Meet A.Michelle Blakeley | Artisanal and Future Vintage Designer

I stumbled into my business. I’m a serial entrepreneur, but my background was corporate policies and procedures, organization management and business therapy.

I got bored with pushing papers and wanted to do something fun. I wanted to be outdoors in the fresh air and meet people and see things.

I told my husband, I was going to wrap up my contracts and drive for Lyft for a year and figure it out. I came home and told him I wanted to make pillows, not just pillows but luxury pillows. He was behind me 100%. One of my last passengers for Lyft told me about a place where I can get high-end designer fabric on the cheap. We went the next weekend. It was true, I was able to get high-quality fabric on the cheap, but I also realized it was going to take a while to get enough fabric to make enough inventory to go to market. My husband, being the man that he is, a few days later and says meet him in the city – San Francisco. Long story short, he made a bunch of phone calls and ended up getting me my own vendors. We currently have over 19 vendors.

When design houses and showrooms are done with all their expensive fabrics and materials they use to make furniture, they call us and we go and scoop up all the excess and discontinueds so they don’t have to send it to the landfill.

Since 2019, when we started, we’ve diverted over 11,700 pounds of textiles. And this is from just the two of us. So, you can imagine how much overproduction and waste there is in just the interior design industry. But the same goes for the food industry and the clothing industry. We produce far more than we could ever use. It’s frustrating that this has become the norm.

I’ve since evolved from making pillows to handbags. Found I still had a lot of excess fabric and materials so I started sourcing denim from thrift stores and add fabric scraps to the denim. All of my products are made from reclaimed, recycled, reused, and repurposed materials.

My objective is slow fashion. My focus is creating heirloom handbags and future vintage statement clothing. I want my products to be used, enjoyed and passed on when people feel they no longer have use for them. My love letter to slow fashion.

I absolutely love what I do. Once again, as an entrepreneur, I find myself having to wear many hats, which is always the challenge. You have to be conscious of your weak spots and not lean to heavily on your strengths. There has to be somewhat of a balance between doing the part of the business that you love, and all the other little things that you’re not crazy about but are necessary to keep the ball rolling.

My husband is unequivocally my biggest supporter and allows me to basque in my creativity.

The endless inspiration of zero-waste designers in all industries.

All the vendors in our collaborative who generously share their textiles and reduce the impact on landfills.