company. The food chain of outsourced work in the apparel industry is extensive. I was on the print design team, and the irony was that we bought most of our prints from another satellite vendor that specialized in only print design. We mainly recolored the prints and got them ready for production.

I had been working full time for 3 years at this point, and was fraught with disappointment. Instead of turning away from textiles and the industry I dug in. I can’t jump ship because the industry is just kind of wrong? Shouldn’t I, with everything I know, try to make my own small impact? BUT HOW?? After all I am just kind of a spoiled upper middle class white kid from a flyover state. What value do I really provide to make a mark? Says the voices in my head.

So naturally I do what any ADD young adult does: have 5 million tabs of career research on my laptop and start scheming unrealistic business ideas with my best friend and roommate, also named Maddie. I sure could ramble on about Maddie’s terrible jobs in the apparel industry – physical injuries, verbal abuse, low pay, and toxic bosses.

Back in college we dreamt of organizing campus-wide clothing swaps. We never got to it, but mid-2021 we started hosting mending parties at our home. The concept: everyone brings a clothing item they want to learn to repair or alter (and also, we drink wine). Usually Maddie and I did all the work while everyone imbibed. That same year we brought our idea of a merchandised clothing swap to life. In 2021 we organized The Echo Park Clothing Exchange in our neighborhood at Elysian Heights elementary school. After living through the insulated lock down of COVID, we both recognized that no new sustainable clothing brand or upcycling brand would solve the issue. The issue is we have too much already and people were in dire need of community. The market for small clothing brands is oversaturated and we knew that donating your unwanted clothes to Goodwill didn’t actually mean those items would be resold in your community.

We set out to hang up flyers around town stating “Donate! Renew! Reduce!” The concept was we’d collect clothes from people in our community, sort them for resale at a pop-up market, and make some fun merch. We’d donate the profits and pay ourselves back whatever we spent.

We spent almost six months getting everything in order. We had to get permits, get insurance and rent equipment. At least 10 of our friends helped throughout the process. Garments were sorted and tagged, a U-Haul van was rented. We had over 500 items donated, sold over half during the swap, and made just over $3,000. We donated the leftovers to other local organizations that deal with a larger volume of second hand clothes. The money we earned as profit was donated to an organization called Homey Made Meals which I had been volunteering with for two years.

I thought: “this is something, maybe this is what I will do.” But life has a way of pulling us in different directions. A week before the clothing exchange, I went with my mom to visit Wilson College of Textiles at NC State. I had already started my Master’s of Science in Textiles online at State, but was curious about what it would be like to live there and study full time. A graduate degree in textiles with a focus on waste management was the solution to my existential/career crisis. After all, full-time graduate students with a TA job could get a stipend and tuition covered at NC State. I decided I’d ask my job for a raise and if they said no I’d quit and go to school full time. COVID had worn my roommates and I down. Living in LA was hard and expensive. Everyone was ready for a change.

Well, to no one’s surprise, they said no to the raise. I had been with the company for 2 years and made $52,000 in Los Angeles as a 27 year old. One thing about most of this industry is they will expect the most out of you while trying to pay you as little as they can.

Wilson College of Textiles and the Inevitable Rabbit Hole

Well I’m here now, I’ve stuck myself down at the bottom. Textiles….I pause here and honestly get a bit bleary eyed because I feel so much when I think about what textiles mean to me. Textiles are art, they are love, they are care, they are political, they are a language and history.

“Textiles give us a social metaphor: we speak of people’s lives as ‘interwoven’ in a ‘social fabric;’ or as ‘entwined’ or “inextricably bound” with one another. Textile expressions evoke emotions—we can be ‘cloaked’ in fear’ or “clothed in darkness” –and many imply or allude to the magic of creation.........All of us are literally involved with textiles from the moment we are born to the moment we die.” (Gordon, 2010)

For a kid who struggled with feeling intelligent and like there was nothing I could excel at, finding my way to textiles has meant everything to me. Finding myself surrounded by others who felt similarly, at Wilson College, made me feel at home.

I also love trash. All the things we deem unusable and worthless. I see the value in it. I am supremely sensitive and feel like everything matters all the time. I’m your annoying stoner friend who says things like “Society is so fucked dude, we use clean drinking water to flush our toilets.”

The way we as a society treat our material goods when they are of no more use to us is abhorrent. The thought of throwing a garment in the trash because it has a hole or a missing button is disappointing. But people do it every single day. The average US citizen throws away 80 lbs of clothing a year (and that data is from 2018) with no regard for the energy and resources that went into making it. It’s not our fault really. We are trained to see value in new things. It’s called a cradle-to-grave system. The economic benefits to the growth of the apparel industry can overshadow the “inherent planned obsolescence and waste” present in the industry (McNeill & Moore, 2015).

I started exploring reuse in 2016 during my senior collection in undergrad, upcycling thrifted clothes, exploring natural dyes, and sewing together plastic bags. To this day, You will rarely find me in the aisle of a fabric store buying yardage for a project. So, when I started my masters and was determining the topic of my thesis I kept coming back to the idea of textile waste management.

My graduate degree equipped me with a deeper understanding of the industry and a renewed sense of optimism that there are people working on solutions. During my time at Wilson, I worked as a research assistant on a government-funded project studying the disassembly of e-textiles, then worked as a lab assistant in the dyeing and finishing lab, and was also a teaching assistant for several undergraduate classes. While I was still finishing my degree in 2023, I had the opportunity to start a job at a bio-tech company in Morrisville. This company creates an algae based sustainable textile fiber. Despite my focus and interest in textile waste management, I have an affinity for bio-material development. So in a sense, this was a dream job. I was in charge of taking the experimental fiber and fabricating it into tangible product samples such as knit and woven textiles as well as researching how to make dyes adhere to the material. This job was constructive in so many ways, but ultimately I left the company in August 2024.

Mend Mother and Beyond

I had been running Mend Mother as an explorative project while in grad school, where I experimented with mending/alteration services and teaching workshops at local businesses. I was finishing graduate school, working the biotech job, taking mending clients in my free time, and somewhere in there I was working part time at a wine shop. I was running Mend Mother out of my house, occasionally doing fittings in my bedroom (where the full length mirror was). At some point in the summer of 2024 I had a two-month wait time for my mending clients. I spent the little free time of that summer writing up a business plan.

My husband and I got engaged in April of 2024. We had decided I would move into his house in September and then I would start to think about quitting my job to do Mend Mother full-time. If I’m being honest, I was itching to quit that job. A compensation issue came up at work during the summer of 2024, which was just the push I needed to say fuck it, I’m quitting.

August 2024 I was able to secure a split studio in the Carter building where the rent was more than reasonable. I share a studio with my lovely friends and artists, Mary-Beth Eisenstadt/David Eisenstadt. I have been working on Mend Mother full-time since. Phrased that way it sounds like a simple trajectory. I started Mend Mother with about $15,000 of my own money and the support of my loved ones. Let’s be real: I would never have been able to take that leap without the safety nets that I have - my husband Coley and his belief in me, plus a lifetime of support from my parents. In my experience, you can’t quit your job and start a business without a support system, whether it be family or friends or by saving a shit ton of money. The problem we are trying to solve at Mend Mother is rooted in connection - our aim is to try to provide solutions for our community. I could not have done it/be doing it without my own community. I feel gratitude daily to have this opportunity afforded to me. Having access to capital of any kind is a game changer. There is also some necessary delusion involved. You have to be kind of ruthlessly optimistic to turn an idea or a hobby into a sustainable and profitable business. I’ll let you know once I’ve cracked the code.

As a business owner, you get to make your own schedule. In the beginning it was hard to self motivate. The only person you are accountable to is yourself. Now a year and half in, the structure is forming and I am working a lot. For all of 2025 we were open 7 days a week, repaired and altered 900+ garments, organized nearly 20 events, and got to collaborate with many local businesses. Part of what has been so exciting about Mend Mother is I can use it as a vehicle to experiment with all the ideas I’ve collected over the last 6 years related to textile waste management. But last year I was always at risk of burnout. This year we are focused on sustainable and intentional growth.

In 2026 we plan to focus on people’s strong suits, ask for help, create structure and be a part of the solution. Solving the issue of waste and wasteful behavior takes intention and patience. The way capitalism has conditioned us all to burn ‘n’ turn almost every material aspect of our lives takes time and consistency to unlearn. Repair is a radical act. It’s a choice to step out of line and re-evaluate your consumer pattern. I started Mend Mother not because it was the convenient choice, but because we need this type of service in all communities, and we need our communities to learn this skill. Repair is a defiant, and political action that has a direct impact. For every 5 garments repaired it displaces 4 new purchases and saves those items from being land filled or incinerated. Not to be dramatic, but convenience is the sword that our culture will die on. The more out of touch we are from the effort and cost of the services and products we consume, the more disconnected we become from the environment.

Mend Mother will be here when you need us! Thanks for coming, that is the end of my substack ted talk.

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