Since the start of the brand in 2015, founder and creative director Ellie Mae has made her mark on the Toronto fashion industry with stand-out investment pieces, from funky prints to classic basics. Since the opening of the Ellie Mae flagship location at 1096 Yonge St. in 2021, the brand has grown. From a new vintage line inspired by her father to the complicated process of figuring out who to trust, we spoke with the founder about everything Ellie Mae.
What inspired you to go into the fashion industry?
I’ve always had a really good relationship with clothes. When I was younger, my parents always said, “Wear whatever you want.” I used to wear my Teenage Mutant Ninja pyjamas everywhere; to school, to the store. I moved to L.A. when I was 19 to intern with a stylist, then came back to Toronto to learn about jewelry-making. It was when I moved to London to take a few fashion courses that I really fell in love with the creative process of making clothes.
How did the Ellie Mae brand start?
In 2015, I started out super small and decided I’d just do jackets, because they seemed like the most complicated things to make. I thought if I could do that, I could do a whole line easily. I made a black and a green leather jacket, and I realized people liked it and started figuring out price points from there. But the start of Ellie Mae was such a dumpster fire; I was just working with the wrong people and getting taking advantage of and I didn’t know what I was doing. Those first couple years were a very humbling and sobering experience. In the last four years, we’ve started to surround ourselves with the right people moving forward.
How does sustainability play a role in your brand?
I sometimes feel it’s impossible for sustainability to go hand-in-hand with a fashion company. For us, it was far more important to be an ethical fashion house than a sustainable one – making sure everyone is paid properly and treated properly, sourcing our materials from Europe and re-purposing our fabric when we can.
We don’t make thousands and thousands of pieces; when brands say, “This is sustainable,” I don’t believe having hundreds of stores all over the world is very sustainable.
For me and for everyone who we work with, we just decided early on that it’s always been about the people who we work with. Everyone in the studio, everyone in the store and all of our third party business partners . . . I would rather go down knowing that everyone was treated properly, rather than going down as the most sustainable brand.
You recently released a new vintage line. Was that a natural next step for the brand?
When we started doing just jackets, all I wore with them were vintage t-shirts. My dad was big into music, so whenever we would go to the stores, he would explain the history of all these t-shirts to me. So I wanted to sell vintage pieces, and we started sourcing it from New York and L.A. People seem to love anything vintage; it’s this emotional connection. I think it’s going to have a huge place in fashion moving forward. When you look at brands like Chanel and Louis Vuitton, there’s a reason why their stuff is still relevant today. Craftsmanship has always been important to them, which is why it can still live on as vintage. I think that [vintage] world is just going to get bigger. If you spend a little bit extra, you’ll have it for that much longer. And then it becomes this piece that you can hand down to your daughter, your niece, your sister, whoever. When we talk about sustainability, I think vintage, that’s your real sustainability.
Any exciting announcements on the horizon?
I think our most exciting thing right now is our store at 1096 Yonge St. Our hope, fingers crossed, is that we can find somewhere for another location.
What has been your proudest moment in the business so far?
Having our store open was an incredibly memorable thing. It opened during the pandemic, and I didn’t know if it was actually going to happen. Our team has just really persevered and I feel like we all made this unspoken commitment to each other that we were all just going to push through. We did a rebrand in the middle of this pandemic and I just feel like we’ve there’s something that I feel like will stay with me moving forward. I don’t know if I can explain it. I don’t know if that sounds weird. There’s just something super memorable about it all.