JJ Martin on Building La Double J: From Milan Freelancer to Conscious Fashion Founder

JJ Martin credits her spiritual practice over the last 15 years as fundamental to building La Double J into a profitable, values-driven company that prioritizes consciousness over blind ambition.

Summary of Woo-Woo Fashion. Every timestamp links into the original audio.

The short version

• 00:00:22 — Working with insurance providers allowed the brand to set competitive pricing by partnering directly with factories like Mantero Seta in Como, getting access to the same luxury silk used by major houses but pricing it fairly rather than inflating costs with runway shows and celebrity endorsements.
• 00:02:13 — Moving from freelance journalism to business ownership required reinventing herself when she arrived in Milan in 2001, since no fashion companies there had marketing departments yet—a constraint that forced creativity and eventually led to launching the brand.
• 00:02:55 — Profitability by year two became a guiding principle: pinching pennies obsessively, using barter and trade arrangements early on, and avoiding unnecessary overhead expenses until recently opening their first proper office building after 11 years in business.
• 00:08:51 — Milan has transformed significantly due to tax incentives attracting billionaires, causing property prices and rents to spike, though the internationalization brings conveniences like coffee to-go that didn’t exist before.
• 00:13:04 — La Double J started as a passion project selling vintage pieces online, then evolved into making new clothing using vintage patterns from silk archives, growing gradually into a full collection rather than launching with a massive inventory.
• 00:18:56 — Her business partner and ex-husband, who had consulting experience at Bain and worked in e-commerce, provided crucial strategic advice about profitability timelines and positioning the brand in the luxury market rather than competing on volume.
• 00:28:37 — Homeware represents only 10 percent of overall revenue but unexpectedly opened doors to hospitality partnerships with luxury hotels and resorts, proving that diverse product categories can attract different customer segments and create new business opportunities.
• 00:38:45 — A 15-year spiritual practice involving plant medicine, channeling, and consciousness exploration directly informed the company’s strategic direction and mission to raise vibrations, demonstrating how internal development translates to external business vision.
• 00:52:28 — Rather than following traditional fashion industry playbook with runway shows, the brand creates unique experiential presentations during fashion week—like sound healing sanctuaries in palazzos or carousels for customer participation—to maintain distinctiveness without the massive budgets of competitors.

In depth

From reporter to reluctant CEO

JJ Martin’s origin story runs against the grain of how most fashion founders describe their start. She didn’t arrive in Milan with a business plan; she arrived in 2001 fresh from a marketing job at Calvin Klein in New York and discovered that Italian fashion companies simply didn’t have marketing departments yet 00:11:57. That absence forced her into freelance writing, starting at the literal back row of shows with almost no industry standing, working her way up through stints at Women’s Wear Daily, Harper’s Bazaar, and Wallpaper 00:12:30. Lauren Sherman recalls Martin as one of the few English-language voices covering Milan at the time, a rarity that made her something of a minor celebrity among American editors commissioning freelance work 00:14:24.

What’s notable is how long the runway was before the business became a business. Martin describes the brand’s first incarnation as a personal vintage-selling hobby, something she’d been doing every weekend for fifteen years, using friends and muses as informal models 00:15:23. The shift to making new clothing wasn’t a strategic pivot so much as a practical necessity: real vintage doesn’t restock, sizing is unreliable, and the model simply couldn’t scale, so she began reproducing one dress at a time using archival silk patterns sourced from a mill in Como 00:15:49. That incrementalism, one dress, then a shirt, then a skirt, is presented not as caution but as the only structure available to someone learning fashion production from scratch despite having covered the industry as a journalist for years 00:16:28.

What’s left slightly unresolved is how much of this trajectory was foresight versus improvisation. Martin doesn’t claim she saw the brand’s current shape coming; she frames the vintage-to-ready-to-wear transition as something that happened to her as much as something she engineered, and even the leap into home goods in 2017 is described as a passion project her own business partner actively warned her against 00:26:22.

The profitability discipline and the Como silk gambit

The clearest strategic through-line in the conversation is a single piece of advice Martin says shaped everything: her husband at the time, a former Bain consultant with e-commerce experience, told her that if a fashion brand isn’t profitable by its second year, it never will be 00:19:34. That principle gets treated less as folk wisdom than as an operating constraint. Martin describes obsessive cost discipline in the early years, tracking every cent, relying on barter and trade arrangements with partners rather than cash spending, and avoiding the overhead that she says sinks many small labels 00:20:48. The payoff, she notes almost as an aside, is that the company only got its first proper headquarters last year, eleven years into the business 00:21:25.

The second half of that advice concerned positioning rather than cost-cutting: rather than compete on volume, lean into access to elite manufacturing and price it honestly. Martin’s account centers on Mantero Seta, a Lake Como silk mill that supplies houses like Vuitton, Dior, and Gucci, and her argument is that the exact same silk twill going into a La Double J blouse costs a fraction of what it costs on a Gucci label, not because the material differs but because the final price on a luxury logo item is subsidizing runway shows, celebrity fees, and retail real estate that a smaller brand doesn’t carry 00:20:19. She frames this explicitly as a value-communication problem in Italian-made fashion generally, arguing that consumers struggle to understand why

Homeware as an accidental door, not a growth plan

Martin is candid that the move into home goods in 2017 wasn’t sold to her as a smart business decision, it was resisted by her own business partner, who told her flatly there was no money in it and that it wouldn’t scale 00:26:22. She pursued it anyway because it came out of her genuine immersion in Milanese hosting culture, an obsession with dinners, entertaining, and the domestic aesthetics she’d been steeped in for years as an editor visiting people’s homes 00:12:46. The category still represents only about ten percent of overall revenue, a figure she offers without much drama, treating it as a modest slice rather than a core pillar 00:28:37.

What makes the thread interesting is the indirect payoff Martin describes. Homeware, she says, pulled in an entirely different customer, people who found the printed clothing too bold for themselves but were happy to buy a plate or a glass, effectively widening the brand’s addressable audience without diluting the clothing line 00:28:48. More consequential, in her telling, is that the category became the on-ramp to hospitality partnerships she says the company never planned for: collaborations with properties like Passalacqua on Lake Como, the Dorchester in London, and Belmond’s Villa San Michele, where La Double J doesn’t just supply homeware but designs spaces and even builds spiritual programming like an energy chapel 00:29:43.

Martin ties this to a broader read on where luxury spending is heading, arguing that consumers increasingly have enough handbags and are redirecting money toward wellness and hospitality experiences instead 00:29:20. That’s offered as her own theory rather than something she’s tested rigorously, and it’s left open whether the hospitality pipeline will ever become a meaningful revenue line or remain a brand-building curiosity, the way she suspects Vogue World functions for the houses that stage it earlier in the episode 00:04:25.

Spirituality as operating philosophy, not marketing gloss

Sherman pushes directly on whether Martin’s public spirituality is authentic conviction or a savvy differentiation strategy in a crowded luxury market, and Martin’s answer resists the binary. She traces a fifteen-year personal spiritual practice, including plant medicine and what she describes as multidimensional channeling, that she says only became visible to customers by accident, during COVID lockdowns when she started posting Instagram videos about processing emotion and building spiritual practice, and found the response so strong that she built out retreats, healers, and online gatherings in response 00:38:45. Her claim is that the business mission,

Fashion week without a runway show

Martin frames her refusal to stage a traditional runway show as a deliberate rejection of an industry playbook she spent years covering as a journalist and considers wasteful and hollow. Her reasoning, stated plainly, is that a conventional show is an enormous fixed cost that smaller brands can’t recoup the way a major house can, and that spending on spectacle for its own sake had, in her words, drained meaning out of fashion consumption during years of pure volume-driven selling 00:49:29. Instead, the brand has staged a rotating set of alternative fashion-week activations: a marching band party inside Milan’s Galleria, a carousel where customers became models, a sound-healing sanctuary built inside a palazzo courtyard alongside the clothing presentation upstairs, and now open gong-temple sessions at both the New York store and the Milan office 00:52:59.

This year’s version is a capsule collaboration with model Carolyn Murphy called a

Summarised automatically. Listen to the original for the full conversation — this is not a substitute for it.