Feb 14, 2022 · 1h 17m · how-i-built-this
Telfar: Telfar Clemens and Babak Radboy
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
On this episode of NPR's How I Built This, Telfar Clemens and Babak Radboy share how they defied exclusionary fashion gatekeepers to build an iconic, accessible, and direct-to-consumer global brand. Through self-taught design, unconventional corporate partnerships, and democratic pricing, Telfar revolutionized modern luxury.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Guy holds 39.9% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Guy as informed peer 4.3 Guest teaching 4.6 Guest disagreement 2.8 Guy pushing back 1.0
speaking balance: gold is Guy, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 1:13:45 Rejection of the work vs. luck binary
Babak flatly rejects Guy Raz's standard question about hard work versus luck, stating that neither explains their success and warning against tying creative survival to systemic exploitation.
Hardest push from Guy ▶ 58:15 Raz presses for clarification on performative diversityRaz summarizes and presses Babak to clarify whether he is arguing that corporate fashion's sudden embrace of diversity was merely performative tokenism following political shifts.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 58:00 Defining the difference between inclusion and ownershipBabak directly educates Raz on the difference between true power and corporate inclusion, arguing that inclusion simply allows creators into existing structures without transferring ownership.
Guy holds their own ▶ 22:36 Raz connects Telfar's aesthetic to Norma KamaliRaz demonstrates industry and historical knowledge by drawing an insightful comparison between Telfar's comfort-driven design aesthetic and designer Norma Kamali's pioneering work.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Guy as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Guy pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Growing Up in Maryland and Developing Early Style | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Guy Raz conducts a warm, biographical inquiry into Telfar's childhood in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and his Liberian immigrant community. Telfar explains his early rebellion against school uniforms and conformity without friction. | |
| Early Garment Deconstruction and Self-Taught Sewing | 3 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Raz asks how Telfar learned to sew, assuming formal craft training. Telfar reframes the craft, explaining he is proud of being technically 'bad' at sewing because deconstruction and raw intuition drive his aesthetic. | |
| Hustling on the Lower East Side and Inventing the Triple T-Shirt | 4 | 3 | 1 | 0 | Raz tracks Telfar's early college days selling deconstructed garments on the Lower East Side. Telfar describes creating the triple T-shirt and lying about his age to avoid being dismissed by older boutique owners. | |
| Subverting Fashion Conventions and Refining the Unisex Vision | 5 | 4 | 2 | 1 | Raz brings in a point of comparison to designer Norma Kamali regarding comfort. Telfar defines his philosophy of unisex clothing as an authentic daily state of being rather than a high-fashion gimmick. | |
| Mid-Show Break and Babak Radboy's Seattle Origins | 4 | 2 | 1 | 0 | Raz introduces Babak Radboy, reviewing his background in commercial art direction in Seattle and New York before returning to Telfar's lean early operating model. | |
| Meeting in the East Village and Battling Gatekeepers | 4 | 6 | 4 | 1 | Babak explains how institutional fashion gatekeepers deliberately ignored the brand because it was outside the established, predominantly white social and financial ecosystem. | |
| The Kmart Partnership and Early Shopping Bag Prototype | 4 | 6 | 4 | 1 | When Raz attempts to extract a standard How I Built This startup playbook from the Kmart show, Babak immediately pushes back, warning listeners not to copy their path since it left them deep in debt. | |
| Cold-Calling White Castle and the Iconic Times Square Afterparty | 5 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Raz and the guests discuss the White Castle sponsorship, with Raz highlighting White Castle VP Jamie Richardson's history of backing unorthodox cultural projects like Harold and Kumar. | |
| Mid-Show Break: The Evolution of Telfar's Iconic Looks | 4 | 4 | 2 | 1 | Babak and Telfar explain to Raz that controlling production for White Castle uniforms was the real financial breakthrough, turning a standard marketing gig into a sustainable manufacturing revenue stream. | |
| CFDA Win and Launching the Democratic Shopping Bag | 4 | 5 | 3 | 1 | Raz asks about the 2017 CFDA Vogue Fashion Fund award and the bag's sudden explosion. Babak contextualizes the timeline, noting that growth was gradual and that mainstream acclaim brought new forms of institutional hostility. | |
| Critique of Industry Tokenism and Exiting Wholesale | 5 | 8 | 6 | 2 | Babak articulates a sharp critique of corporate tokenism following the 2016 election, educating Raz on how the industry substituted superficial inclusion for genuine ownership, prompting their exit from wholesale. | |
| Lockdown Bag Drop Frenzy and the Stalled Gap Deal | 5 | 4 | 3 | 1 | Raz walks through the collapse of the Gap deal during the early pandemic lockdown. Telfar and Babak explain how direct-to-consumer bag drops rapidly outpaced any corporate collaboration. | |
| Exiting the Fashion System and Creating an Accessible Empire | 5 | 6 | 4 | 2 | Raz proposes that Telfar used industry machinery until strong enough to leave. Babak and Telfar agree in part, schooling Raz on how the standard fashion calendar enforces deliberate overproduction and inflated pricing. | |
| Evaluating Grit, Luck, and Community-Driven Independence | 4 | 7 | 6 | 1 | When Raz introduces the standard closing question about grit versus luck, Babak and Telfar explicitly reject both options, explaining that collective community power and refusing exploitative contracts were the deciding factors. |
Statements from this episode (23)
Clemens intentionally failed private school placement tests to avoid wearing uniforms
“Every single placement test that I would take, I would mark A-A-A-A-A-A all the way down to placement test so I wouldn't get in.”
Telfar Clemens cannot sew and relies on collaborators to construct garments
“I was bad at it, and I'm still bad at it. Like, I can't sew for shit, and I wouldn't want to. That's when I, you know, I really, like, you know, I'm blessed enough to have, like, great people that work with me that make things the way how they should be made”
Clemens: Formal fashion training is unnecessary to direct and create design
“I don't think you need any kind of formal training to do that, or necessarily, it's like, sometimes ripping something and telling someone to do that thing that you just did is like the thing that you need to do, you know, to get what you want. It's not a refin…”
Clemens concealed his age starting out in NYC to avoid industry disrespect
“I had this whole thing that I wouldn't tell anyone how old I was. Like, my best friends, they didn't know I was 18 until I was 21, you know? Like, they thought I was 21 the whole time, because I always just immediately would just feel, like, this amount of dis…”
Telfar Clemens: Early unisex fashion was superficial before Telfar
“There's no line that was Like unisex at that time, that was coming from the place that mine was. Everything was like, oh, a dress on a man meant unisex.”
Supima gifted fabric samples to Telfar when Clemens could not afford it
“I was getting the fabric as a gift from Supima. You know, I couldn't even afford the fabric that they were giving me.”
Radboy: Vogue and Style.com act as historical gatekeepers of fashion
“You have to understand that when people, you know, you have these institutions like Vogue and Style.com, and they're like the Library of Congress of fashion. So they, their, your entry means that you happened. So when they refuse to even record that you had a …”
Radboy: Fashion industry is overwhelmingly white and uses tokenism conditionally
“You're dealing with an all-white industry. Right? And who know it. And you symbolize something specific that's useful up until a point, you know.”
Telfar had never sold over two dozen units before its shopping bag
“And then we had produced the Telfar bag, the shopping bag, and we put the entire production in the store. So it's like hundreds and hundreds of this bag, you know, for a brand that had never sold more than Maybe a dozen, a couple dozen of anything.”
Telfar generated over $1M converting fashion show marketing into revenue
“Like, at some point, we were bringing in over a million dollars just from doing shows, so what you would consider marketing is actually, it wasn't an expense, it was Our income.”
Radboy: Most fashion brand collaborations are superficial PR stunts with small fees
“Well, think, you know, these things are usually for show. They're for press. It's just, you want a press release saying that happened, and then you get a little check for your design fee.”
Telfar secured an order to manufacture 20,000 employee uniforms for White Castle
“So with White Castle, we had the opportunity to make unisex clothes for a 20,000 unit order.”
White Castle renewed Telfar uniform orders every six months
“So we became a supplier to White Castle, and they're renewing them every, you know, six months, and like, that Became a revenue stream, not just a kind of press release.”
Telfar based signature bag price on DJ earnings, making it initially unprofitable
“That, that was a big part of it, is that Telfar wanted to base the price on how much you would make in a night DJ. And that absolutely didn't square up with how much it cost to make the bag. Like, at all. But it's like the price of the bag was part of the conc…”
Telfar was generating only a few thousand dollars monthly through early 2019
“We're still only making like a few thousand dollars a month. Right. Through 2018 and into 2019.”
Radboy: Corporate inclusion initiatives maintain existing ownership structures without sharing power
“And when you really look at the term inclusion, it means that ownership doesn't change. Now you're just being allowed here.”
By early 2019, Telfar's wholesale accounts were doubling every season
“And at that time, you know, our wholesale accounts were doubling every season.”
Telfar decided in early 2019 to fully exit wholesale by 2020
“But we made the decision January, 2019, that by January, 2020, we would be completely out, which was a very difficult thing to do.”
Telfar's first pandemic-era bag drop in March 2020 sold out in seconds
“It was the end of March where finally China opened up. We got a shipment of bags. We post a bag drop in the middle of this crazy pandemic... And they sold out in seconds.”
Telfar only collaborates for manufacturing capabilities, not financial checks
“The whole reason why we collaborate changed because of our material position. Like, we're not looking for that check, actually. We're looking to develop a product that somebody is better at making, or that would take us two years to do.”
Fashion overproduction and unoptimized supply chains drive up retail apparel prices
“Overproducing by design, right? Two collections, like, you know, 400 items every six months. Absolutely wasteful. And you end up, when you have to make like that, that's why you are selling a pair of jeans for a thousand dollars, is because you didn't figure o…”
Clemens plans to open physical retail stores with apparel and lifestyle goods
“I want it to be accessible. Like, you can go to a store and get the things that you want to get, you know. A Telfar store. Definitely clothes, definitely accessories, and definitely an experience. Candles, pianos, bath bombs.”
Radboy: Creative workers must build community to alter exploitative environments
“You can't be in a position where you're binding with Your success or your survival to your exploitation. And that's the position that we're put in, in the creative industries in general. Like, we need the platform, we need the budget, we need the distribution.…”