Turning Hatmaking Into a Business — with Teressa Foglia

On this week’s episode of Girl Gang the Podcast, we head to New York to interview Teressa Foglia. She's the Founder and Designer of Teressa Foglia, an ethically sourced, sustainably made hat studio in Industry City. 

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Welcome to season two of girl gang, the podcast. I'm your host, amy will and the founder of Girl Gang, the label.com. Hi, my name's Theresa Foglia and I'm a hat maker and designer at Teressa Foglia hats and you're listening to girl gang, the podcast. So Theresa and I have been friends for 12 years. You have been a hustler's since I've known you. How many internships did you do in college and companies did you work for? I started interning for companies and I was 14 years old. I had an internship my sophomore, junior into senior year, high school internships, and then in college probably around seven internships I would say I'm different semesters, summers and two that I ended up working for after college as well. Can you talk about the transition from being a lover of hats since a young age to starting your own hotline? I know that this is something you've always wanted to do. You just didn't know exactly how it would look. Can you talk about how this actually came to be? Yeah. I first thought about starting a hotline in 2015 after a trip to Thailand, a girlfriend of my Jessica harmon was running her fashion brand out of Thailand. I thought, oh, this would be great. She's working with a women's run, owned and operated a facility. It'd be great to produce hats here. I really loved her mission for it by simply just didn't have the time to execute something. Running the digital agency as well, and I kind of closed my laptop, put the mood board away. Actually had developed a brand name and a label, but this was all just while I was sitting at home one afternoon and just kind of dreaming. It went to the next level when I moved to Europe and I was living there for about a year and during that time I just did not want to come back to the states and so I started looking up fashion design courses. I couldn't go and get my masters somewhere, but I wasn't finding myself attracted to just a fashion textiles course or just a fashion design course. I really loved the idea of military and making hats. I was actually buying really expensive hats and just thought they're never exactly what I wanted. I didn't really feel like I was getting necessarily what I was paying for. So while I was looking for a master's program, I stumbled across this hat making course, wrote her out a Thursday, arrived on a Monday, spend some time with this woman, an English woman in France. And I mean I cried everyday that I was up the course. I was so happy. It was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life and it was during a time that I was healing from a really bad breakup and it was just for the first time I really felt genuinely happy again when I got back to Berlin and my friends that I was living with really admired my hats and people that I was, you know, I was walking around wearing my new hats and people started, you know, just kind of asking me for them. And that's when I thought this is kind of a fun project to do. And I had spent my entire career just on my phone and on my computer and not physically making anything that um, yeah, just kind of went from there. You spent so long doing computer work, Internet work, everything. And I know you still do that stuff, but how good does it feel to be making physical things and be a maker? I love giving someone something that's an extension of themselves. I love inspiring people. I love giving people the confidence to wear hats. So many people come in here and have never worn a hat before and what I say is they lack hatfidence. It's, we'll see someone put on an outfit that's totally out of the norm where you know, it's just something that's just out of their personality and they try things on and everyone has this idea that certain hats look good on certain types of people. And yeah, I mean maybe from a more technical point there's someone with a round face looks good in this type of hat. I'm a firm believer in just creating something that makes someone feel really good about themselves. So I just love that feel good aspect. And I definitely think that's just an extension of my personality that, you know, I hate when people are disappointed if I work or I just love creating something that makes them really happy and light up for a long time. I didn't want to start a brand because I didn't want to just produce something to produce something because I liked it. I thought it was cool. This really feels like creating a product when we only do it based on the demand of someone wanting. It feels like we're actually making an impact in an industry that, you know, I really admire and I love. It's nice to be off the computer. But I will say spending more time away from my computer actually made me miss my job more of what I used to do. And I love the business aspect of it now. So when people are, when I'm talking to potential investors or I'm talking to my advisors or mentors, they keep saying to me, put your business work off to someone else or put your operations off for someone else. And I look at them and I love that aspect of my business too, you know, I love setting up the social media. I loved working on the schedules. I, I love that aspect. Um, but it also just feels so good to create something. And also I'm finally feel like a year and a half later I'm getting the creative confidence to just make things. I used to be so nervous about putting that detail or not including that detail. And now I just create. And that's really good feeling that I'm finally feeling confident in myself to like, flex that creativity muscle. You just started making hats a year and a half ago. And now here we are in your studio in industry city. You've done like three interviews this week. You're in editorials. We like, I've been here all weekend. Just watching people come in and out. When you let the universe kind of push you in the right direction and you trust it and you're not scared and you fully lean into it, things just happen much more quickly because you're on the path you're supposed to be. And I think you're a direct example of that and I think you and I are both believers and this, we kind of never believe a prediction that doesn't serve us. So for example, today was supposed to be torrential downpours and we weren't supposed to see any sunshine. And Lo and behold, we get this 85 degree day with sunshine all day. And that's kind of how this entire process has been for me. I never went into my hat making course thinking I was starting a hat brand. I think I should say that I truly went because I had a free week in Europe and the two people that I was spending the most time with were both out of town. This was truly just something to fill my time with. And when I got to New York last year in April, I met these incredible humans that we're just starting a branding agency and they met me and I just think that positive energy just goes such a far way and such a long way. And they said to me, we want to make you a brand. And I said, I don't have a brand. They said, no, but you are a brand. You don't even see it yet, but can we book an appointment with you at your coworking space? We want to make your brand for you. I thought this is crazy. Okay. I don't even make hats for anyone. I don't even sell hats, but sure, let's do it. Did my brand sprint. They presented their brand strategy to me and I cried. I was totally blown away by it. I'm a pisces. A lot of my stories are going to involve crying, very emotional. Um, when I saw this brand book, I thought, wow, well if I don't do something with this, what they kind of just handed over to me and the silver platter. And it was incredible from my vision, my manifesto, my just everything, my tight treatments, my color, my photography, the way we speak to our customers, the online journey, the customer journey. And one of the things that they had me do during this brand spread, what they call them. And also I should say the company is called Scout Lab. And they're incredible. One of the things they had me do during my brand spread was they had me come up with a playlist if I had a store, so there you go. Your brain starts like operating in that way and you start putting this playlist together and it was the one thing that of all the activities they gave me to do, I kind of cruised through everything else and they kept falling off and be Theresa. Whereas this playlist, whereas this playlist with music is a huge part of my life and typically see, you know, two shows a week in New York and that's why I moved to Los Angeles from Laguna was because I was going to so many shows it. It took me forever to kind of put these playlists together because I felt like it was kind of the most important piece of the entire puzzle and I think ever since that moment, subconsciously in my head, this was something much bigger than it ever was and I've never really wanted to play life little at all. If I'm going to go on holiday, I'm going to go for six weeks. I'm going to try to hit like 20 countries and that week and you know, really just go for it. And New York has been the type of community and with the people that I spend my time with here, my friends need my brand. I mean I am simply the one orchestrating it, but the way that they have supported me, the fact that they have all been customers of mine, they've brought all of their own costs, tons of other customers to me. Um, it's just an incredible place to foster what we wanted to do. So I've been making hats in New York now for a few months and I was struggling to find a co artist's studio to make my hats. And when it came to industry city, I am, I do. I had been kicked out of two studios already. One for the sanding treatment was too loud and another studio, the sanding treatment was causing too much dust for someone. So I, you know, I'm an emotional rollercoaster, like this isn't what I'm supposed to do. And it was just for fun. I was doing a maybe a day out of the week. It was super minimal. I was still running my digital agency, which I still am running as well right now. Um, but when I came to industry city, I looked at his face and Camp David. They saw this bigger picture that I didn't see. They asked me to put a mood board together of what my ideal studio would look like. Where would the, what would the equipment look like, what would the hat blocks look like, what would the vibe be? And we had this entire French Bohemian which would combine a modern, uh, modern aesthetic with industrial and vintage, um, you know, look and feel. And I didn't really think anything of it. I thought there's no way they're going to approve this. This place is so cool. And I had never heard of that before. So I went into burning man having no idea and it kind of went on this trip and went off the grid for a few days without my cell phone. And as soon as I got myself back on, I got this email from industry city saying we'd love to work with you and we'd love to move forward. And at first I thought, no way, I live out of my carry on, I travel the world, I run a crazy following digital agency. There's no way that I'm going to open some physical location. Mind you, I don't even live in New York at this time. I still live in Los Angeles. I've been subleasing, bouncing around out of New York since April. Feels like my friends will let me leave every weekend. I'm like, I'm going back to La and there. No, you're staying for another weekend. And it was the perfect timing. Everything just came together and we opened this. We, you know, we signed the lease in October and opened the space in December and I thought that I would have a lot of time to do trial and error when we first opened because solely mave, you know, so many hats at this time it only had so much training. And when we opened the doors the first day we were open, somewhat came in and bought a custom. And I kind of thought like, how, like what do I do now? Like, how am I going to do this? You know? And we just made it work source the materials, we found the right hat shape and we made. And yeah, it's been profitable ever since. And your team here is so amazing to. You've brought together such an awesome group of women hat makers. Can you talk a little bit about some of the people that are working for you and just really the energy that's inside of this space that you have to give our listeners a better picture? Yeah. We have around seven people that work for us all in a part time basis. We have two extremely talented hat makers that had been in the industry for, I would say about a combined 20 years. One is very specialized in one side of the business. One is specialized in another side of the business and there are backend support for whenever production is becoming too overwhelming that I can't produce all the hats on my own. They're an incredible duo and they work together just really, really well. And then for new people that had been in the studio, we have a few students, um, that are from Nj Jit, which study product design there. They fascinate me, they have really made our company into this modern military business that we are. They are working on three d renderings of our blocks. They are working on getting all the plastic out of our studio. They figure out ways to up cycle all the materials that we use here. We tried to be a zero waste company, so all of our scraps or donated to schools and these are all very much concepts that once they kind of saw my vision of I was just so worried to create a product and have it be about effect on, you know, not have a positive effect on the world and they're aligned in that vision and very much believe in it as well. Can you talk about the energy in New York and working here? I mean it's magical. Obviously I love when you're in La because that's where I am and I love when we live in the same city, but there is something really special and real about New York. Can you talk about that? Yeah, I mean the reason why I didn't go back to La after my Europe trip and mind you, I after I learned how to make hats and France I think continue making hats and Berlin, I went back and I was making hats and La. I was still really heartbroken and cannot be in la, so I went to London the day that my visa's re re could be reissued and I met another incredible hat designer there and I apprenticed and worked on a collaboration with him for three months while I was there. So when I came to New York it was just for a birthday party, a surprise weekend and I felt when I was traveling in La a lot going in and out of the city, I felt like I could leave la and come back and everyone was super supportive, a heavy bed and you know, life just kind of carried on and everyone was kind of doing their own thing and on their own schedules. I come back to New York, you, it, everyone is so everyone has something in New York. They're all hustling hard. It's really hard to live in New York and just be kind of casually chilling. Where in La there are a lot of people that have more of I think a chill life and I don't know if it's how much it costs to live here or they dynamics of the city of the type of demand that the jobs take here. To be honest, I much prefer the light lifestyle. Unlike my low. I liked my more slower paced life. Um, but New York, everyone has something and they own it and they love it and they work so hard for it. And in my immediate group of friends, the majority of us are entrepreneurs and own our own businesses and being around that type of community, you can't just kind of wake up and just go to the met for the day and then maybe I'm going to go out to the Hamptons for the weekend and casually stroll log. That's great. There are people in New York that do that, but then hanging out with your friends that have these projects and they're growing and they're progressing and they're creating. So I would say that the energy of New York is completely contagious. Everyone here is extremely driven and very dedicated to whatever they're working on. It's allowed me to have input from so many different people in different areas of my business that when you're a solo entrepreneur, it's really hard that only is it really hard to try to act like, you know, the answers to all the decisions you should be making. But it's really lonely. So I find myself very grateful that I live in a city where most of my friends are single. They're primary dedication, his work, and they're willing to give advice and help others because they had been given so much advice and they've been given so much help. There's just something about the energy in New York. It's been like this forever. I don't think it's ever going away. Um, I have found that if I'm going to work, I want to do it in New York. I miss my life in La. I have zero complaints about any of it at all. I love living in Europe. For me, I personally just find that, you know, I've been here for 13 months now and I came with no direction and where I wanted to take my life and I've had a brand developed, opened a store and now are sending hats to clientele that never did. I think that would happen. So you opened the studio in December and just a handful of months later, can you talk about, um, some of the clients that you've been lucky enough to be making these hats for? So the manifestation is real. So someone recently asked me if I had a dream list of who would be wearing my hats, could I send it to them? And I said, okay, well how much of a dreamless are we talking here? Because my dream list is going to start with Oprah and beyonce. So tell me like, what kind of dream lists we're talking here. And they said, yeah, that's fine. You can start it with Oprah and beyonce. That's super cool. I thought okay. So since then we've been lucky enough to work with Catherine Zeta Jones, Jamie Chung. Nikki Reed personally love Bob Moses. I'm phineas O'connell. Who was an incredible musician and a lot of other artists that I just love and respect. I have a lot of people that write me on a daily basis asking for hat for this and a hat for that. And to be honest, I really didn't want to just become another hat in someone's closet. I'm really more inspired by someone like Sophia Amoruso who I just dmd on instagram. It just said, Carl, you are amazing. I need to make you a hat. And when I got her response of, wow, these are beautiful, you know, here's my hat size. Those are the type of people that I am trying to work with because they inspire me and I feel like they appreciate and understand my craft. So why did this all start? The trip to Europe started because I found myself in a situation where I was in a relationship for six years and I thought my boyfriend was proposing to me and he actually broke up with me. So I think this was on maybe a Thursday and the following weekend I booked a one way ticket to Barcelona and that my friend there for a music festival and I didn't come home until the following April. During that time that I was there, I took the hat making course and my trip really allowed me to slow down. He'll and really regroup and find what I wanted to do and I still didn't know and even realize it was hats. If you look at my bookshelf in this store, you're going to find the majority of the books are self help it find your passion books and I must have done the artist's way three times before I went on this trip to Europe and I've read a course in miracles and I did yoga and I meditate. So in the hat thing came around and people started asking me to do something that felt just this incredible creative expression and also how cool that we get to come here and make hats every day. It was one of those things where it was kind of, okay, the universe brought me where I was supposed to be. It was during my Saturn return. It was days before my Saturn return happened that my boyfriend broke up with me. What you do with your Saturn return during your 28th year has such an important impact on where your life goes after that and I'm so happy that my. With the way that it did, wellness and health are a big part of your routine in and out of the office for your personal life and professional life, which I guess is all the same. It's really meshed now at this point we've been at. You've been here every single day. You're here like multiple days in a row. Can you talk a little bit about your routine to help take care of yourself? Yeah. I'm. I'm a big believer in just stopping when you're done, so there's a lot of nights that I will say at the studio until 11:00 at night or one in the morning and there are other nights that it is 4:00 PM and I just don't feel like doing it anymore. And I think that allowing yourself a mental stop time to just say no is really, really important. I Love Yoga. I think travel is the biggest thing that feeds my soul and truly allows me to say happy, healthy. Um, winter. I can say that I did a lot of boozing in New York City. It was a cold long winter. Um, I would say that that wasn't my healthiest moment, but it also gave me a big reality check to say I really wanted to take a step back since those, the last couple of months of really focusing much more on my health. I just can't believe how much of a better performer I am in my day to day job. I can show up with a better attitude. I have higher spirits for everyone that needs to share this space with me. Remembering that we don't have offices here, we're an open shop in studio, so when you're in this space, one person's energy really affects the rest of the group. So just staying active every day, eating healthy. I love green juice in the morning, vitamin and daily shots of ginger and wheat grass. We have a juicer in the studio. Um, I just think it has a really huge effect on my own life. I am a bit of an insomniac and that is something that I am really trying to work at. But these days I'm just so tired. I've been kind of just pass it out as it is. Is it safe to say that hats or that big love of your life hats are the driver for that big love in my life. The bigger love in my life is bringing together people and communities and seeing people happy. So having this space is so much more than being a hat shop. It's hosting events, it's having my friends here. It's my second home. It's having incredible humans like you to share the space with and host popups. And so for me, I just love how happy, happy hats make other people too, that this space is actually becomes so much bigger that I think necessarily the physical product of the brand in itself, it really is an experience when you walk in and there's so many things you can do it. And like you said, it's the energy and I think people coming in here just naturally inspired because you have everything out. You see how this hat processes made. I watched people's eyes light up when they come here. So I think they just come in and they get in touch with their creative self. So there's so much you can do in here. How do you keep up with a social life with owning a hot studio? That super demanding, taking time to take care of yourself and also running a digital agency. First off, I have the most understanding and supportive friends I think anyone's ever had in their life. I'm so, so lucky. Uh, my day to day routine is I wake up, I'm out of bed. Before you even have a chance to check my phone, I'm just not a bed linger at all. Um, I usually run to industry, city gym. Um, I will be in the studio, try to be sometime between 9:00 AM and noon. Just just, it depends on what's going on in the studio. Um, I work until the evening time or I'm back in the city, in the garment district to source materials. My social life is a huge component of my happiness. I get so much happiness from other people's energy and spending time with them. I try to have dinner with one of my friends or a group of my friends every night of the week. If I don't work through dinner, typically this will wrap up between 10 and 11:00 at night and I'm holding back on my computer when I actually get my work done between the hours of around 11:00 PM and two to 3:00 AM. And then, you know, you never know when the insomnia is going to hit. So you're either up at 6:00 AM and you're decided again, or you know, you have that morning where you sleep in and enjoy a bit of rest. Do you have some advice for people that are creatively last and waiting for that passion to align with their career? I definitely think that taking a break from whatever your day to day routine is to get yourself happy is step number one. There's no clear path for everyone of what, where they're going to find their passion, but I think there's something to be said about slowing down and maybe mind mapping out a bit about different things that interests you and you're passionate about and the next morning, see what you want to do that day because I think there's no. There's nothing more evident than just doing what you want to do. And I see the same thing about someone who's unhappy in a job or relationship and a friendship. I think as soon as you recognize it and make a change, as soon as the happiness comes back into your life, that's really when you start to really. When you start to see the light of where of where you should go, a lot of universe books, a lot of universe podcast and books and realizing that we're all this gravitational force and kind of things are gonna Happen to you actually no matter what, it's kind of just how you're reacting to them. Dropping just so many wisdom bombs right now. How did you set up the business? I completely self funded the business. I set it up as an LLC. I would say that my business background definitely helped me be a little bit more confident in my decision to open the store. It's been an ongoing project. The store was very bare and minimum when we started. We don't have a lot of raw materials here because we simply just don't have budgets for them. Investors want to invest and I don't have time to meet them in investors. I mean that's the swaggiest thing I've ever heard in my life, so literally people are just like knocking on your door to give you money and you're just like, I just need time to make a deck, but. Sorry. Yeah. I don't know how to prioritize. You definitely do. I would say sitting in here like you got your priorities pretty good. How important are relationships and building your business? Can you. I mean everyone in industry, city, we think they're your best friend and just like the energy project personally and as your brand is so positive. Um, I definitely think that that's helped a lot with your brand building so quickly. So can you touch on that a little bit? Relationships are the most important part of my business, that's for sure. You definitely hit that. I try my best to treat everyone better than how I would want to be treated. I really, I find people to be just completely infectious. I think it might have to do with a bit of the traveling. It kind of opened my mind to different people's backgrounds, different cultures, different personalities. You're not going to get along with everyone. That's not what I'm saying or that I think at all, but I think just giving someone a hug rather than a handshake, you know, hugging for five seconds and trying to level with people as much as you can. And just treating people with just good energy, you know exactly what you're saying. I, I love to be friendly with every single person here and my friends and I all treat each other really, really like family and I definitely find them to be my chosen family. You guys included. And I find myself surrounding myself with people that only treat people the same way. We're very generous with our time. We're very generous with our ideas, with our friends. And I used to think when I was younger that you didn't make really good friends as an adult. And I realized that now at 30 years old that it's so not true. It's actually, you're kind of just starting to develop maybe some of the best friendships of your entire life. And I don't think it's for everyone because I don't think everyone goes down this crazy. Let me find what my true passion calling is in life. And it's so in a way cheesy to say. And I, I just, I don't know. I just, I take things seriously, but I just don't take anything that seriously. It's all, you know, we're, we're here for such a short time. Their hats, like I'm living. There's a billion cells in me right now. It's like all of this is, it's just wild, you know, and why am I going to wake up and be in a bad mood? That's not to say that I don't get a bad mood because I do, but I just think that having, you know, just having a smile on your face goes such a far way. I'm inspired by travel colors are and things that just make me happy. So a lot of the scarves that are here I see out and I buy them and they come back and I'm like, this car I would want to wear on a hat that looked like this and it's also what's available to me. So like I said, starting this on my own, on my own budget. I bought materials that I could afford and I mess and experimented with things that were available to me. So I might not be able to get that Monte Cristo Gorgeous Straw hat because actually they costs around five to $700 just to buy them and then to resell. So a lot of those things I couldn't afford it. I'm starting my business and I don't necessarily go into things with clear visions, but if I am establishing a collection for a place I'm going to, that definitely influences it. So for example, we were shooting a collection in Barbados in February. We're going to this incredible hotel and they had these pink umbrellas and the ocean was as bright blue and they had these yellow kayaks and they had this like gorgeous. We're Tan chairs everywhere. So obviously we went with a painful era. We were the Blue Foodora and this great yellow and it just felt like the hat collection was born by the hotel and it was, it was very much like that. So I kind of make as I create and I definitely have ideas, but I don't necessarily. I set out all the details of what exactly I'm doing. If I, you know, if we tie dye something or if we missed something or if we find a silk, we know we want to use that as a piece of the hat, but we might wrap that hat scarf around the brim and then as soon as you see it visually you're like, no, we're not in a business where we're making samples and mass producing so we can make any design changes at any time. I actually came in yesterday in three of the half that are in the store. Look nothing. We have three new hats in the store today because I just decided I'm, I'm over the look and feel. Cut the brands, change the colors, lit them on fire, added things that I've picked up since then and I have three new hats in the shop and all I did was changed the trimmings on the. Can you let our listeners know where to find out more about you and to get a custom handmade? Yeah, definitely. You can visit my website, Teressa Fotolia.com. Or follow me on instagram at Teressa. Foglia. All right, well thank you so much for sitting down and taking the time to chat with us today. I love you Ave. thank you. I love you. I love you so much. I've had so much fun here this weekend. This was probably the best weekend that I met in New York. This was incredible. I want you guys to come and lock yourselves in my studio every single weekend, but just let us out to go to the French French diner. A shout out best restaurant in New York City.