Nathan Rothstein

President at Project Repat

Nathan Rothstein is the President at Project Repat. Repat creates fair wage jobs in the USA by making it fun and easy to upcycle your clothes.  Repat was member of the HUB Ventures 2012 co-hort, which is a social entrepreneurship accelerator program in San Francisco. Repat has been featured on The Today Show, The Boston Globe, Fast Company and since starting last year has prevented over 100,000 t-shirts from getting dumped in landfills. 

Kate Black

Founder & Editor-in-Chief of Magnifeco 

Kate is the founder and editor-in-chief of Magnifeco.com. Where ethics meets aesthetics, Magnifeco.com is the digital source for eco-fashion and sustainable living. Dedicated to bringing together ethical designers and conscious consumers from all corners of the globe, Magnifeco.com publishes stories about small artisans and corporate retailers who are focused on producing garments or products in ways that won't harm the earth, yet still offer stunning visual appeal and longevity. 

Dedicated to local as well as global, Magnifeco, together with the NYC Fair Trade Coalition, hosts the "Fair Fashion Runway NYC" during NYFW. Now in its second session, the event promotes eco-fashion and fair trade in one innovative show. 

A graduate of the University of Toronto, Kate possesses a decade+ of online marketing experience. Having lived in some of the world's greenest cities: Vancouver, Barcelona, Amsterdam and Zurich, when she found herself in Tokyo, without sufficient language skills to work - it was time to launch something that melded her two passions: digital publishing + eco-fashion. Voila - Magnifeco!

Connect with Kate: 

http://magnifeco.com/

Melissa McGraw

CEO/Creative Director at The Fashion Potential

During her fifteen years working in the New York City fashion industry, Melissa McGraw rose through the fashion ranks managing millions accounts ranging from Amazon.com to Neiman Marcus and for companies that include Calvin Klein Jeans, Cynthia Rowley, Rocawear, Nicole Miller, and Joe’s Jeans. Melissa was also an instrumental force in the successful launch of the Harajuku Lovers and L.A.M.B. handbag brands by Gwen Stefani.

In 2007, Melissa co-created the popular women’s website Workchic.
Melissa has been a guest writer/contributor/blogger for Marie Claire, Style Network, Shop it to me, and Shecky’s to just name a few. You can also find Melissa giving out style advice on ABC/HDTV weekly series- Mirror/Mirror.   She also is an adjunct professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.

A true entrepreneur by nature, in 2010, Melissa sold Workchic and created The Fashion Potential. The Fashion Potential was created to show aspiring fashionistas how to target and gain the right clients, stand out from their competition, reach their financial goals, and create a buzz around their brands.  

The Fashion Potential teaches Indie, Emerging Fashion Designers and students the insider tips and tricks they need to create a successful fashion brand. We teach you about the business side of fashion the right way! Through webinars, workshops, e-books, and our online fashion community, we provide the support, tools, and resources you need to save you the time, money, and headaches of launching your label on your own!  

Connect with The Fashion Potential here:
http://thefashionpotential.com
Email:  melissa@thefashionpotential.com
Twitter: @fashpotential
Facebook: The Fashion Potential
Pinterest: https://pinterest.com/fashnpotential/ 

Charles Stewart

Owner & President of Tumbling Colors 

BS Textile Chemistry, NCSU 1977
MS Textile Engineering, Georgia Tech 1979
PhD Fiber and Polymer Science, NCSU projected Dec 2013

Stewart has a 35 year career in international textiles manufacturing and wet processing. Stewart started Tumbling Colors in 1999 as technical resource for designers. The company provides production ready product development for the textile and apparel industries from our 18000 sqft facility in Raleigh NC. 

Aly Khalifa

Owner, Product & Engineering Director 

Aly Khalifa comes to the design profession from a bipolar education at NCSU: Mechanical Engineering and Product Design. His goal is to find the balance of both of these disciplines in each project challenge. Aly’s career is chiefly centered about Gamil Design, a firm he started in 1995. His work experience previosuly included working for the NCDOT, wind tunnel of the US EPA, Performance Bicycle, and teaching at NCSU’s School of Design.

Aly started Gamil in the interest of furthering the synthesis of creative design with creative engineering into a field called invention development. Their specialty in advanced design, engineering and development of sporting goods accessories (skates, footwear, eyewear, gloves, bags) has led them to many clients, including: Nike, Trek, Bausch & Lomb, and Outdoor Products. This has further developed into partnerships between Gamil Design and Asian manufacturers. Aly travels heavily to Asia to realize Gamil’s projects that are produced in mass-market quantities.

Together with a handful of other professionals, Aly and his wife started Designbox in 2001. Designbox is a creative collaborative located in Raleigh, NC with members honing their creative skills at weekly meetings. Designbox members represent some of the finest talent in the area and are responsible for curating monthly shows in their prominent downtown gallery.

Designbox has sprung a number of community projects in which Aly has led facilitation sessions. These have ranged from sculpting undesireable landfills into fun urban parks to rethinking Raleigh’s own self image. The latter eventually led to the creation of SPARKcon- the Triangle’s first Creative Conference that enabled more than 30,000 people in the Triangle area to stake its claim as the “Creative Hub of the South.”

Khalifa is also the winner of the prestigious Eisenhower Fellowship, which he won for his Lyf Shoes concept. "LYF Shoes is a company dedicated  to making footwear for a better planet. All of us in the footwear industry know that we have a lot of environmental, health, and production challenges. By rethinking the process of how shoes are made and sold, we have found a unique opportunity to integrate job creation, customer service and sustainability into a new paradigm." 

Aly is also a cellist and singer in a variety of Raleigh music projects, including Dear Enemy (Rykodisc) and semicolon (Foreshortened Arm). Most of the rest of his time is dedicated to completing overly-ambitious landscaping ideas.

Susie Breuer

Founder of Co-Lab54 & Author of Blue is the New Black 

Born in Lancaster, England, Susie developed an early interest in fashion which led her to work her way from a retail sales associate to leading the development and production departments of global fashion brands like Calvin Klein, Karl Lagerfeld, and Tommy Hilfiger.

Susie’s knowledge of the fashion industry stems from her extensive hands-on experience setting up production and development teams, building department structures, and creating sourcing strategies. Susie distilled these experiences into her recent book Blue is the New Black, a 10-step guide to the development and production of a fashion collection. Released in 2012 and enthusiastically received as an “industry Bible”, Blue is the New Black is currently used by fashion schools across Europe as course work and by fashion companies from Italy to China as a blueprint for development and production. Blue is the New Black is available internationally, has received a glowing review by the New York Times magazine, and is being translated into several languages.

Susie founded the consultancy Co-Lab54 in 2010 providing strategic guidance to large and small fashion companies around department setup, range planning, and information flow. She also offers practical workshops to fashion professionals to improve their understanding of the development process.

Elizabeth Cline

Author of Overdressed

Elizabeth L. Cline is a New York-based writer, editor, and author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion (Penguin Portfolio/2012). Cline holds a degree in Political Philosophy from Syracuse University and has written for the Daily Beast, New York magazine, The New Republic, Village Voice, GOOD, Etsy Blog, seedmagazine.com, Nerve.com, and many others. She is currently an editor for AMCtv.com’s Blogs. Overdressed is her first book. Read her interview with the Wall Street Journal. 

Ryan Hurley

Owner of Vert & Vogue 

Ryan Hurley and his wife and partner, Nadira, own Vert & Vogue, an award-winning fashion boutique in Durham’s Brightleaf Square. V&V showcases leading sustainable designers such as Organic by John Patrick, Raleigh Denim and Stewart & Brown. Most of its collection is American made and includes organic cotton, tencel, hemp and other sustainable textiles. As lead buyer, Ryan continually works through the challenges of creating a collection that is both environmentally and financially sustainable. He also oversees marketing for the business and has discovered effective ways to communicate to customers about sustainability. Ryan handles operations such as HR and finance for V&V too. 

Vert & Vogue is the 2010, 2011 and 2012 winner of The Independent Weekly's Best Local Women's Boutique and Best Men's Clothing awards. It was also named Outstanding Downtown Business 2011 by Downtown Durham Inc. It was founded in 2008.

Beth Doane

Founder of RainTees, Author, and Owner of Andira Consulting

As one of America’s youngest and brightest social entrepreneurs, Beth launched her first fashion company at age 22, created a consulting firm focused on sustainability, and speaks all over the world about her journey from fashion designer to humanitarian. 

Her brand, RainTees launched at Mercedes Benz Fashion Week and with a growing celebrity following, the line features artwork drawn by children. A tree is planted for every item sold and the incredible stories of the youth Beth works with inspired her award winning children’s book entitled ‘’From the Jungle’’.

Beth’s passion and success have inspired audiences internaitonally, from the United Nations to Google and numerous events such as TEDx, and Earth Day Network's annual celebration where she spoke on the National Mall in Washington DC. RainTees currently works in over thirty countries and Beth launched a pen-pal program in 2011 connecting fans with thousands of at-risk youth around the world in need of support.

United Airlines Hemispheres Magazine nominated her a “Hero” for her environmental achievements and Los Angeles Magazine featured her as “Outstanding Women of the Year Nominee”. Celebrity photographer John Russo also featured her in his book, 100 Making a Difference, alongside Michelle Obama, Prince Edward and Steven Spielberg. 

Eric Henry

President of TS Designs

Eric Henry, president of TS Designs, and has been in the screenprinting business for over 30 years. Eric’s duties at TSD range from sales to operations to PR. He is the foremost public face of TSD, attending numerous trade shows, giving speeches to groups and universities and hosting tours of the TSD facility. His boundless enthusiasm and energy have gained him a certain level of notoriety at most of them, even winning him the Sustainability Champion award from Sustainable North Carolina in 2009.