kidswear
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The Bootstrapped Bengaluru Label That Sold India on the Rs 3,000 Shirt
How Manish and Akshika Poddar turned a family garment factory's European know-how into one of India's fastest-growing premium fashion houses - and stayed bootstrapped until the numbers spoke for themselves.
Drew Eakins
Drew Eakins is a marketing leader in the outdoor industry and the marketing chief for Reima's North America business, the 80-year-old Finnish children's outdoor clothing and footwear brand. Based in Colorado, he has spent more than a decade building outdoor brands, with earlier stops at Cotopaxi, Hestra Gloves, and Great Trango Holdings. He is known for connecting technical outdoor products with the audiences who actually use them, and for leaning into brand storytelling, wholesale partnerships, and channel strategy.
Judy Duzich
Judy Duzich is the merchandising chief at Century 21 Stores, the lower-Manhattan off-price retailer famous for stocking designer labels at 40 to 65 percent off. She joined Century 21 as an assistant buyer in 1990, spent roughly three decades climbing to vice president and divisional merchandise manager, left after the chain shut down in 2020, and returned in 2022 to help rebuild it. When Century 21 reopened at 22 Cortlandt Street in May 2023 - 100,000 square feet across four floors, down from 250,000 across seven - Duzich was the one deciding what actually went on the racks. Her stated brief was to make the assortment more curated, more elevated and more relevant, organized by brand and by style instead of piled into bins, with fresh deliveries arriving constantly so that the store's famous treasure-hunt logic still worked. A Fashion Institute of Technology graduate in marketing and fashion merchandising, she is one of the few people who has bought for Century 21 in three separate decades.
Reima
Reima is a Finnish children's outdoor clothing company founded in 1944 that designs functional, weatherproof apparel, footwear and accessories for kids aged 0-12. Built on a mission to get every child active outdoors for at least an hour a day, Reima pairs Nordic design with technical performance - waterproof jackets, snowsuits, softshells, base layers and shoes - and has become an industry leader in sustainable, circular kidswear, cutting its emissions more than 50% since 2021 and selling in roughly 50 countries.