Elena Bonvicini is the name behind Los Angeles-based denim brand EB Denim. She’s not an influencer; she doesn’t have followers in the millions, nor in the tens of thousands. But when Everlane approached her for a partnership, she agreed to do so under her own name, rather than her label’s.
The founder didn’t feel her brand was ready for a collaboration, but was keen to flex her design chops in a new context, and build out her personal profile as a designer in the process. “What if I took my design lens and built out my essentials capsule for the Everlane customer?” she says. “I felt like that would be a really amazing opportunity for me to introduce myself as a designer to an audience outside of EB Denim.”
“From our early conversations together, it felt important that this be about Elena — not just a brand-to-brand collaboration,” says Everlane CEO Alfred Chang. “What we were drawn to was her creative eye and the way she thinks about denim. Positioning it under her name keeps the focus on that perspective; it makes the collaboration more personal.”
The result is an eight-piece capsule collection, including seven pairs of jeans and a tee modeled off a style from the EB Denim line. “I stole some [styles] from myself,” Bonvicini jokes, including EB Denim’s bestselling baggy low-rise jean, reworking them in Everlane’s fabrics, with the US retailer’s factories.
Everlane and Bonvicini hosted an event in LA on February 19 to celebrate the collaboration, ahead of the release. The next day, Everlane, which has a million Instagram followers, posted a string of stories, tagging Bonvicini’s personal account, which had under 10,000 followers at the time (EB Denim, by contrast, has around 77,000). It’ll be Bonvicini’s face on the Everlane website, and on the billboards in Everlane’s store windows.
As social media has evolved into a necessary brand-building tool, the personal brand is a way for founders to boost their own profiles — and, in turn, sell more clothes and accessories. The pressure has been mounting in the years since Covid; in 2024, 91% of 101 fashion industry professionals surveyed by Vogue Business said that they felt at least some pressure to have a presence on social media, due to the tightening link between personal branding and business.
In recent years, under-the-radar designers have lost sales to influencer-founded brands, which appeared thick and fast in the post-Covid boom. Since, their power has waned as the influencer landscape has shifted, opening space for brand founders to find success by establishing relationships with their followers and promoting their products via personal profiles. At a recent Vogue Business Gen Z event in Los Angeles, founders across fashion and beauty emphasized the impact of utilizing social media to connect with followers and boost their brands — with one caveat: the product has to be good. But in an increasingly crowded brand landscape, a solid product can’t always speak for itself. Brand founders need to speak for it.
Two years on, this pressure is as big as ever, but founders are now seeking out methods to build their personal brands that aren’t solely reliant on social media. “Social media is so important and founders feel like they have a secondary job of becoming this persona behind the brand that people relate to and love,” Bonvicini says. “I felt like this would be an amazing opportunity for me beyond social media to connect with a new audience.”
Beyond socials
Not every brand founder will be savvy on socials, and that’s OK, says Max Stein, founder of talent management company Brigade Talent. “If it comes naturally to you, then it’s something that your company can really rely on and probably provides a lot of value,” he says. “But if it doesn’t, the customer can tell what feels forced. The thing about social media is it’s such a microscope on your life, and if it doesn’t feel authentic, then I don’t know if the cost-benefit analysis is right.”
Still, many founders believe you do need a level of personal brand to build a successful fashion business. This is Presley Oldham’s view, whose eponymous jewelry line is closely tied to his personal profile. “Building a personal brand in tandem with my jewelry brand has become a priority for me,” he says. Oldham hopes to become a creative director for other brands in the future, and believes this will help carve out that path. He’s found a balance between personal and professional. “I’ve had to learn what feels right for me as an individual — I only show certain parts of my life, and when it feels authentic,” he says, like sharing content from material sourcing trips or collection inspiration.
Other founders are getting creative online to grow a profile without having to share their entire lives. Bonvicini isn’t alone in working on a collaboration under her own name, rather than her brand’s. When Zankov’s Henry Zankov released a capsule collection with Diane Von Furstenberg last year, it was titled DVF x Henry Zankov, rather than DVF x Zankov, placing emphasis on ‘Zankov the designer’ over ‘Zankov the brand’. Others have done the same, simply because of their personal social followings. When Wildflower Cases founder Devon Lee Carlson collaborated with Reformation in 2025 under her own name, it was because Carlson is as known for her influencer persona as she is for her brand.
There’s value for bigger brands in aligning with designers and founders. Even if said designer’s name recognition is lower than that of their brand (as is the case for Bonvicini versus EB Denim), a large company isn’t looking to tap the reach of the smaller brand anyway — it’s about the cultural cachet. By supporting a smaller designer, a brand like Everlane can demonstrate its empowerment of young, emerging talent. Bonvicini is grateful for the show of support. “I don’t have a huge name for myself. I don’t have a hundred thousand followers. I’ve never done anything beyond EB Denim,” she says.
A collaboration is one way to expand one’s reach without going full-throttle on socials. But there are other ways, too. Heaven Mayhem founder Pia Mance — who nailed her personal social media, and utilized it to grow her accessories brand — is conscious that she cannot rely on socials alone. “If you don’t follow someone, you never see their content. So even though I might think this person’s the most relevant person ever, someone else in my office might not follow them and has never heard of them,” she says. “So it’s really important to build on social media, but also build beyond that.” Mance has a laundry list of projects she’s working on to ensure her own reach and longevity, including press interviews, Substack send-outs and podcast appearances.
Founders are best at playing to their interests and strengths, Stein says. He flags jewelry designer and Brigade client Pamela Love’s (whose name doubles as her brand’s) recently published tarot deck and guide book, The Infinite Door. “The project sat totally outside of her jewelry. It was in bookstores all over the country, we did an event at Bookmarc,” he says. “Tarot, we’ve learned, has its own niche market and there are so many super fans there.” Those who hadn’t heard of Love may well now buy her jewelry, he says: “It was also a customer acquisition opportunity”.
What’s in a name?
Whether or not to name a brand after yourself is an age-old question that founders continue to reckon with. In 2026, the question of what’s in a name is all the more potent, as founders are asked to build out their own profiles on top of their brand’s, adding another layer to an already complex decision.
For Oldham, there have been pros and cons to having his brand name double as his own. He didn’t think deeply about it at first — Presley Oldham, the brand, began as more of a project than capital F fashion brand, he says. “Within a month of launching my first collection, I had tangible results from both sales and press, and saw what I’d created had legs,” he says. Oldham then became conscious of what it meant to have his name and face attached to the brand he was building. The personal connection is a positive for the brand, he says, but makes it hard to separate from himself. “I’ve had to work to create that space, as well as the boundaries and definitions around it for myself.”
Plus, once your name is your business, you can lose the rights to your own name. Once brands start growing and bringing on investors, it’s not as simple as changing the name. Stein points to designers including Helmut Lang and Jil Sander, whose brands still bear their names, despite their bygone departures. “I would advise that someone build a brand’s name that isn’t necessarily their name — and that doesn’t mean that people won’t know who the people are behind it,” he says. “You’re always going to be you and a business doesn’t have to live with you forever.”
It’s why many designers use part of their name, or a variation of it. Like Zankov, Kallmeyer is designer Daniella Kallmeyer’s last name. Others opt for a variation, like Catherine Holstein’s Khaite. New York brands Ashlyn and Lii are both plays on their founders’ first and last names, respectively: Ashlynn Park and Zane Li. That one additional letter creates a degree of separation not possible if a brand name is identical to its founder’s.
Bonvicini recalls woven labels she made in high school that read “Elena Bonvicini Denim”. She quickly decided she didn’t want to use her full name after debating the name with her father (she suggested Reworked Vintage, which he vetoed). EB Denim was personal (EB was a childhood nickname), but separate enough to live on its own. Mance, meanwhile, knew from the get-go that she didn’t want to use her name. “I was never, ever, ever, ever going to call it my own name,” she says. “I wanted it to live far beyond Pia Mance in terms of having the opportunity to sell, having the opportunity to do a million things with the name.” Knowing she already had a following, Mance also didn’t want it to be dismissed as an influencer or creator brand from the beginning.
A founder’s existing profile impacts the equation, Stein says. All bar one of Brigade’s brand founder clients — all of whom have sizable followings — have called it something other than their own name. He recalls Leandra Medine’s 2016 shoe line MR by Man Repeller, which was named after her Man Repeller publication. The magazine and shoe brand have since shuttered, but Medine’s following — and many brand collabs — persists. More recently, Done to Death’s Chris Black launched American-made Hanover, named after the Atlanta street he grew up on.
A separation of name makes it easier to build out a fashion brand beyond the founder — especially as founders are expected to hold their own in the public sphere. “It’s essential for an emerging brand to have the founder be face forward, but at the same time, my goal is to build EB Denim beyond me,” Bonvicini says. “EB Denim will always be ahead of me.”
Thinking ahead, she’s confident that, if one day she chooses to sell EB Denim, the brand will be able to flourish on its own. For now, Bonvicini is making sure she has her own name recognition, so that she, too, can continue to build.
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