MINNA
Founder, Creative Director, & CEO
2013 - 2025
MINNA was an ethically handmade home goods brand that I built in collaboration with master artisans across Latin America. Over twelve years, it grew into a nationally recognized, B Corp certified company — over 20 artisan partners across five countries, a full line of contemporary home textiles, and retail partnerships at Design Within Reach, Nordstrom, and Ace Hotels.
MINNA began as an extension of my art practice. A self taught weaver, I wove each piece by hand in the beginning before exploring artisan production. The name came from my maternal grandmother, who dropped it upon arriving in the United States from Germany in 1940. Nostalgic with a touch of rebellion.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Product Design
MINNA products often started as my original artwork and were then translated into woven, embroidered, knit, or printed textiles. The full line included rugs, pillows, throws, blankets, kitchen and dining textiles, baskets, and bedding, all designed in-house and developed in collaboration with the artisan workshops producing them.
The design process took a Bauhaus approach: technique and final use considered from the beginning. Materials included merino wool, alpaca, organic cotton, and naturally dyed handspun fibers. Construction spanned pedal loom, backstrap loom, knitting, felting, embroidery, and natural dyeing. Each technique and material came with its own design language and material possibilities, a truly co-created process.
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Designing for handmade production is its own discipline: the loom, the weaver's hands, and the yarn dictate as much as the sketchbook does.
Brand & Creative Direction
MINNA's visual identity was developed and maintained in-house across twelve years and dozens of seasonal collections. The aesthetic evolved significantly over that time but the through line stayed consistent. For an independently run brand, it consistently read as the work of a much larger company. Photography was produced season after season with a small, consistent team, which is most of what made it work. The continuity compounded as the storytelling became richer and more indepth.
Artisan Partnerships
MINNA worked with over 20 artisan groups across Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Uruguay, and Bolivia. These relationships were built on the ground and rooted in mutual respect for the craft and the people behind it. Some lasted the full life of the company, and continue.
This was co-creation at it’s heart. The artisans were the generational owners and creators of the textile techniques, and the product development process worked within their knowledge and the strengths. In Uruguay, that meant partnering with the largest network of women-run cooperatives in the country. In Mexico, it meant working across floor looms and backstrap looms with groups whose techniques defined the design possibilities.
Building production systems that let small-scale artisan capacity meet national retail demands, without compromising quality, wages, or working conditions, was one of the hardest and most rewarding parts of running the company.
Brand Partnerships
Over the course of MINNA's twelve years, we developed a custom product pipeline that made an otherwise complex process feel manageable for the brands we worked with. Partners came to us with a concept — a material direction, a color story, an object they wanted to exist — and we took it from there: designing and developing the product, identifying the right artisan workshop, and managing the full production process through delivery. The work required holding two things at once: the creative vision a partner brought, and the real constraints of what handmade production could do.
East Fork
A collaborative relationship rooted in shared values around craft, materiality, and how objects are made. We developed several custom tabletop collections to coordinate with their seasonal glaze releases.
Ace Hotel
Over the course of seven years we partnered with Ace Hotels to design custom decor items for their Toronto, Palm Springs, and Greece locations.
Design Within Reach
Design Within Reach carried our inline products alongside a custom collection of textiles that we developed for them spanning rugs, pillows, top of bed, and dining categories.
Retail
MINNA's brick and mortar location in Hudson, New York was where the brand became three-dimensional. More than a shop, it was a curated environment — a place where MINNA textiles could be experienced in context, layered alongside the work of other makers, designers, and global artisans whose values and aesthetics aligned with ours.
The merchandising was intentional: everything in the space was chosen to show how things live together, not just how they look individually. It became a place where customers could understand not just the products but the sensibility behind them.
