The Who What Wear Podcast: Denim Expert Benjamin Talley Smith on Making Best-Selling Khaite and Reformation Jeans, Plus the Styles to Shop this Summer Image

The Who What Wear Podcast: Denim Expert Benjamin Talley Smith on Making Best-Selling Khaite and Reformation Jeans, Plus the Styles to Shop this Summer

3 July 2024 - 27 mins
Podcast Series Second Life

Benjamin Talley Smith is the founder of the denim atelier Talley Creative. Named “the most influential jeans guy you’ve never heard of” in a recent New York Times profile, Ben provides services across design, production, and marketing to brands looking to create or expand their denim offerings. Over the years, he’s worked on denim collections for Helmut Lang, Earnest Sewn, Ulla Johnson, Jordache, Re/Done, Everlane, Reformation, and Khaite—and that’s just scratching the surface. As a true denim whisperer, he often has a hand in the most exciting denim launches, including an upcoming line with Spanx in 2025. This week, Ben joins us to discuss the best pairs on the market today, the return of l...

27 mins

Series Episodes

The Who What Wear Podcast: Go Sports! Athlete Stylists Brittany Hampton and Manny Jay on Dressing WNBA It Girls, and Why It's More Than Picking Out Clothes

The Who What Wear Podcast: Go Sports! Athlete Stylists Brittany Hampton and Manny Jay on Dressing WNBA It Girls, and Why It's More Than Picking Out Clothes

In this episode, Senior Fashion Editor Eliza Huber—Who What Wear’s resident expert on the intersection of sports and fashion—is sitting down with two stylists behind some of the best tunnel fashion we’ve seen in recent months. Brittany Hampton is a seasoned athlete stylist whose client roster includes some of the buzziest women in basketball: Paige Bueckers, Sabrina Ionescu, Cameron Brink, Evan Mobley, and Nika Mühl. She’s also the Golden State Valkyries’ fashion strategist. Manny Jay began his styling career working with musicians like Trippie Redd and Tink, and more recently manifested his way into the sports arena through his work with WNBA tunnel ’fit veteran Skylar Diggins-Smith. Today, Hampton and Jay discuss the WNBA’s unprecedented growth over the last year and how that heightened visibility impacts their clients’ relationships with fashion. They get into the ways that athlete fashion extends beyond aesthetics, influencing fan accessibility, marketing avenues for players, and even their on-court performance. Check out Eliza’s Go Sports content here!

36 mins

9 July Finished

Denise Woodard: Founder and CEO of Partake Foods

Denise Woodard: Founder and CEO of Partake Foods

Denise Woodard is the founder and CEO of Partake, an allergy-friendly food company. Woodard started her career in pound-the-pavement sales roles at Philip Morris and FedEx, gaining robust experience in winning business by providing genuine solutions to her clients. She then spent the majority of her early career at the Coca-Cola Company, starting in sales and then finding her niche working on the emerging brands that were better aligned with her values, like Honest Tea and Health-Ade. After rising through the ranks and becoming the director of national sales for Coca-Cola’s Venturing and Emerging Brands (VEB), Woodard was proud of the career she had built for herself and didn’t envision she’d ever leave her job. But after having her daughter, Vivienne, and finding out her child suffered from food allergies, she started to realize just how stark the allergy-friendly food landscape was. She couldn’t find any options that were nutritious and delicious, and after some nudging from her nanny, Woodard decided to do something about it. She promptly put together a new business pitch for an allergy-friendly snack brand, entered a pitch competition, and won. She spent the next year building Partake while working her day job before leaping into it full-time. Since then, Woodard has become the first Black woman to raise over $1 million for a packaged food company, and Partake Foods can now be found in over 18,000 retailers, including Target and Whole Foods.

56 mins

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The Who What Wear Podcast: Rhode Cosmetic Chemist and BeautyStat Founder Ron Robinson on Crafting Cult Favorite Products and the Buzzy Ingredient That’s Not Worth the Hype

The Who What Wear Podcast: Rhode Cosmetic Chemist and BeautyStat Founder Ron Robinson on Crafting Cult Favorite Products and the Buzzy Ingredient That’s Not Worth the Hype

Ron Robinson is the founder of BeautyStat and the cosmetic chemist behind Hailey Bieber’s skincare line, Rhode. Robinson began his career at Clinique in the ’90s and, over the past two decades, has worked on products for industry giants like Revlon, Avon, L’Oréal, and Lancôme. He launched BeautyStat as an educational platform for beauty enthusiasts in 2009 but ultimately moved into developing his own product line in 2019 with the launch of his groundbreaking, ultra-potent vitamin C formulation. Celebs took notice, and Hailey Bieber quickly reached out to bring him on as a partner in what would become Rhode. In this episode, Robinson chats with Who What Wear Beauty Director Erin Jahns about the science behind successful products and which ingredients are worth the hype.

19 mins

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Alyssa Wasko Stein: Founder and Designer of Donni

Alyssa Wasko Stein: Founder and Designer of Donni

Alyssa Wasko Stein is the founder and designer of Los Angeles–based womenswear brand Donni. Stein has had entrepreneurial tendencies since childhood, but she didn’t always know her love of fashion would take her down the designer path. She studied a different part of the fashion industry (retailing and consumer sciences) and secured a coveted internship in Chanel’s visual merchandising department during college. But after her father’s passing at the beginning of her sophomore year, Stein sought out a creative outlet for her grief. She began handmaking and selling scarves, naming the business Donni Charm after her father, Donald. Stein slowly grew her side business while continuing to work at Chanel after graduating, but after some early wholesale success, she decided to focus on Donni Charm full-time. She moved operations to Los Angeles and rebranded to simply Donni. Most significantly, though, she stumbled into designing ready-to-wear clothing, as she wanted specific pieces to style with her scarves. While Stein had no prior clothing design experience, it came naturally to her, and she surprised herself with a full line of 30 SKUs within four weeks, laying the groundwork for the Donni we know and love today.

59 mins

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The Who What Wear Podcast: The 2025 Who What Wear 100 Beauty Awards

The Who What Wear Podcast: The 2025 Who What Wear 100 Beauty Awards

For our second annual Who What Wear 100 Beauty Awards, Beauty Director Erin Jahns is joined by beauty editors Jamie Schneider, Kaitlyn McLintock, and Maya Thomas for a roundtable discussion about all of their favorite products. After spending months testing items from the buzziest new brands and the industry giants, the team has narrowed their top picks down to 100 items across haircare, skincare, makeup, bodycare, tools, nails, and fragrance. Warning: You may want to listen to this episode with your beauty retailer of choice’s website open for easy, add-to-cart access. The Who What Wear Beauty 100 story is live, so check out the full list here!

40 mins

25 June Finished

Katie Sturino Returns! The Founder of Megababe and Author of Sunny Side Up Is Back

Katie Sturino Returns! The Founder of Megababe and Author of Sunny Side Up Is Back

Katie Sturino is the founder of Megababe, the innovative beauty brand known for nontoxic, cult-favorite products like Thigh Rescue and Bust Dust. She's also a body-acceptance advocate with a highly engaged community of close to one million supporters across platforms. Sturino joined Hillary Kerr on Second Life back in 2020 to talk about her winding career path from PR to social media to beauty (listen to her first episode here), but we had to have her back on to discuss her most recent pivot to fiction writing. In this episode, Sturino shares why she decided to write her debut novel, Sunny Side Up, and gets refreshingly candid about the challenges of continuing to transform your career when everyone has feedback. She opens up about what it's like to work with a ghostwriter and where she hopes to take this creative endeavor moving forward. Of course, she also catches us up on the last five years of bootstrapped growth for Megababe and shares what's on the horizon for the business. Buy Sturino's new book, Sunny Side Up, here! (It's Hillary Kerr approved.)

48 mins

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