Maria McManus on Building a Sustainable Fashion Brand from Scratch During the Pandemic

Maria’s brand became a pandemic baby when she pivoted from in-person wholesale shows to sending beautifully packaged line sheets with fabric swatches and vintage bandanas to buyers stuck at home.

Summary of Manus Operandi. Every timestamp links into the original audio.

The short version

• 00:08:10 — She starts every morning with a large pot of Irish tea with milk and homemade muesli with flax, coconut, hemp seeds, and chia, reflecting her family’s commitment to cooking and sitting down together for meals.
• 00:14:16 — Her husband opened a bar called Bua on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village—now the second oldest business on that street after Mogador—which eventually led to partnerships with Momofuku and expansion into gastropubs.
• 00:16:20 — She came to New York in 2000 before 9/11 after backpacking through Southeast Asia and Australia, staying on a friend’s floor in Astoria, Queens and eventually getting visa sponsorship through work.
• 00:18:01 — She worked at Eden, the Irish-led altruistic collection backed by Bono and Ali Hewson, where she met Morgan Stanley and worked alongside talented people like Bridget Russo and creative director Rogan.
• 00:25:39 — At Club Monaco (owned by Ralph Lauren at the time), she learned merchandising fundamentals by working on product from conception through proto and showroom setup, developing what she calls her master’s degree in the industry.
• 00:34:49 — In February 2020, she showed Stella Ishii at The News showroom with twelve prototypes, receiving immediate interest from thirty-six stores before heading to Paris Fashion Week where buyers began canceling orders as COVID spread.
• 00:40:37 — She pivoted to mailing beautifully designed boxes containing line sheet books wrapped in vintage bandanas, fabric swatches, sketches, and flowers to buyers during spring 2020 lockdown, with Japanese clients ultimately driving her first official orders.
• 00:50:27 — She actively says no to large orders that could jeopardize cash flow, relying on a network of advisors and fellow designers like Stephanie at An Heirloom to make smart growth decisions despite the pain of turning down revenue.
• 01:00:07 — She developed her brand identity by incorporating French laces, macrame from a Lower East Side artisan, pieces from Bolivia, and biodegradable shell and nut buttons—details that set her apart and resonated with customers who became loyal repeat buyers.

In depth

A brand born on the worst possible timeline

McManus’s origin story is really a story about timing gone catastrophically wrong, twice. After roughly twenty years working other people’s businesses — Eden, Club Monaco, Tory Burch — she decided nobody was doing sustainable womenswear the way she thought it should be done, and rolled a rack of about twelve prototypes into Stella Ishii’s showroom, The News, in February 2020 00:34:49. The response was immediate: thirty-six store buyers took notes and placed real interest before the collection even left New York 00:34:49. That validation from Ishii, who according to McManus doesn’t let just anyone dress up a corner of her showroom with borrowed furniture and rugs, felt like the industry’s seal of approval 00:37:38.

Then the market moved to Paris, and by the time the young designers arrived, buyers from Asia were already wearing masks while everyone else shrugged it off 00:38:48. McManus recalls getting sick herself in Paris that week, though she insists she didn’t actually catch COVID until Milan Fashion Week more than two years later 00:39:02. By the time she flew home, retailers were canceling the very orders that had made the trip feel triumphant days earlier. She describes the period afterward — furloughs, employees who didn’t make it through, business partners in the restaurant trade watching their industry evaporate simultaneously — in genuinely bleak terms, calling it a dark time she doesn’t want to dwell on 00:40:06.

What makes the story worth telling isn’t just the setback but the workaround. Unable to hold in-person showroom appointments for the follow-up spring season, McManus and her team built physical mailers instead of relying on Zoom: line-sheet books wrapped in sourced vintage bandanas, fabric swatches, flowers, and sketches packed into boxes designed to communicate craft through the mail 00:40:37. She still gets PTSD, in her words, from pitching a collection over video call 00:40:51. The tactic worked less because of algorithmic reach — she had essentially no social following at the time — and more because Japanese buyers responded to the object itself, placing the orders that became her first real revenue 00:41:24. It’s a small case study in how a scrappy analog gesture outperformed digital pitching when digital pitching was the only tool everyone else had.

Wholesale versus direct: why McManus refuses to pick a side

Sherman frames the wholesale-versus-direct debate as an old argument that actually changed shape after COVID: pre-pandemic, a brand like Rag & Bone could be built almost entirely on department-store relationships, but the calculus flipped once customer acquisition costs online became punishing 00:41:59. McManus doesn’t dispute the shift, but she resists the implied conclusion that direct-to-consumer is now the serious strategy and wholesale a legacy habit. Her argument is practical rather than ideological: independent specialty stores are, in her account, genuine relationships — she knows the owners’ spouses’ names, their kids, where those kids go to school — and that intimacy builds a distribution network that can’t be replicated by paid acquisition 00:44:51.

Her resistance to picking a lane is also a cost argument. She’s blunt that building a DTC business from scratch now costs far more than it did in 2020 and 2021, when she says she had essentially no following and no reach and genuinely needed wholesale just to get noticed 00:45:26. That’s a notable reversal of the conventional startup wisdom that direct channels are the cheap, controllable option — for McManus, wholesale was the affordable path precisely because acquiring an audience organically has become so expensive that she says she doesn’t even know what a single customer acquisition costs anymore 00:45:39. Her conclusion is that a young brand needs all the channels simultaneously: trunk shows, pop-ups, wholesale accounts, and a direct site, each treated with equal attention rather than as a hierarchy 00:46:19.

The unresolved tension in this part of the conversation is one Sherman raises without either of them fully answering: how do you manage financial exposure when big retailers themselves are unreliable payers or going under — she cites Matches and the effective disappearance of Harvey Nichols’s online business — while advising smaller brands to just accept nonpayment risk as a cost of doing business 00:48:44. McManus’s actual practice is more defensive than aspirational: she says no to large orders that could destabilize cash flow, even when it hurts to turn away revenue, and leans on an informal peer network of fellow designers — she specifically names Stephanie at An Heirloom — to sanity-check whether a big order or a risky retailer relationship is worth taking on 00:50:27. It’s a coping mechanism built on trust and shared experience rather than any systematic hedge, which is itself a comment on how thin the safety net still is for independent brands operating below the LVMH tier.

What actually differentiates the product, according to McManus

Sherman pushes McManus on a specific and underrated skill: merchandising instinct as a design philosophy in itself, comparing her to figures like Mickey Drexler who succeeded without being trained designers but who understood what a customer wants to walk into 00:56:34. McManus’s account of finding her aesthetic signature is partly accidental — she describes a drawstring trouser that arrived too late for specialty stores, forcing her to absorb the inventory herself, which then became her brand’s best seller purely because the product was strong enough to sell on its own once it reached customers directly 00:57:39. That anecdote does real work in the conversation: it undercuts the idea that a coherent brand identity is always the product of a top-down strategic plan, suggesting instead that some of it is stumbled into and then recognized in hindsight.

The more deliberate part of her differentiation strategy came from stylist Alex Harrington, who pushed her to lean into her Irish identity as a design hook 00:58:12. McManus’s response complicates that advice rather than simply adopting it: she argues Ireland’s visual craft traditions were largely erased by colonization, even as its literary and oral traditions survived and flourished, so there wasn’t really a rich indigenous textile aesthetic to draw from directly — even native Irish wool, she notes, is too rough for garments, which is why traditional Aran sweaters are scratchy rather than luxurious 00:59:04. Rather than force an Irish motif, she redirected toward provenance and craft more broadly: French lace from artisans in a country that has actively protected its textile industries, hand-macrame from a Lower East Side maker, artisans in Bolivia, and biodegradable buttons made from shell and nut materials 01:00:07.

Her claim, essentially, is that customers respond less to a nameable cultural signifier than to tangible evidence of care — bound seams, garments that look as finished inside as outside, and unusual sourcing details that reward closer inspection 01:01:05. This is presented as the real driver of her loyal repeat-customer base, more than any marketing narrative about sustainability alone. It’s worth noting this claim goes untested in the conversation; McManus offers it as her own diagnosis rather than something validated by customer research, and Sherman doesn’t push back on whether it’s craft details or simply fit and quality doing the heavier lifting.

New York as an incubator, and the shrinking space for independent brands

Sherman raises a structural worry from her own vantage point as a fashion journalist: the ecosystem of scaled, venture- or private-equity-backed American ready-to-wear brands that existed a decade ago — she cites Alexander Wang and Proenza Schouler as having had serious European private equity backing — has largely thinned out, leaving her, as a reporter, covering mostly either giant luxury conglomerates like LVMH or a handful of massive direct brands like Nike and Skims, with comparatively little happening in between 00:51:59. Her framing implies that American fashion’s middle tier has been squeezed nearly out of existence, which raises the question of whether New York is still a viable place to build an independent brand at all, or whether it’s simply where founders like McManus happen to be located out of personal history.

McManus’s answer reframes the question around culture rather than capital. She argues that the American entrepreneurial ethos — network aggressively, introduce people to each other, help competitors as much as collaborators — is structurally different from what she’s observed among London-based peers, where the pool of buyers and industry contacts is smaller and therefore, in her account, more guarded and less generously shared 00:53:53. She frames this generosity as a genuine competitive advantage for building a brand in the U.S. specifically, distinct from anything about capital markets or retail infrastructure.

She also credits scale of wealth and willingness to spend as a factor that keeps an independent, non-VC-backed brand viable in America in a way it might not be elsewhere — noting, half-jokingly, that the U.S. currently has an unusual concentration of billionaires and consumers willing to spend 00:54:29. But she pairs this optimism with a candid limitation: her team is too small to build the kind of CRM infrastructure a major conglomerate would use to nurture a loyal customer base she already has, a gap she and Sherman jokingly propose fixing themselves on the spot 00:54:58. That admission complicates the otherwise upbeat picture — America may offer cultural goodwill and customers with disposable income, but converting that into durable infrastructure is still a resource problem independent brands haven’t solved.

Ambition, scale, and why she keeps going despite the daily damage

Sherman’s final line of questioning gets at something specific to running a small designer brand in America: the implicit social pressure to want scale, to treat growth as the only legitimate definition of success, even when the last several years of retail collapses have made clear that bigger isn’t always survivable 01:02:37. She asks McManus directly what her five-year ambition actually is, given that she could walk away and consult, or run an entirely different kind of business, rather than continuing to juggle wholesale, direct, artisan sourcing, and environmental responsibility all at once 01:03:09.

McManus’s answer avoids a growth target altogether. She describes the business less as a strategic project and more as something she loves doing despite, in her word, hoping neither of her daughters ever enters the industry — an admission that reads as only half a joke given how she characterizes the day-to-day reality 01:03:39. She describes every day as swinging between something close to catastrophe — a retailer like Saks failing to pay, another Harvey Nichols-style collapse looming — and something that reminds her why she does it, generally involving the community of women who wear and champion the clothes 01:04:12.

That community framing is where she lands her real answer to the ambition question: rather than defining success as revenue or store count, she points to having built a group of repeat customers and industry peers she now sees more than a couple of times a year, treating that social and creative satisfaction as the actual payoff 01:04:27. It’s a notably modest definition of success for someone operating in an industry that valorizes scale, and Sherman doesn’t push her to reconcile that with the financial precarity described earlier in the conversation — the two threads (creative fulfillment as the goal, cash-flow anxiety as the daily reality) are left sitting side by side rather than resolved into a single coherent business philosophy.

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