Mallory Ottariano on building Youer

A New Angle

Mallory Ottariano is the founder of Youer, an American-made apparel company headquartered in Missoula that offers bold, functional, and sustainable clothing for active individuals. Mallory shares her journey from experimenting with sewing and design in her Massachusetts hometown to building a thriving business in Montana. She delves into the pivotal moments that shaped her path, including leveraging Etsy to launch her brand, transitioning from solo production to owning a local factory, creating a distinct design ethos, and maintaining creativity and passion in entrepreneurship.

1/23/2025 update from Mallory:

Last month, we made the very difficult decision to let half our team go and downsize our in-house production. We’ve moved those units to our existing partner facility in California. We’ll still be making one product in-house but nothing like the scale we were operating at before, where we made 70% in-house in 2024. We’ve always made things in California, but now we’ll be making nearly all of it there. Thanks for the opportunity to share stories of making clothes in America.

Learn more about Youer here.

Transcript available here.

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