Sylvana Ward DurrettShe left the Met Gala to sell toddler clothes. On purpose.

Today she runs Maisonette out of Brooklyn, where roughly 77 people spend their days deciding which independent diaper bag, which Italian playsuit, which wooden dollhouse deserves a spot on a site that sells to parents who could shop anywhere. The pitch is deceptively simple: clothing, toys, furniture and decor for kids ages 0 to 12, chosen the way a magazine editor chooses a cover. The execution is the hard part, and it is the part Sylvana Ward Durrett finds interesting.

Maisonette exists because of a frustration she could name precisely. After years of dressing the most discerning women in fashion, she became a mother and ran straight into a wall. The products were scattered across a thousand boutiques and big-box aisles. Nothing was curated. Nothing felt considered. "Why isn't there a Net-a-Porter for kids? Why doesn't it exist?" she asked. And then the line that became a thesis: "When you have kids, you've hit a cliff."

So in 2017 she built the thing she wanted, with Luisana Mendoza de Roccia, a friend and fellow Vogue editor who had hit the same cliff. Two women, six children between them, and a market begging for taste. They added Le Scoop, an editorial platform pitched internally as "a Vogue for parents," and Maison Me, a private label for when the perfect item didn't exist yet. The company closed a $15 million Series A in 2018 and has continued raising since, most recently a Series C in late 2022.

The eight years that taught her everything

Before any of it, there was the interview. She had applied to Vogue out of Princeton, where she had studied English literature, and she did not realize the eleventh and final conversation would be with Anna Wintour herself. "I had a very corporate, non-fashion outfit on, which was horrifying," she remembers. She got the job anyway, starting as an assistant and staying nearly fourteen years.

By 2009 she was director of special projects, which is a tidy title for an untidy job: she produced the Met Gala. For eight years she stage-managed the seating, the celebrities, the spectacle, the logistics that the rest of us only see as a red carpet. She produced and appeared in the documentary The First Monday in May, which followed the Gala's 2015 "China: Through the Looking Glass" edition. She worked on the Fashion Fund. She learned, in her words, that Vogue "was like my business school."

The lesson she quotes most often came straight from Wintour. "She has an incredible work ethic and she doesn't stop until it's done. 'No' is not an answer; you fight until you get what you sought out to do." That refusal to accept a closed door is the through-line from the Costume Institute to a customer-service queue at a children's retailer. When she left in 2016, the people who hired her did not exactly disapprove. At Maisonette's launch celebration, Wintour herself showed up. "They've both been so much a part of my Vogue life and personal life for so many years," she said, "I couldn't dream of not coming."

Taste as a business model

The bet underneath Maisonette is that curation is a service worth paying for. The internet gave parents infinite options and almost no judgment. A marketplace that aggregates the best independent and luxury brands, and tells you which ones are actually good, is selling the one thing search engines cannot: a point of view. "We sought to build Maisonette which is a curated marketplace that aggregates what we consider to be the greatest products for kids," she has said. It is the editorial instinct from her Vogue years, redirected at car seats and christening gowns.

She is candid that the job is unglamorous in ways the Met Gala never was. Running a venture-backed consumer company means inventory, vendor integrations, logistics, and the unromantic math of margins. She compares the whole enterprise to parenthood without flinching: "It's like having a child, it really is." Coming from someone with three of them, that is not a throwaway line.

Why a partnership, not a solo act

Maisonette has two names on the founding document, and Durrett rarely tells the story without crediting the other. She and Luisana Mendoza de Roccia met inside Vogue, where the same culture that produced the Met Gala also produced a shared standard for how things should look and feel. When they decided to leave the magazine world and build something, they brought that standard with them. The partnership is the point: one person's frustration is an anecdote, but two editors arriving at the same conclusion from two different households is a market. They split the labor the way founders do, but the editorial conscience of the company - the answer to "is this good enough to put our name beside?" - is shared.

That conscience is also why the company built its own brand rather than simply reselling everyone else's. Maison Me, launched in 2018, exists for the moments when the perfect children's item did not already exist on the market. It is a small declaration that curation alone has limits, and that sometimes the most editorial thing a retailer can do is make the thing itself. Le Scoop, the editorial platform, plays the opposite role - it is the magazine voice grafted onto a store, advising parents the way Vogue once advised its readers, except the subject is naptime and birthday parties instead of hemlines.

The discipline behind the taste

It would be easy to read Durrett as a creative who happened into commerce, but the record argues the reverse. The Met Gala is, underneath the gowns, an enormous logistics problem: thousands of moving parts, immovable deadlines, and zero tolerance for a visible mistake. She solved that problem eight years running. The skill transfers cleanly. A marketplace serving children from newborn to twelve is a catalog of immovable deadlines too - birthdays, holidays, growth spurts, the first day of school - and a single bad experience can lose a parent for good. The work ethic she absorbed from Wintour, the refusal to accept "no," reads less like a motivational poster and more like an operating manual for a company where the customer is exhausted and the stakes feel personal.

The mother in the founder

Her three children are not a footnote to the work; they are the product testers. Maisonette's selection is shaped by the same kids who shape her weekends, which she guards as family time. She talks about the daily logistics of parenting with the eye of an operator. On the school run: "Scooters are brilliant because you can get somewhere in a reasonable amount of time whereas when your kids are walking, it takes about 10 years." On the guilt that comes with building a company and raising a family at once, she offers something closer to grace than a strategy: "You're doing the best you can. Your kids love you and they'll respect you for it later."

The fashion gene runs deep. She grew up in Los Angeles, the daughter of actress Rosanna DeSoto and screenwriter David S. Ward, the Oscar winner behind The Sting. Her sense of style, she says, came from her mother's closet: "My love for fashion started with my mother. She had an extraordinary shoe collection, which is where my love of shoes started." She chose retail logistics over Hollywood, and a generation of well-dressed toddlers is the result.

Recognition has followed. She landed on Inc.'s 2019 Female Founders 100 list. But the more telling metric is the one she set for herself: build the store that should have existed when she first went looking, and refuse to take no for an answer until it does.