TL;DR: What you miss if you stop reading here

Rachelle gets candid about building a career from a hospital bed, how an online sketchbook led to Chanel, and what it actually takes to turn a distinct point of view into a sustainable practice in luxury. Plus, what’s coming in fall 2026.

Every week, Emerging Voices spotlights a founder, creative, or strategist shaping what luxury becomes next. These conversations decode what’s changing, why it matters, and how to respond.

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You can reach us at info@beyondluxury.group or book a 1:1 conversation with me directly through our LinkTree. And find our full ecosystem on beyondluxury.group.

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Not many founders are willing to admit that, let alone walk it back.

Julia Toledano launched Nodaleto in 2019. Her brand, known for its signature Bulla heel and a distinctly ‘90s-inflected aesthetic, grew quickly, landing in wholesale accounts worldwide, opening a flagship in Miami, and forming a devoted community of women who collected the shoes the way others collect art. Then, at what looked like the height of her momentum, she slowed down. She scaled back, recalibrated, and returned to designing entirely on her own terms.

TL;DR: What you miss if you stop reading here

Julia gets candid about losing herself in the wholesale machine, what it cost her, and why she walked it back at the height of her momentum, plus what she’s building next and why it looks nothing like the traditional playbook.

Every week, Emerging Voices spotlights a founder, creative, or strategist shaping what luxury becomes next. These conversations decode what’s changing, why it matters, and how to respond.

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You can reach us at info@beyondluxury.group or book a 1:1 conversation with me directly through our LinkTree. And find our full ecosystem on beyondluxury.group.

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It feels seamless.

And yet, for the 600 million people globally who hold cryptocurrency, there’s a peculiar roadblock the moment they reach for their wallet. Their digital wealth can’t easily pay for the cocktail, the suite, or the night out. The funds are real, and the desire is there, but the pathway to bridge the two simply isn’t.

EnterPay was built to close that gap. Co-founded by Brandon Williams, who has spent over seven years working at the intersection of cryptocurrency and the Web3 world, the company is his answer to a gap he kept encountering.

Crypto is becoming a mainstream way to spend, but real-world acceptance is still catching up. Enterpay brings payment terminals to hotels, clubs, and luxury venues, enabling them to accept Bitcoin, Ethereum, and stablecoins with no added complexity for operators and a seamless experience for guests, making digital assets as easy to use as a card tap.

TL;DR: What you miss if you stop reading here

Brandon Williams explains why luxury should be paying attention: crypto users already outspend traditional payment users by 40%, the technology is far simpler for merchants than assumed, and as governments move toward digital currencies, the question is no longer if this becomes the norm, it's when.

Every week, Emerging Voices spotlights a founder, creative, or strategist shaping what luxury becomes next. These conversations decode what’s changing, why it matters, and how to respond.

Know someone building the future of luxury?

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You can reach us at info@beyondluxury.group or book a 1:1 conversation with me directly through our LinkTree. And find our full ecosystem on beyondluxury.group.

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For two decades, personalization technology has promised to know what you want, and largely failed. Not because the data wasn’t there, but because it was looking in the wrong place. Recommendation engines have refined their ability to show you more of what you already clicked on, serving a mirror image of your past behavior rather than anything genuinely attuned to you.

What’s missing, Anabel Maldonado argues, is the underlying model of the person, their psychology.

Maldonado is the founder and CEO of PSYKHE AI, an infrastructure layer for taste that encodes personality traits into product intelligence, profiling every item psychographically and matching it to users based on the Big Five model of personality, without prompts, search queries, or prior purchase history.

Her path here moved between two worlds that rarely meet: from neuropsychology and psychiatric research to a decade in luxury fashion, from journalism to the infrastructure layer she’s now built to bridge them. The through-line was always the same question: not what’s trending, but why you want what you want. Carmen Busquets, Net-a-Porter co-founder and the woman the New York Times called “e-commerce’s fairy godmother,” wrote the first $100K check. The $4.5M raised since has come from people who built commerce and retail: Madaluxe Group and Pierre N. Rolin of Ankh Impact Ventures; David Goubert, former president of Neiman Marcus and a fifteen-year Louis Vuitton veteran; and Bob Kupbens, former VP at Apple and eBay.

TL;DR: What you miss if you stop reading here

Taste isn’t random, but causal, structured, and computable. In this conversation, Anabel breaks down why personality is the most underestimated variable in taste, how her model translates across categories from fashion to grocery, and what it would look like for commerce to stop asking what you want and start surfacing who you are.

Every week, Emerging Voices spotlights a founder, creative, or strategist shaping what luxury becomes next. These conversations decode what’s changing, why it matters, and how to respond.

Know someone building the future of luxury?

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You can reach us at info@beyondluxury.group or book a 1:1 conversation with me directly through our LinkTree. And find our full ecosystem on beyondluxury.group.

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Today, Raphadu is an International Emmy Award winner, the first South African to receive the Le Book Emerging Talent Award in Content & Talent, and one of the most distinct directing voices to emerge from the continent. His films, grounded in observation, immersion, and a refusal to simplify, have taken him from Johannesburg’s streets to documentary work across Morocco and Benin, and commercial campaigns for VICE, Adidas, and the European Commission. The world is only beginning to understand what Africa has to offer, but Raphadu has known for a while.

TL;DR: What you will miss if you stop here

Raphadu Maphoto is an International Emmy-winning director from South Africa whose practice is built on one conviction: every story demands its own language. Here, he speaks about cultural storytelling, the responsibility that comes with aesthetics, and why luxury, for him, has always been about who’s in the room.

Every week, Emerging Voices spotlights a founder, creative, or strategist shaping what luxury becomes next. These conversations decode what’s changing, why it matters, and how to respond.

Know someone building the future of luxury?

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You can reach us at info@beyondluxury.group or book a 1:1 conversation with me directly through our LinkTree. And find our full ecosystem on beyondluxury.group.

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What has shaped the way you see the world, and what you choose to commit yourself to?

“I’ve had this very deep passion for African stories since I was a kid. Africa was viewed in a very different light, and I was exposed to this very beautiful, very complicated, complex beauty, so I always wanted to pick up a camera. I felt like I wanted to showcase this beautiful culture, and that’s almost where my life and storytelling began.

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You can also explore the full ecosystem at beyondluxury.group.

Paris is a city known for its interiors as much as its facades. People stop to look at the Haussmann doors, the crown moldings, and the parquet floors that have worn in over time. In passing through every building, there are details people notice, photograph, and return to.

It’s within that landscape that interior architect Sally Drowicz works. After several years at Hugo Toro, where she contributed to high-end residential projects and a restaurant opening during the Cannes Film Festival, she founded Drowicz Studio to develop a more personal approach to interior architecture, one shaped by composition, context, and how a space is actually lived.

We spoke with Sally about how she approaches space, and how that thinking takes shape in her work.

TL;DR: What you will miss if you stop here

In this conversation, Sally Drowicz reflects on working within existing spaces, how narrative and function shape her interiors, and why the foundation of a room matters as much as what’s added to it.

Every week, Emerging Voices spotlights a founder, creative, or strategist shaping what luxury becomes next. These conversations decode what’s changing, why it matters, and how to respond.

Know someone building the future of luxury?

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Find our full ecosystem in one place. Find our podcast, articles, reports, and ways to work with us on our LinkTree, including booking a 1:1 with Carlota.

You can also explore the full ecosystem at beyondluxury.group.

There was a time when shopping for fashion was built around ritual. Women would travel to designer salons to see new collections, trying pieces on in intimate settings, often in conversation with the people who made them. Later, that experience evolved into something more social, of days spent in department stores, moving between brands, building relationships with sales associates who knew your taste and told you when something worth seeing had arrived.

Parts of that still exist, but most consumer behavior today looks very different. Discovery happens through scrolling, purchasing is immediate, and returns are expected. The process is efficient, but largely stripped of interaction, creating excess and increasing the distance between the product and the people behind it.

It’s in that environment that curation has taken on new importance. When everything is available, the value shifts to knowing what is actually worth paying attention to. Point of view becomes a form of filtering, and, over time, a source of trust.

Mariana Vergara has built Merci, C’est Vintage around that idea. Through her selection of vintage pieces and emerging designers, and through the environments she creates around them, she offers a way of engaging with fashion that feels more personal and connected to the people behind it. In doing so, quite successfully, she proves that some of the most compelling energy in luxury is no longer coming from scale, but from specificity.

TLDR; what you miss if you stop reading here

In this conversation, Mariana Vergara reflects on how Merci, C’est Vintage evolved from a personal instinct into a platform, why curation has become a form of trust, and how vintage and emerging designers are reshaping where value sits in luxury.

Every week, Emerging Voices spotlights a founder, creative, or strategist shaping what luxury becomes next. These conversations decode what’s changing, why it matters, and how to respond.

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What has shaped the way you see the world, and what you choose to commit yourself to?

“Before I started university, I was interning with bridal designer Delphine Manivet. We met at a coffee shop terrace. She started talking to me about her whole life story and ultimately asked me to start working in her showroom. I went in right away, and everyone working there was far more experienced and at a very different stage in their careers. I was just 18, with no experience. Here, I learned how to fake it till you make it. She took me under her wing and taught me everything about fabrics and textiles. That opened my mind to this vintage and antique world and gave me a sensibility for craftsmanship. Everything was done by women.

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Find our full ecosystem in one place. Find our podcast, articles, reports, and ways to work with us on our LinkTree, including booking a 1:1 with Carlota.

You can also explore the full ecosystem at beyondluxury.group.

We talk a lot about individuality and dressing for yourself, outside the algorithm and the trend cycle. Then something like the Carolyne Bessette-Kennedy wave happens, and a familiar pattern resurfaces: the black turtleneck, the longline skirt, quiet luxury returning with a face to anchor it.

For a woman trying to find her own style in a space where everything is seen, referenced, and repeated, the question becomes harder: how do you dress in a way that still feels like you?

It brings up whether clothing can actually function as freedom when references move this quickly.

Mor Elkayam has been working from that idea.

Mordehai Paris, the brand she founded after Parsons and ESMOD, moves outside the traditional fashion calendar. It takes shape through pop-ups in cities like Paris, Tel Aviv, and New York, where each piece begins with a conversation, with select pieces made to order. Without forecasts or volume runs, the clothes are built around the person, for those who want to dress with intention and feel themselves in what they wear.

Mordehai Paris is currently popping up in New York, find them here and follow along at @roome_newyork.

In conversation, she reflects on what it means to build a brand when the only brief is your own life.

TL;DR: What you miss if you stop reading here

In this conversation, Mor Elkayam reflects on how Mordehai Paris grew from a personal philosophy into a brand, why she designs for feeling rather than season, and what it means to build something rooted in multicultural memory without reducing those cultures to aesthetics.

Every week, Emerging Voices spotlights a founder, creative, or strategist shaping what luxury becomes next. These conversations decode what’s changing, why it matters, and how to respond.

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Photography is often an exercise in control. The photographer decides what enters the frame, what to cut, and what the final image becomes. The camera is the vehicle that brings it to life.

Federica Belli approaches the medium differently.

Rather than photographing the ocean, she places photosensitive paper directly into the water at night, exposing it to moonlight as waves move across its surface. Instead of documenting fire, she burns the material itself. In another series, the paper is immersed in her own bodily fluids. The resulting images are not representations of these forces, but traces left by them.

Belli studied economics at Bocconi before turning toward art history and the history of photography at the École du Louvre. Her work has been exhibited at Paris Photo, Photo London, and Zsona Maco, earning awards including the Sky Arts Master of Photography prize and the BNL Acquisition Prize.

But the credentials only partially explain the work. What Belli is ultimately investigating is a question that runs through both art and science: how much control we actually have over the systems we inhabit.

Her answer, at least in photography, is to remove the camera altogether.

In conversation, she reflects on authorship, vulnerability, curiosity, and the strange kind of resilience required to follow questions further than most people are willing to go.

TL;DR: What you miss if you stop reading here

In this conversation, Federica Belli reflects on how the photogram became her way of asking questions she couldn’t ask with a lens, how vulnerability became central to her process, and why the most valuable form of luxury today may be independence of thought.

Every week, Emerging Voices spotlights a founder, creative, or strategist shaping what luxury becomes next. These conversations decode what’s changing, why it matters, and how to respond.

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At the same time, shopping itself has fragmented across tabs, screenshots, newsletters, and social feeds.

In the middle of this changing landscape, Sreya Halder and her co-founder Ellie Konsker are building The Mall: a live product database that tracks stock movement, pricing activity, and new drops across brands in real time.

What began as a consumer tool to organize inspiration is expanding outward. On the front end, it gives shoppers a single place to track the brands they care about. On the back end, it surfaces the same real-time data that retail teams often lack when making seasonal bets.

Trained in computer graphics at Stanford and shaped by both Hollywood production and creator culture, Halder is building around a simple premise: if the market is moving faster than ever, visibility can’t lag.

TL;DR: What you miss if you stop reading here

In this conversation, Sreya Halder reflects on building at the intersection of creator culture and retail infrastructure, why discovery isn’t the real problem in fashion, and how real-time product visibility could reshape how multi-brand retail makes decisions.

Every week, Emerging Voices spotlights a founder, creative, or strategist shaping what luxury becomes next. These conversations decode what’s changing, why it matters, and how to respond.

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Wendy Andreu operates inside that landscape, but on her own terms.

Her work has been commissioned by Centre Pompidou, produced in collaboration with houses including Bottega Veneta, Montblanc and Polène, and recognized by AD100 France and the City of Paris’ Grand Prix de la Révélation Design. From handcrafted leather mirrors to large-scale architectural installations, she moves between atelier, institution, and luxury brand.

Behind that visibility is a practice grounded in material research and physical experimentation. In conversation, she reflects on questioning the obvious, resisting buzz, and redefining what luxury demands of design today.

TL;DR: What you miss if you stop reading here

In this conversation, Wendy Andreu shares how a rural upbringing shaped her approach to craft, how a failed textile experiment evolved into a nationally collected material system, and why design must hold up in reality, not just on the feed.

Every week, Emerging Voices spotlights a founder, creative, or strategist shaping what luxury becomes next. These conversations decode what’s changing, why it matters, and how to respond.

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The industry has entered a moment of reckoning. As The Business of Fashion founder Imran Amed recently told IFM graduates in Paris, “The most radical thing you can do in fashion is practice restraint. Growth has become a proxy for relevance — but the result wasn’t abundance. It was dilution.”

If growth alone no longer signals strength, then value must be reconsidered. Not just at the moment of sale, but across the entire lifecycle of a product.

Melissa McDermott has spent more than two decades inside global fashion brands and technology infrastructure. Having worked across merchandising, design, sourcing, and digital transformation for companies ranging from Gap Inc. to Kering and Mango, she has seen how value is built, and how quickly it disappears once a product leaves the store.

With Reclaim, she is building what she describes as circularity as infrastructure: designed to extend value beyond checkout, reconnect brands to their products, and reframe purchases to assets, giving both brands and consumers a way to manage the product’s next life.

TL;DR: what you’ll miss if you stop reading here

Fashion’s resale economy is expanding rapidly, yet much of its growth happens outside brand control. Reclaim integrates at point of sale, allowing consumers to track and recover value from their purchases while enabling brands to retain visibility, revenue, and data beyond the first transaction. By connecting post-purchase behavior to product and consumer intelligence, Melissa McDermott positions circularity as a structural evolution in how fashion defines ownership, value, and data.

Every week, Emerging Voices spotlights a founder, creative, or strategist shaping what luxury becomes next. These conversations decode what’s changing, why it matters, and how to respond.

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Ukraine is often spoken about in terms of endurance and less often in terms of standards.

Across industries, a new generation of founders is building companies that are structured, controlled, and unapologetically premium. And they’re doing so not in spite of circumstance, but with full awareness of it.

Tatyana is one of them.

She is the founder of SHEMAX, a Ukrainian premium beauty equipment brand best known for its professional manicure systems. What began as a distributor-led business has evolved into a company focused on vertical control, elevated service, and a philosophy she describes as “Next Level.”

For Tatyana, SHEMAX is inseparable from her personal history and the values she carries forward. The brand reflects her belief that luxury begins with culture, environment, and responsibility, and that professional spaces deserve the same rigor and dignity traditionally reserved for fashion houses and heritage maisons.

We spoke with her about legacy, national identity, and what it takes to build a premium brand from within Ukraine today.

TL;DR: what you’ll miss if you stop reading here

How Tatyana transformed SHEMAX from a wholesale business into a brand built on control, environment, and uncompromising standards.

A conversation on luxury, national identity, and building premium from within Ukraine.

P.S. We work with leaders and teams who sense the shift before the data fully catches up. If you’re questioning where desire and value are heading next for your brand and how your storytelling, experiences, channels, and talent need to adapt, we’re always open to a conversation.

Reply here or contact us at info@beyondluxurygroup.com

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Building and growing a fashion brand in Ukraine today means living with uncertainty while continuing to create. It requires adaptability, care for people, and the discipline to keep moving forward day by day.

Anna October is no stranger to this reality. Founded in Ukraine, her eponymous brand has been shaped by an intimate atelier practice and a commitment to emotional dressing. It’s built on the belief that clothing can support a woman’s inner life by offering confidence, softness, and presence rather than performance. Known for its sensual yet restrained silhouettes, the brand places precision, craft, and a deep respect for the body at the core of its collections.

TL;DR: what you’ll miss if you stop reading here

As the brand continues to grow across Europe and the US, Anna October has built something rare: a fashion business shaped by care, independence, and long-term thinking.

In this conversation, she reflects on growth under pressure, the responsibility of building in Ukraine today, and why continuing to create, to care, and to believe in beauty remains central to her work.

P.S. We work with leaders and teams who sense the shift before the data fully catches up. If you’re questioning where desire and value are heading next for your brand and how your storytelling, experiences, channels, and talent need to adapt, we’re always open to a conversation.

Reply here or contact us at info@beyondluxurygroup.com

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Commerce has become highly efficient at measuring outcomes but still struggles to understand the decision-making process that leads to them. Working to solve that is Evelyn Mora.

Evelyn is the Founder and CEO of VLGE, an AI-powered platform transforming fashion retail into spatially intelligent, commerce-ready 3D worlds. Built around AI systems trained on how real people move, explore, hesitate, and engage in space, VLGE helps brands observe how people move through environments, where they pause, what they return to, and how context shapes decision-making. The platform helps brands observe behavioral patterns as they unfold in space, including exploration paths, dwell, return behavior, and contextual engagement.

Positioned at the intersection of fashion, world models and spatial computing, and AI, VLGE reflects Mora’s thesis that culture moves faster than the systems built to understand it. As conversations around the “end” of the metaverse grow louder, she argues the opposite is happening. Evelyn sees a shift away from flat digital interfaces toward intelligent environments that continuously learn, adapt, and inform creative and commercial decisions across physical and digital retail.

TL;DR: What you’ll miss if you stop here

Mora lays out why commerce is moving away from flat digital interfaces toward immersive environments that can read human behavior as it happens. She explains how this shift will change how brands measure engagement, train AI agents, and protect meaning as automation accelerates.

P.S. We work with leaders and teams who sense the shift before the data fully catches up. If you’re questioning where desire and value are heading next for your brand and how your storytelling, experiences, channels, and talent need to adapt, we’re always open to a conversation.

Reply here or contact us at info@beyondluxurygroup.com

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Moderately Nice Studio was founded on a simple premise: creative work should leave things better than it found them. Founded by Isaure Loysel, the studio works where brand, culture, and human experience converge, working closely with founders and emerging labels to shape identities that feel both intentional and emotionally precise.

At a moment when global fashion houses are formalizing entertainment strategy by appointing Chief Entertainment Officers to embed culture into storytelling and deepen engagement, Isaure’s process emphasizes coherence and emotional presence over episodic activation.

With training in journalism and a practice grounded in listening and craft, she approaches creative direction as a collaborative function, shaping the logic and texture of a brand’s language over time rather than chasing transient signals. Moderately Nice Studio uses this approach to help brands develop presence, coherence, and trust over time.

TL;DR : What you’ll miss if you stop here

In this conversation, Isaure discusses how creative direction becomes a tool for building clarity and confidence inside young brands. She walks through how intuition is translated into visual language, how proximity to founders shapes decision-making, and what “human-certified” creativity looks like when technology accelerates production. The exchange offers insight into how contemporary brand identities are being constructed with greater emotional accuracy and long-term intent.

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In an internet now dominated by video, most brands are still trying to understand culture through text. Captions, hashtags, and mentions offer fragments, but they still miss the meaning that forms inside the frames, edits, and untagged moments that circulate far beyond official channels. Julien Rosilio has spent the last decade working at this intersection between how culture moves online and how brands attempt to measure it, long before it became an obvious problem.

TL;DR : What you’ll miss if you stop here

In this conversation, Julien traces how that disconnect led him to build Oriane, an AI-powered video search engine designed to make the invisible visible. Drawing on his background across luxury, technology, and digital experimentation, he explains why luxury became the natural starting point, what brands are missing when they rely on metadata alone, and how video-native search could reshape how culture, trends, and influence are understood. His perspective offers a glimpse into what brand intelligence looks like once the internet stops being read and starts being watched.

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In a fashion industry shaped by speed, scale, and constant visibility, Aoife McNamara has built her namesake brand by moving deliberately in the opposite direction. From a thatched-roof cottage in Adare, Ireland, she has grown a label rooted in craft, responsibility, and a deep connection to place. Her work proves that ambition doesn’t require distance from home, nor values sacrificed for growth.

TL;DR — what you’ll miss if you stop here

In this conversation with Aoife McNamara, she offers a clear blueprint for building a modern luxury brand. By making early decisions around pace, production, and place, she created the conditions for responsibility, durability, and long-term relevance. Her brand shows how staying rooted while reaching globally, investing deeply in operational rigor, and educating customers along the way can shape a business built to last.

Before Aoife McNamara became a brand, it was just you and an idea. What did your life look like at that point, and what pushed you to start?

“I set up the brand in 2019, but before that I spent four years studying fashion design at Limerick School of Art and Design. During my internship year, I was in New York, interning with Marc Jacobs. That was my first real introduction to the fashion industry, and it was incredible.

After that, I went straight to Paris for a few months. I graduated in May and stayed there until December. While I was there, I set up my brand in October 2019.

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As we wrap up our final edition of the year, we wanted to leave you with a perspective that captures where…

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Wearables have become the industry’s favorite fixation. People are using them every day, whether taking ca…

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