Theresa Perez

Let’s start at the beginning. Tell me about your background and how you ended up in fashion.

Vanessa Barboni Hallik

I grew up in Iowa. My dad was a sociology professor who got really involved in technology, specifically around NeXT Computer, the company Steve Jobs founded when he got fired from Apple. My mom was an artist and printmaker who ultimately ran the local arts council: a gallery, dance studio, and theater. So I grew up in this totally amazing interdisciplinary, hippie, artsy, techy ecosystem.

We moved to northwestern Pennsylvania when I was around 7, and I witnessed this incredibly formative experience of watching an industrial town collapse. It was a college town, but it also had this high-paying manufacturing economy—the biggest zipper factory in the world, lots of tool and die companies supporting the auto industry. Between the time I went to high school and my younger sister went three years later, they installed metal detectors. The social fabric was completely wrecked. There was also insane environmental degradation.

I think the combination of my parents’ community and seeing that created this feeling that we have to do better than this. I felt a sense of responsibility in that.

But I was really attracted to the intersection of math and creativity, economics and political science. I thought I was going to be an architect, but after some personal challenges in my late teens, I pivoted to what felt like safety. I went hardcore into economics at Cornell.

Theresa

How did you end up in finance?

Vanessa

I always thought I’d work in policy or for a think tank. I applied for all these fellowships and got none of them. Then I had friends applying for finance jobs, and I thought, OK, I guess I’ll try that. I had co-authored this paper with an economics professor—I needed something decent on my resume—and all these finance people were like, “Girl, who does math? We know what to do with that.” The banks gave me all these offers, whereas the policy people were like, “Eh.”

I didn’t know anything. I thought banks were tellers and the tubes that came through the drive-through. I had no idea what investment banking was. But I had an opportunity in foreign exchange in emerging markets, which seemed interesting, and I liked the people better. I very quickly realized that being in a cost center at a bank isn’t a great place, career-wise, so I moved into options trading and started out in foreign exchange. Within nine months, I was like, “I hate this.” It didn’t attach itself to any of my intellectual interests—it was just hard math.

Theresa

But you stayed for 15 years.

Vanessa

I tried to quit. My boss said, “Don’t be stupid, don’t torch your career. Just take a few months off.” I went down to see my family in Colombia, which was amazing. I thought maybe I’d be an immigration lawyer. I took the LSAT, but I didn’t want to do that either. So I ended up back at Morgan Stanley.

But I took a very entrepreneurial approach. I was like, I don’t want to do it the way these trader bros do it. I want to do this differently. And it worked, so they kind of let me. I built out all these emerging markets businesses for them—in Latin America, our trading business for foreign exchange, structuring for corporate transactions, trading of government bonds. It was super cool. They didn’t know what to do with me.

Theresa

When did you start thinking about leaving?

Vanessa

By 2016, it was a very good year on paper for me, but a really crappy year for the people who worked for me given what was happening in the business. I felt like parts of myself were missing—real core parts had been degraded into obsolescence. I was forcing myself to do that job.

Finally, I got up the courage: I either believe in what I say I believe in, or I need to come to terms with the decisions I’ve made and be grateful and happy about that. I decided I have to try.

Theresa

How did fashion enter the picture?

Vanessa

 I ended up pitching Morgan Stanley to build out a big ESG and impact business. They were like, “Meh.” It was clear it wasn’t a priority. They were trying to convince me to do another job and then kind of do that on the side. I knew that trick. Hard pass.

I was going to leave. They suggested a sabbatical. I said okay, but I’m going to pitch this thing to your competitors during my time off.

So I did. Along the way, I also got married and have three amazing stepkids—they were 2, 4, and 6 at the time, now they’re 14, 17, and 19. Their mom is amazing. I felt like I had this base of safety, and I could take some risks. I started exploring other industries. I didn’t know the first thing about fashion, but the more I looked at it, the more I thought, oh my gosh, this is a total dumpster fire. I was trying to really understand where I could be of service. When I looked at other areas like energy transition, I didn’t have some radical new idea. But fashion felt like it was being underinvested in as an area that needs real systemic change.

I felt, I understand this. There’s some intuitive understanding I have that brought all the pieces in my life together: the finances and the supply chain stuff I learned, and emerging markets, and the creativity and the technology.

I kind of shocked myself into this concept for a brand that could be this blueprint, and spent my sabbatical coming up with this concept for Another Tomorrow.

Theresa

From the beginning, you knew you wanted to make a model other people could replicate?

Vanessa

Yeah. I was looking at policy, trying to map things at a systems level from all these discrete pieces of information, thinking about it through the lens of the consumer and discovery and knowledge. Ultimately I was like, I think we can build a brand that encapsulates regenerative sourcing, treating clothing as an asset from a circularity standpoint, really deeply embedding a consistent value system of valuing life across environment, animals, and people.

Then I had this idea: We’re going to come up with some solutions along the way that hopefully would be of service to others. Can we open source that: Build this model, prove that it works and can scale (I see the tensions in saying that), and then take some of the solutions we come up with and offer them up so that other people can use them without reinventing the wheel?

Theresa

What year did you launch?

Vanessa

2020, right before COVID. We were not making sweatpants, so we did not have the Pangaia moment. But it was also a wonderful time because people had some emotional bandwidth to digest what we were doing and think more thoughtfully about how they wanted to live.

Theresa

Has the model been working?

Vanessa

The model has been working. One of my first revelations was: Fashion’s either an agricultural product or it’s a petrochemical product, or some combination of the two, which is kind of the worst. Sustainability is inherently local, so you need to have a relationship at the farm level.

For wool, we built our supply chains literally from the farm up. We started out with two farms in Tasmania. An organization called Fibershed made the initial introduction. We’ve built these supply chains that are really scalable, from the farm up, and we’ve been able to demonstrate with data: net sequestered carbon, amazing biodiversity impact, and the materials are beautiful, wearable materials. We’ve been able to do that with a net positive impact.

Same thing for organic cotton. We have a great program we’ve developed with a partner in Uganda, and another program that’s about 20 different farms now, globally. This has really been our cornerstone, and it works.

Theresa

And you’ve integrated digital IDs?

Vanessa

Yes, you can scan your jacket and see the supply chain. You can also activate the product to resell it. The thesis is farm to closet to closet to closet.

Theresa

Tell me more about the circularity and the technology.

Vanessa

We’re developing our technology, ultimately hoping it becomes a licensable solution so other brands can embed it and start to think about the customer and product lifecycle as inherently circular. We just moved onto blockchain, so you can record changes in ownership.

I was careful about blockchain initially because I didn’t see a really coherent use case. But now we really have this opportunity to both authenticate and register the product and then have these transitions of ownership.

I view it like you should be able to bonk each other’s phones, and instead of just exchanging information, all of a sudden I own your jacket and I send it to you. That’s my vision of how this should feel.

Theresa

Do you get any of the benefits of the circularity, economically?

Vanessa

Yes. One, you can take a piece of that transaction. Two, you get the benefit of staying in touch with that customer. Maybe you love that jacket now, and in a year you’re not feeling it. Maybe you sell it and buy something else—we have another touchpoint with you.

Theresa

Wait, so people can buy a brand-new T-shirt and a secondhand jacket in the same cart?

Vanessa

That’s the idea—to normalize that.

Theresa

How have you been sharing the model and learnings with others?

Vanessa

In the very early days, we did a ton of supply chain storytelling. For a minute, we even had a completely editorially separate magazine section to talk about these supply chains.

I realized that’s how I built emotional connection. There was a New Yorker article about cashmere years ago, and I understood it through that storytelling. But I didn’t want it to be branded content. I really wanted it to have that integrity.

Over time, the commercial realities of the business meant those storytelling budgets got squeezed. A lot of the communications shifted to much more in-real-life, community communications. That’s something we’re working to rebalance now, and it’s an area where I’ll be putting more of my voice.

Theresa

I’m visualizing something that illustrates your whole model.

Vanessa

We would love to build that. It can really de-risk your business. People look at it through the lens of cost—customers don’t care, you can’t handle the margins, blah blah blah.

But if you look at it through the lens of multi-year contracts, a materials library you consistently design into, reduced waste, more certainty, stronger partnerships—there are so many ways in which this is inherently better for a resilient business.

Theresa

It’s like solar panels—it’s economically better, better for the environment, but people need to trust it first. Have you had dialogues with bigger brands?

Vanessa

We have a lot of those dialogues. There’s a good community amongst us who are working in this space. I’ve gotten to know the team at Kering probably the best.

We’re hoping to get some of the materials we’ve developed into as many brands as possible. And equally, that’s how you get money down to the farms. There’s a group of farms that would be amenable to making some of these changes if we can just get some of the cash down to them.

We were careful about communicating the opportunity until we really had the data to back it up. Now that we have the data, we’re ready to mobilize.

Theresa

If you could have it the way you wanted it, what does the fashion industry look like in five to 10 years?

Vanessa

For me, the pinnacle of sustainability is really circularity, because we have so much product outstanding that can be recirculated in the world. Cultural attitudes toward ownership have to change.

Resale is critically important, and every brand should have it built into their model. That creates a huge incentive to go up in quality: Anything disposable doesn’t have residual value.

The other part is regenerative sourcing, which is harder, because it is definitively more expensive. The two things have to come together.

You have to de-risk the model first. The amount of risk in fashion is what creates the push toward massive margins and lowest cost. The circularity piece and the merchandising philosophy help de-risk the model.

Otherwise, you’re just adding more cost to a broken system—and that doesn’t work.