- BeautyStyling
- QualityPerception
- CraftStory
- LongevityWarranty
- SustainabilityClaim
And then you hold that ideal of beauty and quality
against how the economy and consumption actually work
That is the big mismatch for me. And honestly — sustainability, longevity — I cannot hear those words any more.
What happens when an industry slowly becomes the opposite of what made people fall in love with it?
“Why do we fall, Bruce?”— “So that we can learn to pick ourselves up.”
I have watched that scene more times than I can count — not for the film, for the sentence. My mother sewed what we wore; when something tore it was mended, not replaced. Fifteen years of dance taught me the same thing from the other side: you fall in front of people, and you get up in front of them.
Interstellar puts it as a physics problem. Brand cannot measure love and trusts it anyway — the one thing, she says, that reaches across time and distance. I do not think that is soft.
Anything you look at with love, you look at longer.
That is where beauty comes from — not from the thing, from the attention. It is what holds a family, a table, a city together. That is how I want to see the world, and how I want to live in it.
Before I knew what design was, I knew what I liked to look at.
My mother made my clothes. For weddings. For carnival. I never really had anything off the rack.
I come from a big family, so weddings were basically standing appointments. Clothes were made for a person and a day — not bought for a season.
Beauty was never just about what is conventionally beautiful.
I danced for fifteen years. That is where I started reading colour and shape and movement instead of only liking them. It went into my head as a kid, without me noticing.
And then it multiplied.
Music, food, travelling, art. Later the degree and the actual technical knowledge came on top. I think I learned to see beauty before I learned to define it.
My own label did not start at a last. It started on a drive.
A stretch of country we had travelled often, the long water of Lake Como beside us — and the lake gave the mark its form: the signet leans on the shape of the lake itself.
A furniture fabric that has already lived one life interests me more than a new one.
Seatbelt webbing cut from a roll for safety; furniture fabric that had already covered a chair. Both became product — because the material was better than what would have replaced it, and I could prove it.
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
Jeder Mensch hält die Grenzen seines eigenen Gesichtskreises für die Grenzen der Welt.
Arthur SchopenhauerPhilosopher · 1788–1860
A person takes on new knowledge and new skills only when it touches them — when something gets under their skin.
Neues Wissen, neue Fähigkeiten und Fertigkeiten erwirbt ein Mensch nur dann, wenn es ihn emotional berührt, wenn ihm etwas unter die Haut geht.
Gerald HütherNeurobiologist · Loccumer Pelikan 4/2011
Everything can be made to be a musical instrument in one way or the other.
„Why do we fall?“ — the piece I keep coming back to.
Hans ZimmerComposer · CBS 60 Minutes, 17 Jan 2023
A novella about a coat, and what people decided because of it.
Gottfried Keller, 1874. A tailor’s son in a good cloak is taken for a count — and everyone acts accordingly. The oldest argument I know for why make and material are never only decoration.
Knowing is not the same as being able to.
„Wissen ist nicht gleich Können.“ — Kapitelüberschrift
Vera F. BirkenbihlStroh im Kopf? · GABAL, 48. Aufl., S. 77
The one city on the route I went back to twice.
Ten European cities between 2017 and 2023, nineteen fairs. Florence is the only one that appears twice on the route.
Scale, and what it does to a decision.
The one field where the numbers get so large that they stop being numbers. It puts a season, a range and a margin back into proportion.
What you refuse to look at does not go away.
Analytical psychology: the parts of a person that get pushed out of sight keep acting anyway. It is the same argument as the one about seeing — attention decides what exists for you, and inattention does not make things disappear.
Light behaves differently when someone watches.
Send particles through two slits and they build an interference pattern, as waves do. Measure which slit each one takes, and the pattern collapses into two plain bands. The act of observing changes the result. I have never found a cleaner argument for taking looking seriously.
The timing is the craft.
Laurel and Hardy, 1927 to 1955, over a hundred films. Nothing about them is loud. The joke sits in a pause held two seconds too long, in a look straight into the camera. Humour is not the opposite of precision — it is precision applied to timing.
BROGUE — premium concept store
Buyer & creative advisor · Hamburg · from 2019 alongside the degree- 120+ international brands
- €300k annual purchasing budget
- 250 m² selling floor
The full buying cycle: assortment planning, supplier comparison, order appointments on the floor. Sell-through told me what had happened — it never told me what belonged.
Assortment by System →
HAW Hamburg — B.Eng., full-time
Clothing Technology & Management · four years alongside BROGUE- 1.0 bachelor thesis
- 642 N mean seam failure
- 8 standard test methods
Seatbelt webbing turned into product, measured against UN/ECE R16. Textile testing on the side — tensile, abrasion, pilling, fastness, dyeing.
Waste, measured →
COMVM — a label of my own
Co-founder & product manager · Hamburg / Como- 400 pairs, handmade in Como
- 5 product lines
- 6–9 months time-to-market
Uppers from repurposed furniture fabric. Technical drawings, material specs and supplier setup done in-house; quality control on site with the makers.
A label from scratch →
Die Wäscherei — a store, closing
Retail operations · Hamburg- 6 months to final handover
A clearance strategy built to hold sell-through up while a furniture house wound down. Inventory analysis for reporting and liquidation, the floor dismantled in order, service kept intact until the end.
MyMexiko — fashion on a furniture floor
Buying, concept & retail build · Herzogenrath- 50 m² inside a 10,000 m² house
- 17 % of the whole house’s revenue
- ~10 brands bought in
Concept, buy and interior build in one pair of hands. The operational side came with it — warehousing and inventory, so it could be restocked without me standing in it.
Fifty Square Metres →
Data Analytics & AI — the other half of the same job
WBS Coding School · Hamburg / remote- 226,904 raw orderlines
- €1.53 M given away in discount
- 92.8 % of orderlines discounted
SQL, Python, Tableau, Power BI, statistics and A/B testing on real datasets. Not a career change — the tools for the half of buying that sell-through never answered.
The Data Index →What’s next.
A buying desk where sustainable still means made well enough to be kept. A seam that still holds after years, a leather that ages instead of failing, a workshop that can say why the last is cut that way. I can pull a material to breaking point and put a number on it — but the number only proves it survives. I want to buy where both still count.
Hamburg · B.Eng. · 2017 → · Open from September 2026
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