Vanessa
Barboni Hallik

Scan the seam of an Another Tomorrow blazer and a small chapter of natural history opens up: the farm the wool came from, the hands that cut it, the year it was made, and a standing offer to buy it back when you are done. This is the company Vanessa Barboni Hallik runs as Founder, Co-CEO and Executive Chair, and it behaves less like a fashion label than like a ledger you can wear.

The premise is deceptively plain - treat clothing as an asset rather than a disposable. Behind it sits a fully digitized product ecosystem: digital IDs that prove provenance, technology-enabled transparency across the supply chain, and an authenticated recommerce program so a garment can have a second and third owner without losing its paper trail. Another Tomorrow is B Corp certified, designed end to end, and built on regenerative and certified low-impact fabrics - traceable silk, regenerative wool, organic cotton, recycled cashmere.

"My mission is to create a truly sustainable and compassionate company - a foundational wardrobe of ethically made clothing, education, and a platform for activism."

That three-pronged idea - clothing, education, activism - is not a marketing afterthought stapled on at the end. It is the thing she left a Managing Director title to go do. The label launched out of New York roughly six weeks before COVID-19 closed the world. Most founders would call that the worst possible timing. She kept building.

Before the wool and the digital IDs, there was a derivatives desk. Barboni Hallik spent roughly fifteen years at Morgan Stanley, trading foreign exchange and emerging markets and holding several leadership roles in the institutional securities business. A summer research internship in college had pulled her into finance almost by accident - her first boss spotted her there - and she rose to Managing Director.

The turning point was not a promotion. It was a slump. When her relevance to the firm started to slip, a colleague gave her counsel that sounds backwards until it works: ask for the hardest job in the building. She took over a struggling business unit, turned it around, and discovered something about herself in the process - she is a builder. Rebuilding a broken desk lit her up more than any clean win ever had.

That same instinct now points at an industry instead of a trading book. She took a sabbatical around 2017 intending to move into sustainable finance. The research went sideways in the best way. The deeper she dug into where things are made and what they cost the planet and the people who make them, the more fashion's quiet, enormous footprint refused to let her look away. By January 2018, the sabbatical had a company in it.

She had quit the industry three times before. This time she did not go back.

Most people who leave a trading floor go quiet, or go to a hedge fund, or go to a beach. Barboni Hallik went to the parts of the apparel world that nobody photographs - the farms, the mills, the dye houses, the long opaque chain between a raw fiber and a folded sweater. What she found was an industry running on assumptions that would never survive a risk committee: nobody could tell you where most things came from, what they cost in water or carbon, or who was paid what to make them.

To a person trained to price uncertainty, that opacity read as the whole problem. You cannot fix what you cannot measure, and you cannot ask customers to value what they cannot see. So the first product Another Tomorrow shipped was not really a blazer. It was visibility - a way to make the invisible supply chain legible, and then attach that legibility to the garment permanently through a digital ID. The clothes are the delivery mechanism. The transparency is the payload.

The second move is just as contrarian. Fashion makes money by selling you the next thing; Barboni Hallik built a model that profits when a garment lasts and changes hands. Authenticated recommerce means an Another Tomorrow piece can be resold with its provenance intact, the way a watch or a painting carries its history. Treating clothing as an asset is not a slogan on a hangtag. It is a different unit economics, and it is the bet she left a Managing Director title to place.

It helps that she is not squeamish about hard years. She built businesses in the wreckage after the financial crisis. She managed volatile emerging markets where the floor could fall out overnight. Launching a luxury label into a pandemic was, by that standard, just another week with a wide bid-ask spread. The instinct she trusts is the one that turned around a failing desk: find the resilience pattern, and build on it.

Press, boards, and a few lists

• Featured in The New York Times, Fast Company, Bloomberg, and Vogue.
• Named to Wallpaper* Magazine's USA300.
• Named to Worth Magazine's Worthy100.
• Advisory Board, Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.
• Built a B Corp certified, end-to-end sustainable design company from scratch.

What the brand is made of

Bars reflect the brand's stated focus areas, not financial figures.

There is a tidy version of this story where finance was a wrong turn and fashion is the redemption. Barboni Hallik does not tell it that way. The same person who liked taking over the unit everyone else avoided is the person who took on an industry everyone agrees is broken and very few try to fix from the inside. The desk taught her how systems hide their risks. The brand is her answer - a system that refuses to hide.

She is candid about vulnerability in a way the trading floor does not reward. She talks openly about resilience and about meditation, about choosing which patterns to see, about wanting partnership over conquest. Those are not soft edges bolted onto a hard career. They are the operating system she now runs the company on, and the reason her hiring rule is so blunt: skill is cheap, alignment is not, and a brilliant person who does not share the mission will quietly pull the whole thing apart.

What makes her interesting is the refusal to pick a lane. She is a former markets professional who can talk regenerative wool and recycled cashmere. She sits on a human rights advisory board at Harvard and ships tailored trousers. She wants the garment to be beautiful and the receipt to be public. The whole project is an argument that those things were never actually in tension - that luxury and accountability can share a label, and that the proof should travel in the seam.

The aspiration is bigger than a brand. She frames Another Tomorrow as a model - a working demonstration of what fashion could look like if it aligned with human, animal, and environmental welfare instead of treating all three as externalities. A beacon, in her words. Whether the industry follows is an open question. That she built a legible, circular, B Corp version of it from a sabbatical idea is not.