Every so often, a new brand comes around that charms a particular yet influential pocket of the industry. Such was the case with Interior, launched in 2021 by Jack Miner and Lily Miesmer. The duo’s brand of sophisticated weirdness seemed to fill a void in New York fashion, and they quickly found attention. Interior had the right kind of clout, a couple of hit products (at least within the insular bubble it existed in), and, it seemed, proper support. Today, though, Miner announced that Interior will be stopping all operations effective immediately. What happened?
“I did everything I could to fight against this,” said Miner over the phone on Friday. “No founder or designer wants to end up in the position I found myself in…it was just not the place I wanted to arrive.”
The last time Miner and I spoke, when he presented his fall 2024 collection at a presentation during NYFW in February, Interior was undergoing some change. Miesmer had departed the brand, and Miner was charging forward by strengthening his direct-to-consumer business while tending to his existing relationships with stores. Interior was part of Net-a-Porter’s Vanguard program and was sold at Bergdorf Goodman, Neiman Marcus, Saks, and more. Still, at the time, Miner also spoke of the precarious state of the industry for small independent businesses: “We as an emerging brand are highly susceptible to any type of volatility, so when the market has a tremor, larger brands and medium-size to larger-size brands are able to sustain that in a way that we are less able to,” he explained.
Miner felt hopeful coming off a productive fall market. “We closed with $700,000 in booked revenue for the season, which was our strongest to date,” he said, a positive indication that things were trending in the right direction. “The North Star had been to reach a place to break even rather than operating on cash flow or being reliant on other sources of funding that may or may not be available to us.” Interior had no external partners or funding (“We did a very small friends and family round of fundraising that existed as debt , not equity, on the books, but I funded the vast majority of the business personally,” explained Miner). It had hit $2 million in revenue for 2023 with a breakeven goal of $3 million for 2025. Distribution was growing, and the brand had picked up a few new accounts for fall 2024. Miner’s goal seemed completely attainable.
Until it wasn’t. “It just speaks to the volatility of the industry and how quickly things can change,” he said. “We had just developed a beautiful pre-spring collection that will now never see the light of day.” The pivotal event was a lineup of business-as-usual touch-bases with Interior’s wholesale partners ahead of June market, when he would have presented and sold the pre-collection. “All of those calls were really challenging, and, in spite of the positivity in recent months around the brand, almost every single partner had us planned either flat year-over-year or down year-over-year,” said Miner. Interior was nominated to the Fashion Trust US earlier this year, and had its eyes set on the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund. But retail partners cited macro factors like economic instability and the upcoming election in addition to more specific hurdles like delays in fulfilling orders due to supply chain difficulties resulting in soft selling in certain categories. There was not much left for Miner to do. Those market tremors the designer cited last season had hit the brand, and time and money were running out.
