Founder · CEO · M.M.LaFleur
Sarah LaFleur
She walked out of a private equity job four months in, sure she had torched her resume. Then she built the brand that takes the work out of getting dressed.
She walked out of a private equity job four months in, sure she had torched her resume. Then she built the brand that takes the work out of getting dressed.
Ask Sarah LaFleur what she sells and she will dodge the obvious answer. Not dresses. Not blazers. She sells the thirty seconds a woman gets back every morning because she no longer has to stand in front of a closet bargaining with herself. M.M.LaFleur, the company she runs from Lower Manhattan, exists to make that decision disappear.
These days the question she is chasing is bigger than any single garment. The office she designed for is gone, or at least it changed shape during the pandemic, and she has spent the years since arguing that workwear should follow. Her answer is a phrase she put into circulation: Power Casual. One level above very casual, one level below business casual. Slacks and a good tee. It is a small idea with a large claim attached to it, that the rules of the corporate dress code were never carved in stone and a founder with strong opinions could rewrite them.
She is unusually candid about the doubt that runs underneath all of it. LaFleur talks openly about questioning herself, about the fear that she was not built for the thing she had decided to build. That honesty is part of why people listen. She is not the founder who pretends the path was obvious. She is the one who admits she nearly didn't take it.
The reinvention is not a marketing flourish. When offices emptied and the blazer-and-pencil-skirt economy froze overnight, a brand built on dressing for the boardroom had every reason to panic. Instead LaFleur leaned into the disruption and recast the premise of the company around how people actually work now: from home, in hybrid weeks, in clothes that have to survive a video call and a school pickup in the same afternoon. Power Casual was her bet that the office was not coming back the way it left, and that the brand willing to name the new rules would get to write them.
"It's not about the dress; it's about the person wearing the dress."— Sarah LaFleur
The origin story does not begin with a vision board. It begins with a resignation. LaFleur had landed at the private equity firm Starwood Capital, splitting time between New York and Paris, helping manage a luxury goods portfolio. It was the kind of job a Harvard graduate is supposed to want. She lasted about four months before deciding it wasn't a fit and walking away.
What followed was not triumph but panic. She was convinced she had ruined her resume, that no serious employer would touch someone who had quit so fast. Starting a company began less as ambition than as a way to make money while the dust settled. She had carried one idea for years, though, sharpened during her consulting days when she kept buying work clothes she did not love and could not flatter herself in: professional clothing for women could simply be better.
To bankroll the early days she tutored students for the SAT at night. The tutoring covered her living costs and bought her daylight hours to chase the business. She found her designer in Miyako Nakamura, formerly the head designer for Zac Posen, and a third partner in Narie Foster. The three of them started in 2011 and brought M.M.LaFleur to the public in 2013.
The name was personal from the start. The "M.M." comes from her mother's childhood nickname, "Meme." The company that would dress thousands of working women carries the name of the woman who raised its founder.
The frustration that started it was specific and unglamorous. As a young consultant, LaFleur kept handing over real money for work clothes that left her cold. "I was so sick of paying $150 for a dress that was so uninspired," she has said. The market seemed to assume that a woman dressing for a serious job wanted to look like a man in a serious job, or that she would happily spend her weekends decoding fashion magazines to figure out the difference. LaFleur did not buy either premise. Her customer, as she framed it, did not want to pore over the pages of Vogue. She wanted to feel like herself and get on with her day.
The early breakthrough was not a single dress. It was a way of shopping that asked the customer to do almost nothing.
A curated selection of pieces shipped to a customer's door. She kept what she loved, sent back the rest, and never had to wander a store or scroll a catalog. It made M.M.LaFleur a fixture on the professional woman's fashion map.
The original Bento Box subscription was retired in 2019. In its place came curated monthly capsules, each paired with an "inspiring woman" as a community partner. The friction-free idea survived; the format evolved.
"They don't look good on a hanger, but on a real body," she has said of the clothes. "They're only exciting when you put them on." The pitch was never the photograph. It was the feeling at 7am.
LaFleur does not treat clothing as a frivolous category. In 2020 she announced that M.M.LaFleur would give free clothing to women running for office, an unusually direct statement that what a woman wears to the podium is not trivial. It tracks with how she talks about the whole enterprise. "Clothing was a really, really powerful way of not just getting other people to see you in that light," she has said, "but also you yourself."
Her influence reaches past the storefront. She has been named a Henry Crown Fellow within the Aspen Global Leadership Network, sits on the Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and serves on the board of the Downtown Alliance of New York City. The founder who once feared she was unemployable now advises on the economy of the city she builds in.
She is also blunt about the ambition. "We want to be the biggest workwear brand out there," she has said. Not a boutique. Not a niche. The biggest.
That nerve is easier to understand once you know where she came from. The granddaughter of a Japanese Prime Minister and the daughter of a US Ambassador, LaFleur grew up around rooms where the stakes were national and the dress code was non-negotiable. She studied the machinery of business up close, first as a Bain consultant, then on the ground in South Africa weighing agricultural ventures against questions of food security, then inside a private equity firm valuing luxury houses. She had seen, from several angles, how the things people buy carry meaning far beyond the price tag. M.M.LaFleur was where she put that lesson to work for the woman getting dressed at dawn.
What keeps the story interesting is that she refuses to let it harden into a fairy tale. The four-month exit, the late-night tutoring, the conviction that she had wrecked her own prospects: she keeps those details on the table rather than sanding them down. For a generation of founders sold on the myth of the inevitable genius, LaFleur offers something more useful. A reminder that the leap usually looks, from the inside, a lot like falling.
Her grandfather, Kiichi Miyazawa, was Prime Minister of Japan from 1991 to 1993.
Her father, Christopher J. LaFleur, served as US Ambassador to Malaysia.
The "M.M." in the brand name comes from her mother's childhood nickname, "Meme."
She tutored SAT students at night to cover her living costs while building the company.
Her clothes were designed by Miyako Nakamura, former head designer for Zac Posen.