About
I made the mistakes so you don't have to.
Founder of Leslye Young Designs. Former founder of Workery Apparel. Based in Murray, Kentucky.
Origin
It started in clothes that didn't fit.
I spent four years in college athletics: 70-hour weeks, mostly on the road, dressed in business-casual clothes that didn't fit, didn't move, and weren't built for what I was actually doing in them.
That should have been my first clue. Instead, it took until 2020, when I finally stopped wearing the wrong clothes and asked the obvious question: what if women's workwear didn't suck?
That's how Workery Apparel got started.
What I built
Workery Apparel.
Functional, stylish workwear for women. I designed it, sourced it, sampled it, marketed it, and sold it. I learned to use Illustrator from YouTube. I produced tech packs by trial and error. I put together a full runway show with friends modeling and my parents catering.
I also made every mistake there is to make.
I spent $800 on samples I never used. I committed to three colors of a jogger when I should have committed to one. I worked with a manufacturer who outsourced my product without telling me. I walked a retail buyer through a line that didn't have a clear story, and watched him politely lose interest.
The brand didn't end the way I hoped. But every one of those mistakes became a lesson someone else can skip.
Why I'm here now
The reason I started freelancing was simple: I didn't want other founders to spend their first $50K the way I spent mine.
Most of the costly mistakes in fashion startups aren't fashion mistakes. They're process mistakes. They happen upstream, before a single yard of fabric is cut. A vague tech pack. A factory chosen for the wrong reason. A margin that can't survive wholesale. A collection that can't tell its own story.
All fixable, if you catch them before they cost you.
That's the work. I help founders think clearly about the things I had to learn the hard way.
WHEN YOU'RE READY
Every brand is different. Let's figure out what support makes sense for yours.
Discovery calls are free. Thirty minutes. No pitch.