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Diane Cha quit her senior job at apparel giant Gap Inc.’s Athleta brand this autumn to take a position as head of merchandising at Ayr, a label with 17 employees and no offices or headquarters.
Ayr is fully virtual, which attracted Cha to the role. Employees work from home in their own US time zones. Cha will work from her bedroom in Orange County, California, with a team spread across three time zones from Ojai, California to Coatesville, Pennsylvania, a town in the state’s Amish territory with a population of 13,000.
Most fashion labels rushed employees back to the office as soon as pandemic restrictions loosened. Ayr, which stands for All Year Round, did the opposite. Known for its sturdy denim and “old soul” classics, the label permanently shuttered its offices in New York’s Noho neighbourhood and told employees to carry on living and working where they please.
Co-founder Maggie Winter and her husband Brice Pattison, vice president of menswear, had met in New York while working at J. Crew in its heyday. They now live and work in a house they bought in Ojai, a rustic small town located east of Santa Barbara.
Three years in, the choice has made all the difference to Ayr’s decade-old operations and is reflected in its revenue growth. Ayr’s annual revenues quintupled over the three years and will top $50 million this year. “All of our meaningful [revenue] growth has happened since we left that studio structure,” says Winter.
When it comes to recruiting, virtual jobs have proven to be like honey for flies. When Mallory Snyder, Ayr’s chief people officer based in Emigration Canyon, Utah, posted an opening for a senior creative manager, she received more than 5,000 applications over the three months that the posting stayed up. Operating virtually has enabled the label to recruit more experienced people, who often have families and are loath or unable to relocate. “Opening up the team to the entire country gives us access to a deep well of talent,” Winter says.
The set-up is relatively unheard of for a fashion brand. Typically, producing a collection and designing pieces requires in-person time spent feeling and comparing fabrics while collaborating on ideas. “You hear from every fashion CEO that you can’t develop product remotely. They [say they] need people in the office,” says Cha, who had moved home to Orange County during the pandemic and feared being called back to Athleta’s San Francisco offices.
Winter calls Ayr a “fully distributed” company. The head of fabric sourcing works from Hudson, New York. The head of women’s design is in Mar Vista, California. The fit technician is in New Jersey. The chief financial officer lives in Montauk, New York. Having experienced employees means they require less direction, which translates to fewer meetings. The workweek is centred around a few Google Meets for virtual fittings, strategy, and a weekly creative meeting.
I wondered how this virtual work gets accomplished in an industry dependent on fit models, fabric samples, and where many people assume that working elbow-to-elbow stirs up creativity. So, Ayr invited me to sit in on a menswear fit session and the weekly creative meeting.
How it works
On a Wednesday at 11am Pacific Time/2pm Eastern, six Ayr employees peered into their screens as fit model John Gallagher emerged from a rented New York dressing room in a pair of white shorts. He stepped in front of two mirrors, where he appeared on everyone’s screens in front and side views. In the room with him were Kathleen Lim, technical design manager, and production director Jessica Swoyer.
The shorts folded awkwardly at the crotch when Gallagher squatted, possibly a problem with the stiff prototype fabric. Pattison squinted and leaned in for a closer look, his nose looming large on screen from his Ojai backyard. “I’m worried about changing the fit when the fabric isn’t working,” he said.
The work isn’t entirely virtual. Lim and Swoyer travel into New York City for fitting sessions, meticulously recording measurements for technical directions to factories. The creative team travels to Los Angeles for photo shoots. Another cost of the mostly virtual studio is in the extra samples Ayr produces so the entire team can touch and feel each one at the same time. They initially tried mailing one sample around but found it inefficient and costly in time and shipping.
Ayr’s creative team works scattered from Ojai, San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles and Coatesville. They bring homework assignments to a weekly Thursday Google Meet, which is conducted via Figma artboards software. One recent week, the assignment was to share a personal snapshot that they loved and to discuss how it made them feel in preparation for a product photo shoot scheduled the following week in Los Angeles. But first, Winter wanted to discuss the biggest news of the week in fashion.
“Phoebe Philo’s brand launched this week. Launched and sold out! Blink, and you missed it,” Winter announced. “They didn’t even put it up on Instagram.”
After sharing their favourite snapshots — of elderly parents staring solemnly, sisters hugging, and friends and husbands — Winter drew a connection between the candids and the next week’s photo shoot. “None of the pictures that we selected were posed,” she noted. “This is a photo shoot, which is very expensive and planned. Our imagery sometimes that performs the best is the ones that don’t show faces.”
Amelia Diamond, who writes Ayr’s cheeky text copy from rural Pennsylvania, is known at work for using a virtual background on Google Meet that obscures her IRL surroundings. The group teased her about the previous week when Diamond appeared with her virtual background “and a seatbelt”, says Winter. Diamond had been on the way to her dentist. She smiled sheepishly and noted that she was not at the vehicle’s wheel at the time.
Some Ayr employees have never met in person. Anita Yung, in San Francisco, and Torii Burnet, in Oakland, California, recently realised they have never met Diamond. “That’s so weird,” Diamond said. “It feels like we have,” said Burnet.
No one at Ayr mentioned one of the oft-discussed work-from-home downsides — isolation. That may be because most are senior in their jobs and busy with families at home. The teams, clearly at ease with one another in their interactions, also socialise via several Slack channels, including the “Food Court” — a joking reference to someone’s Cheesecake Factory order — and the “Book Club”.
“Three of us just read Yellowface,” says Winter. “We DM each other for the trashy books. The Pulitzer prize-winning books, we’re like, hey everybody, read this!”
Cha, who will start her merchandising job in January, says this camaraderie is part of what drew her to Ayr after Snyder reached out to her on LinkedIn.
“I was sceptical when I heard about Ayr because I had so many friends tell me it can’t be done,” Cha says. But “It sounds like everyone’s vibing on the same frequency. And that’s really rare.”
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