Welcome to Chase your Dreams

In this episode you will discover the journey of Canadian fashion designer, Linda Lundström. 

Linda shares her insights on embracing change, the impact of technology in manufacturing and why challenges should be seen as gifts. Join us for an inspiring conversation with this true fashion innovator.

About Linda Lundström

Linda Lundström is an award-winning fashion designer, lean manufacturing practitioner, inspirational speaker, Indigenous ally, and creative director of online outerwear brand Therma Kōta.

Linda’s career spans over five decades in the fashion industry. She’s well known for designing and building the Linda Lundström brand and a state-of-the-art Canadian lean manufacturing facility. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including three honorary PhDs. She was named to the Order of Ontario in 1995 and received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2013. She is recognized as a champion of First Nations awareness, ethical manufacturing practices, and a proud supporter of the Made in Canada label. Linda’s entrepreneurial journey is marked by synchronicity guided by mantras from her parents and a deep commitment to social responsibility.

Summary

Linda Lundström, a renowned Canadian fashion designer, shares her journey of resilience, innovation, and spirituality in the fashion industry. With over five decades of experience, she emphasizes the significance of seeing every life event as a gift, even setbacks like her company’s bankruptcy in 2008. Lundström highlights the importance of paying attention to the universe’s signs and believing in one’s path. Her career is marked by her dedication to Canadian manufacturing, ethical practices, and empowering Indigenous communities through the Sewing Circle Project. She also discusses the transition from running a multimillion-dollar business to founding Therma Kōta with her daughters, focusing on sustainable, made-to-order outerwear.

Takeaways

View Challenges as Gifts

Lundström’s philosophy revolves around perceiving every life event, including setbacks and failures, as gifts that lead to growth and new opportunities.

Lean Manufacturing and Innovation

Lundström’s adoption of lean manufacturing and computerized systems in the ’80s showcases her forward-thinking approach, focusing on efficiency, waste reduction, and empowering workers.

Sourcing and Sustainability

Her commitment to Canadian manufacturing and sustainable practices highlights the importance of ethical considerations in fashion. She designed products based on the available materials, promoting a waste-not-want-not philosophy.

Cultural Identity and Design

Drawing inspiration from her father’s Swedish indigenous background and Canadian heritage, Lundström underlines the significance of integrating personal and cultural identity into design, making it unique and authentic.

Adaptation and Online Business Model

Transitioning to an online business model with Therma Kōta, she illustrates the importance of adapting to changing market dynamics and leveraging technology to reach customers directly, offering customized, made-to-order products.

Importance of Physical Fitness

She emphasizes the physical demands of the fashion industry, advising aspiring designers to maintain physical fitness to handle the workload effectively.

Chapters

00:00 Believing in the Gifts of Life

03:15 Introduction to Linda Lundström

06:30 Early Passion for Sewing

13:35 Starting the Linda Lundström Brand

18:22 Inspiration from a Trip to Japan

23:07 Creating Laparka

30:49 Commitment to Made in Canada

36:52 Transition to Lean Manufacturing

43:08 Supporting Indigenous Communities

56:09 Starting and Building a Multi-Million Dollar Company

57:26 Facing Financial Crisis and Selling the Company

59:18 Creating a Plan B and Transitioning to a New Chapter

01:01:08 Finding Joy and Success in a Smaller Studio

01:03:08 Working Remotely and Embracing Lean Manufacturing

01:05:01 Embracing Online Retail and Minimizing Waste

01:07:52 Supporting Indigenous Communities through the Sewing Circle Project

01:10:53 Advice for Aspiring Fashion Designers and Entrepreneurs

01:15:18 Viewing Challenges as Gifts and Finding Happiness

01:16:16 Where to Find Linda Lundström

Contact info:

Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lifehackslinda
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lundstromlinda/
Website: www.thermakota.com

Transcript

Linda Lundström

If you pay attention to the signs and signals that the universe sends you on your path that are meant to direct you in a certain way, believe, have faith that if you follow that path, it will take you somewhere good. And even going bankrupt, having my company fail in 2008, even that was a gift.

And the second thing besides, you know, being physically strong that I want to share with people as a piece of advice is that I’ve gone through life believing that everything is a gift. Everything is a gift. Growing up in the bush turned out to be a gift. Losing my company in 2008 became a gift because now I live on a lake surrounded by cedar trees and I’m working in my studio and I’m still doing what I love.

So losing my company was a gift because I would have been in worse shape if I clung onto it and not listened to what the universe was telling me. So everything in life in business is a gift. If you have that belief, then you will find that no matter what happens, you can survive it, you can thrive and be happy.

Glynis Tao

Welcome to Chase Your Dreams, a podcast for fashion entrepreneurs who want to build a purposeful and profitable clothing business so they can make a living doing what they love. I’m your host, Glynis Tao, an apparel business consultant and SEO specialist with 20 years apparel industry experience. I’m also a mom to a wonderfully energetic little boy named Chase.

Glynis Tao

Hey everyone, I’m so thrilled to have you join us today as we delve into the incredible journey of Canadian fashion designer, Linda Lundström. Linda Lundström is an award-winning fashion designer, lean manufacturing practitioner, inspirational speaker, Indigenous ally, and creative director of online outerwear brand Therma Kōta.

Linda’s career spans over five decades in the fashion industry. She’s well known for designing and building the Linda Lundström brand and a state-of-the-art Canadian lean manufacturing facility. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including three honorary PhDs. She was named to the Order of Ontario in 1995 and the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2013. She is recognized as a champion of First Nations awareness and ethical manufacturing practices, a proud supporter of the Made in Canada label. Linda’s entrepreneurial journey is marked by synchronicity guided by mantras from her parents and a deep commitment to social responsibility.

Today, Linda shares her insights on embracing change, the impact of technology in manufacturing and why challenges should be seen as gifts. Join us for inspiring conversation with a true fashion innovator, Linda Lundström.

Hi, Linda, it’s so nice to have you here today. Thanks for joining me on the podcast.

Linda Lundström

Thank you, Glynis. It’s so good to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Glynis Tao

You are a Canadian fashion industry icon, and I’m so honored to have you here sharing your story and expertise with us today. My pleasure. So can you tell our listeners a bit about yourself and how you first got started in the fashion industry?

Linda Lundström

Wow, how much time do we have? Well, the short story is that I started sewing when I was three. So, you know, the fact that I did what I did with my career kind of makes sense when you know that. We grew up in a little tiny community in northwestern Ontario. It was a mining community, gold mining community, where there was a lot of little towns, each one with a gold mine. And so the town that we were in when I was actually a hamlet had about 11 houses.

And my mom ordered a Singer featherweight sewing machine from Eaton’s catalog. It was electric, which was state of the art back then because a lot of the sewing machines were treadle sewing machines, you know, you pump them with your feet. So my mom had this little sewing machine which was her pride and joy. And she took the needle out and let me play with it. Can you believe it? So at the age of three, I was feeding fabric through the machine, but there was no needle in it.

And then she thought, oh, this kid seems to be pretty competent in that. So she put a thread in it and a needle and gave me fabric. And so by the time I was in grade one, I was making my own clothes to go to school.

Glynis Tao

Wow.

Linda Lundström

Yeah. And my mom, so my mom was really instrumental and encouraging. I mean, can you imagine we’re in the middle of nowhere in the bush. Our only contact with the outside world is Eaton’s catalog and or one of our only contacts wasn’t the only one. There was a highway out of the area which is basically it’s called the Red Lake District but it was made up of these little towns and we lived in several of them but the one I was born in was very small and so for her to supply me with fabric. Sometimes it was just the bags that flour came in. Flour used to come in cloth bags, by the way, so did sugar. So my mom saved those bags and she’d let me experiment with them. So when I got to grade one, I was wearing my own clothes and I wasn’t wearing like little girls things. I was wearing like pencil skirts with a slit up the back.

Glynis Tao

But you were already a fashionista.

Linda Lundström

I was making adult clothes, but in miniature sizes. And so that was how my career began. And then I just, you know, school was something that I had to contend with when all I really wanted to do was go home and sew. And so consequently, my scholastic records were not great.

I did graduate from high school, but I graduated with a 53% average. So I had some subjects that I was pretty good in, like English and anything creative, but not so good in math and those kinds of subjects. And so my options were limited, but we sent a submission to Sheridan College with photographs of all the things that I had made from the time I was that high to my 17 or 18 year old self, we sent the photographs to Sheridan College and I was accepted and that’s where I met my tribe. I met other people like me who were making things and who had shown this ability. And so I was, died and gone to heaven. I mean, that’s where I really thrived and I was getting A pluses on my projects and high marks and it was the first time I’d ever experienced that.

Glynis Tao

Yeah, that sounds very similar to my story as well. Like, I was not very interested in things in high school except for home economics and sewing classes, the sewing classes that I took. 

Linda Lundström

Yes, yeah, home economics was a good one.

Glynis Tao

Yeah. Yeah, and then it wasn’t until I went to fashion school too that, you know, I felt like I came alive.

Linda Lundström

Which school did you go to?

Glynis Tao

I went to Kwantlen in BC and then I moved out to Toronto and went to Ryerson University.

Linda Lundström

Okay, okay. So and did you study fashion design or fashion merchandising?

Glynis Tao

Fashion design.

Linda Lundström

Okay, oh cool. That’s really interesting.

Glynis Tao

Yeah, so then after Sheridan, then did you decide to start your own fashion brand then or?

Linda Lundström

No, no, I knew that I got a certain amount of knowledge from my time at Sheridan College, but I knew that it was more of an academic approach and that to really understand manufacturing and the business, the industry, I needed some practical experience. So I said, okay, I think I was, I think I was 20 when I graduated from Sheridan College and I thought, okay, I need to get some experience in the industry.

So I thought, okay, when I’m 27, I’m going to start. So I’m going to take the next, you know, six, six or so years and I’m just going to learn more. So I, um, I worked for, um, a couturier in Toronto. Then I worked on Spadina Avenue as a pattern maker. And that was really wonderful. It was a company, um, that had been in business for a long time and they took me under their wing and they really enjoyed, you know teaching me how it actually worked in the industry, you know, like going to New York and getting patterns because they had a tie-up in New York.

So they didn’t actually create a lot of their own styles, which is something I didn’t realize that the Canadian industry was basically based on copying or having a tie-up with a company in New York that was creating the styles and the patterns and then reproducing them here.

I also worked, I also worked for a company in London, England, called Frank Usher because I was awarded a Canadian government scholarship to study abroad for a year. And so I went to London and I was accepted with Frank Usher as an intern. And I worked with them for eight months. And then I went to the south of France and I worked for a company called Chacok.

So you can imagine my learning curve was just, you know, it was going, it was going way up. Yeah. And I came back just full of enthusiasm and thinking, okay, I need another couple of years on Spadina Avenue learning more. And I could not get a job, couldn’t get a job. And so that’s when I decided to accelerate my plans by a couple of years and, uh, and start my own company.

So call my mom and dad. Said, Mom, Dad, remember when you promised me that when I was ready to start my company, that you’d loan me some money to start it? Well, I’m ready now. And so they did, they kept their promise because my dad was in the mining business, but after being an underground miner for many years, he started his own company in the mining contracting business. And my mom had her own company in our basement where she sold fabric and rented sewing machines.

So that’s another part of my story is that when I was about 10 years old or 11 years old, my mom opened this fabric store in her basement, in our basement, and she bought fabric from Eaton’s catalog and then she sold it for the same price she paid for it. And she made cake and coffee for everyone that came to her fabric store. And so my dad said, Olive you’re losing money. So that’s when my mom started. My mom started traveling to Winnipeg, which is like an eight hour, well, it was like a one and a half hour plane ride, but it was an eight hour drive. My mom started going to Winnipeg and buying fabric at wholesale so that she could afford to, you know, mark it up a bit and cover her costs.

So I would come home every day and go downstairs and there would be a fabric store in our basement, right? And so my job was to, my mom also rented out sewing machines because she didn’t think that not having a sewing machine was an excuse for not buying fabric. So she started renting sewing machines out to people for a month at a time. And when they came back from the person, they usually, the thread was jammed or something, they needed cleaning, they needed oiling. And that was my job. I became like almost like a sewing machine mechanic. So simple repairs to sewing machines was something that I developed and I love doing that. I love machinery.

And so where was I? So when I was yeah, so I studied in Europe for a year and came back, started my own company in a two-bedroom apartment with a loan from my mom and dad. And that was in 1974.

Glynis Tao

And that was the start of the Linda Lundström brand. Yes. It started out of your parents’ home. 

Linda Lundström

No, I was in Toronto at this time. My mom and dad were, yeah, I stayed in Toronto because I knew I had to either be in Toronto or Montreal.

And I was sort of a flip of the coin, but I was in Toronto one day, picking up my things that had been in storage out of friends and I ran into one person that I knew. And I thought, okay, I’ll stay in Toronto. I know one person here. I didn’t know anybody in Montreal.

Glynis Tao

Right, okay.

Linda Lundström

So I rented an apartment, a two bedroom apartment. I had sewing machines in one bedroom. Not many, like two sewing machines, industrial sewing machines. In fact, I still have one of the machines. I don’t know if you can see this machine right here.

Glynis Tao

Uh-huh.

Linda Lundström

This machine is an industrial singer sewing machine. And when I bought it in 1974, it was old already. And that machine has not missed a stitch in all those years. It’s my favorite machine. It’s a beauty.

Glynis Tao

Yeah. Yes. And you’re still using it.

Linda Lundström

Still using it had the motor replaced once, you know, maintain it as much as I can, because I know about machine maintenance, right? So that’s why it’s lasted so long. And so I had sewing machines in one room. I had rolling racks in the second bedroom with garments on them and patterns and stuff. My living room was my showroom and it also had a couch in it that was a hide-a-bed. That was where I slept, but in the daytime it was a showroom.

And the dining room was where I built a table, a cutting table. The apartment was one of these old apartments with, the dining room was like the largest room in the apartment. And the way I built the table was if I gained weight, I couldn’t get out from behind the table because of the, it fit exactly into that space.

And I started showing my, I made a small collection and I started showing it to people. One thing led to another. It grew very, very slowly. I remember my first year, my sales were $14,000. My second year, they were $30,000. And my third year, I think my sales were over $100,000. And I just kept, you know, I just kept going.

Glynis Tao

Wow. So what was the vision that you had for the brand in the beginning?

Linda Lundström

You know, the mouse that’s in a maze and it just goes, it goes where the cheese is.

Glynis Tao

Yeah.

Linda Lundström

You know, that, that whole analogy. The maze? Well, um, the maze and they go for where the cheese is. And so I made my first collection, I made dresses, I made tops, I made sportswear, coordinated sportswear, tops and bottoms, skirts and pants, jackets and blouses. I made coats. I made a lot of different categories. And back then, the industry tended to be in categories. You were either a blouse house, or you were a pant house, or you were a coat house, or you know what I mean?

The industry wasn’t set up to be like a concept, a wardrobe concept industry. And I learned pretty quickly that buyers, and I was selling to retail stores, I was trying to sell to retail stores, buyers were used to categorizing. They went to one place for their blouses, they went to another company for their dresses, another company for their coats. So when I put out this collection that had everything in it, coats and everything, I kind of confused the buyers, I think. 

And what sold the best was the dresses. Who knew? The dresses sold way better than anything else. So I guess that was a sign that maybe there was a void in the dress end of the industry that for some reason I stumbled upon it. And so what happened with the next collection, I made more dresses. And then the next one, I made even more dresses. I dropped the coats, I, you know, and started going to where the cheese was. And at a certain point, I was I became sort of known as a dress house, which was okay, as I was building my business, but I felt very limited in that category.

But I kept going and my sales kept you know, my sales kept going up. And then an amazing thing happened in 1980. At the age of 30 a very good friend of mine invited me to join her on a trip to Japan. She was in the fabric. She had gone to Sheridan College, but she ended up going into the fabric design end of the business. And at that time, Japan was the main supplier of fabulous fabrics. Today it’s China and Korea, but back then it was Japan. And so to be invited to go with her to Japan was an amazing opportunity. And her name is Glynis, by the way.

Glynis Tao

Your friend’s name?

Linda Lundström

Yeah, my friend’s name was Glynis. Yeah, she changed my life. And so I really didn’t have a pot to piss in. Like, I mean, I did, my company was growing, but when you’re running a growing company, you’re almost always cash poor because you have to finance that growth, right?

And you have to buy more fabric to fill more orders and everything. And so we were running a pretty tight ship and I thought, well, I can’t afford to go to Japan. But Glynis said, well, you stay with me in my hotel. You know, well my expenses are all paid. You’re just tagging along. So I did. And I took her up on it and I went to Japan and I was mesmerized by the aesthetic.

In Japan, you know, I thought it was going to be a cesspool of humanity with people pushing you and crowding you, not at all. People really respect personal space over there. There were lots of areas that were very spacious and the inside of buildings. It was, it just blew my mind. And the fashion back then was being recognized around the world from Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo. It was pulsating with creative energy. And I landed right then in Japan and I got to absorb all that. And what I observed was that the Japanese fashion that was really being recognized around the world, like in Europe and everything, was when you looked at it, it was all geometric shapes that were based on the kimono. They were kind of kimono-esque, but then they had taken that that those geometric shapes and they had morphed them and twisted them and made them into these really unusual things.

And they started to rediscover some of the traditional fabrics of Japan that were being used in modern day, but were actually old ancient textile techniques. And so I thought, wow, it’s Japan at that point was really leaning into their natural cultural heritage.

I came back from that trip and I looked at my collection and I went, no wonder I’m working so hard. I’m trying to figure out what’s happening in New York, what’s happening in Milan, what’s happening in Paris. I’m reading Women’s Wear Daily, trying to figure out how to stay up with everything. And I felt a little bit like this. I went to Japan and I went, stop. I canceled my subscription to Women’s Wear Daily.

I stopped traveling to all the different shows and everything. And I said, okay, what can I make that is to Canada, what the kimono is to Japan? What can I draw upon having grown up in the North in a little tiny town? What was it about that life experience that I can bring into my work now? What is it about? What is, is there a garment? Like, is there a garment that’s typically Canadian?

And then my father is from north of the Arctic Circle, was born north of the Arctic Circle in Sweden. And his family was partly Sami, which is the indigenous people of Northern Sweden. And they were called Laplanders. And I, so I’m asking myself, what can I make that is a reflection of my Lapland, Sami heritage, my Canadian experience living in the North. And at that point I was visited with a vision that kept recurring. It’s almost like a dream that you have over and over and over and over and over again. And the vision, it was of a figure walking across a frozen horizon. There was no trees. The sky met the ground, which was covered with snow, and there was a very faint line where they met. And the sky was shades of pink, soft pink, soft yellow. And it was, and walking across was this figure with a pointed hood and fur around, walking in profile, and the color of the coat that this person was wearing was the same color as the color of the sky.

So you can, can you see it? Can you, am I painting a good picture?

Glynis Tao

You are, absolutely. I can visualize all of what you’re saying.

Linda Lundström

Was very mystical. It just seemed like that vision is so clear in your mind, like. It’s almost as though, Glynis, it came from somewhere in, it’s almost like I felt like I was channeling. Because it kept coming back and it always came back in the morning when I was waking up but I wasn’t fully awake yet. This vision would appear of this woman walking across this horizon. And it was all very dreamy, very dreamy. So I went, oh, well, that’s a beautiful parka which I grew up wearing parkas, like we all were parkas, there are little jackets with the fur around here.

Glynis Tao

Yeah.

Linda Lundström

And I’ve got photographs of me when I’m like two, wearing a parka that my mom had made and, um, cause it was a good, a good design for the North. And then I thought that my father’s heritage was from Lapland and they dressed in a, a system of layers also. So the outside layer would be brightly decorated and then inside they would either have wool or they would have reindeer hide inside. So there’d be layers, the outside one being decorated with bright ribbons and everything like that.

So I went, wow, it’s almost like a combination of my lap background and a parka. Maybe I should call it Laparka.

Glynis Tao

Yeah, yeah. And that’s how La Parka was born.

Linda Lundström

Yes. What started with this vision turned out to be a product that I ended up manifesting. So I had to get spent. I wasn’t a coat house. Remember, I had eliminated the coats.

Glynis Tao

Yeah

Linda Lundström

I have this I have this obsession based on this vision to make what I see in my vision. And I told two people what I had in mind. One person was my sales agent in Western Canada that I knew that would be a market for this. And that person laughed at me because their idea of a parka was what you see in Eaton’s basement, you know, with rickrack around it. And it wasn’t considered to be an iconic garment. He laughed at me. So I fired him because I knew that this was had to happen. I thought he was going to be all enthusiastic and he wasn’t. I said, okay, fine. I don’t need your energy.

Glynis Tao

You’re not on board with this.

Linda Lundström

Yeah. Get lost.

Glynis Tao

Go away.

Linda Lundström

And then I told the second person who was my sort of the person that was helping me run the company, who was a Ryerson graduate. It’s now called Metropolitan University, but she went to Ryerson and started with me as an intern and ended up never leaving. And I said, Donna, I’ve got this idea and I explained to her my vision. And she said, Linda, I can’t see it, but if you can see it, I believe you can make it happen. So I support you. Well, three months later, she was killed in a car accident.

Glynis Tao

Oh my gosh.

Linda Lundström

Yeah, but so I had to postpone everything for a year because she was pivotal to my business and everything had to be put on hold for a year. Meanwhile, her passing triggered a lot of things to happen. I ended up getting married, getting pregnant. And by the time I was working on Laparka again, I was pregnant and I had opened up my first Lundström brand store.

And I started accelerating my plans because I thought life is short. Life is short. I was at the age of 30, I had lost somebody really close to me. And that was a reminder that, you know, if you’ve got plans, just get them done. So I have this vision, right? I have this vision.

And in case you’re noticing my hands, my hands, I have two brains. One brain is in here and one brain is in my hands. My hands do things almost on their own. And that’s how I built the Laparka. I ended up getting fabric from a supplier that I had never bought from before. It was the wool duffel, getting a machine that I didn’t know if it was gonna work or not due to the blanket stitching. I went to a show in Paris for fabrics because I wanted to get the fur for around the hood. And I didn’t think of using real fur because I didn’t know, I hadn’t learned how to handle real fur, you know. You need cold storage. I wasn’t knowledgeable in real fur, so I thought I’m gonna get a fur fabric.

And I went to a fabric show in Paris with hundreds of exhibitors. Like literally, I’m talking four football fields full of booths selling fabric. And I went down the first aisle of the first hall. I was about halfway down that aisle, and I turned and there’s a company selling the most beautiful fur, man-made fur. In all the colors that I was thinking of doing, like royal blue, red, ivory, all the colors matched exactly. I’d only been at the show for 15 minutes and I went, oh wow. So I took their card and I said, okay guys, there’s gotta be more. If we found these guys this easily, there’s gotta be more companies that we can go and compare prices and everything. We went, we spent the next two days going up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down all the halls. And that was the only company that had fur.

Glynis Tao

Yeah. Sounds as if it was meant to be.

Linda Lundström

Yeah. I mean, you know, if something falls into your lap, what I’ve learned if something falls into your lap, it’s kind of divine intervention and pay attention because when you’re making something that came to you in a vision, then you have to be prepared for magic to happen along the journey, you know? And so when that happened, I went, poof. This is amazing.

Glynis Tao

That just confirmed it to you.

Linda Lundström

That said, totally, totally, it totally confirmed. And I ended up doing business with that company for the next 25 years.

Glynis Tao

Wow.

Linda Lundström

Right So I come back from, I’ve ordered all this fabric, I’ve ordered the fur, hasn’t arrived yet. I’ve ordered a machine, I don’t know if it’s gonna work, a blanket stitch machine, not this machine, another machine, a blanket stitch machine that I don’t know if it’s gonna work. I’m up to my maximum at my bank in terms of my line of credit, I can’t tell my bank that I’ve gone out and I’ve gone out and spent all this money on this vision.

Like, what am I going to do? Go to the bank and say, yeah, I’m a little over my line of credit because I had a vision. And they don’t want to hear that.

Glynis Tao

They want to hear that you’re actually doing making sales.

Linda Lundström

They want to see cash flow projections. Yes. A balance sheet. You know, they want to see all that stuff, which was like, so on one morning, one morning when I was on my way to work. We were waiting for everything to arrive. And I…I was coming down the Don Valley Parkway, I’ll never forget it, and there’s an overpass right around Richmond, where you can go off onto Richmond, there’s an overpass right there. And I all of a sudden was filled with doubt. I went, you know, my inner voice was saying, what the hell have you done? You know, does that ever happen to you, Glynis? When you feel like you’re taking a risk and then you get filled with doubt?

Glynis Tao

Yeah, it just comes out of nowhere and sinks you down

Linda Lundström

It comes out of nowhere and it kind of sinks like a hot lead stone in there right? Oh, God, what have I done? And so as I was coming up on from the Don Valley Parkway way up onto the Gardiner Expressway. Those of you who are in Toronto, you know exactly what I mean.

Out of nowhere in front of me comes this truck. And on the back of the truck is written the words Laparkan, la L-A-P-A-R-K-A. So Laparka with an N at the end.

Glynis Tao

Wow, talk about a sign.

Linda Lundström

At the very moment when I’m being filled with such doubt. Yes. Oh my God. And again, I didn’t just take it for face value and say, Oh, it’s a sign I’m on the right track. No, I went, damn it. Somebody stole my name and they’ve got a truckload on the road delivering it.

Glynis Tao

And so did that just, you know, increase the doubt?

Linda Lundström

It increased the doubt, right? And underneath the big laparcan, it said for all your shipping needs. Oh my God. It was a white truck, I’ll never forget it. And so I got into work, we were on WellinGlynis Taoon Street back then, and I’m going through the phone, back then we had phone books, okay? I’m going through the phone book and I see Laparkan. I dial the number, someone answers the phone, Laparkan. I said, what kind of company is this? And she said, we ship boxes and barrels to the Caribbean. Oh do you make coats? No, but we’ll ship them to the Caribbean for you. So that was my sign, Laparkan. Isn’t that amazing?

Glynis Tao

Wow, that is an amazing story.

Linda Lundström

And you know what? I’ve got the, where’s the?

Glynis Tao

You know, I’m all into this stuff, this like synchronicities and you know, signs.

Linda Lundström

Oh yeah, are you? Okay, I’m just looking around. I’ve got the photograph. Oh, I should have been prepared with the button. Okay, so years later, when we’re doing like $10 million of sales of Laparka, and we’ve moved a couple of times to bigger premises because we’re, you know, our sales are going up, the bank is inviting me out for lunch, for God’s sakes, putting me in their annual, I’m a success story in terms of the bank, who I never told I was doing this.

And we’re selling Laparkas like crazy and I went, you know what, I tell the story of the truck. I need, I need some evidence. So I call up Laparkan and they are still in business. I said, I had a friend who was Jamaican. I said, I want to ship a barrel to your family in Jamaica. So I called the Laparkan and I said, um, I, I want to, I want to, I want to pick up, got a barrel here, uh, going to, um, Jamaica. So my friend was thrilled because her family, you know, we put all kinds of fabric in there and we put all kinds of food in there and everything like that.

So the truck arrives and it’s not white, it’s brown. I said, oh, okay, well, stand on the bumper. I wanna take a picture of you. And so I took a picture of myself with this truck with the Laparkan. I said, what happened to the white truck? They said, oh, that broke down years ago.

I said, oh. I said, how many trucks did you have on the road? He said, oh, we’ve only ever had one.

Glynis Tao

Yeah, and that was the one that you saw in front of you that day when you were all filled with doubt and ready to give up.

Linda Lundström

Yes, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And that’s my appeared, the sign appeared. Yeah.

Glynis Tao

That is an amazing story. But so you’ve been…

Linda Lundström

My journey has been a series of magical, synchronistic, divine things that have happened on my path that have directed me, you know in the way, the path that I’m supposed to take.

So after 34 years in business and being taken to lunch by my bank and receiving a lot of the awards, which you mentioned, I’ve received some, they’re up here on my window sill here now. 

I’ve got some wonderful awards where I was recognized for our business practices, for innovation. Because we weren’t just innovating our product, but we were innovating the way we did business, the way our factory was set up, our employee relationships. For example, we didn’t have sick we didn’t have sick days, we had wellness days, and everybody got wellness days. So if you just didn’t feel like coming to work, and you knew that you were not going to feel like coming to your, maybe your child had a dentist appointment or you had a doctor’s, whatever you need to do to be well, you could use those days for that and not feel guilty that you called in, pretended to be sick.

How many people have called in, pretended to be sick when they weren’t really sick, they just needed a day off. So in our company, I didn’t want anybody to do that, have to do that. I said, you’ve got wellness days, you use them however you want, you don’t have to be sick.

Glynis Tao

That’s unheard of in the fashion industry. Linda. Well, that’s something, yeah.

Linda Lundström

Well, that’s something that I just.

Glynis Tao

It’s usually more cut throat than that. People just expect you to work.

Linda Lundström

Yeah, no, because my dad had his own business and my mom had her own business. And my dad’s business in particular in the mining business, he always would say to me, Linda, you gotta be good to your men because it was all men that worked in the mines. And his way of showing that was to, there was a remote mining site where they were working. He would make sure they had steak and roast beef and had a cook that could bake fresh bread. And the food becomes really important if you’re in the bush working long hours in a mine in the cold, food becomes very important. And he knew that. And so I had, my mom and my dad were my role models really.

And also in my mom’s fabric store in the basement, indigenous women would come from the reserves all around. If you look on a map of where Red Lake is, there’s Pikangikum, there’s Sandy Lake, there’s Deer Lake, there’s Great Bear Lake, Bear Skin Lake. All these indigenous communities would fly into Red Lake and the women would fly in, then they would take a taxi to my mom’s store in Cochenar, which is another little town that’s 20 miles from Red Lake. And they would come to my mom’s store, and the town that we lived in then was 250 people. So we were moving up from the first town I told you about. And they would spend hours, and I would be down there, and they didn’t speak English.

And we didn’t speak Anishinaabegway, but we would spend hours together just feeling fabric and looking at fabric and laughing. And one of the things my mom did was she really honored the beautiful work that the women were doing with home-tent moose hide deer hide, moccasins, mukluks, gloves, gauntlets because we wore mukluks all winter long. We didn’t wear boots up there because when it snowed, it didn’t melt. It just snowed and then it snowed some more and more and more and more. And so it was clean. The winter was clean. And so you could walk around in your mukluks and it was the warmest type of footwear and curling sweaters. We also curled in these curling sweaters with the different reindeer and everything and all. And that was another thing that I incorporated into my collection.

And these women would come to the fabric center and they would have available really good fabrics to line their mukluks because what they were doing is they were making beautiful mukluks and moccasins, but then they didn’t have lining so they would take an old shirt or something and they’d line this beautiful moccasin with it. My mom said, no, here’s the fabric you need to line them. So it elevated the perceived value of them.

And I can remember going downstairs and the smell of that home tanned moose hide. Have you ever smelled hometanned hide?

Glynis Tao

No.

Linda Lundström

Oh, it has a most, it has this smoky smell that’s instantly recognizable. And these were all home tanned, which is really a dying process up north because, well, we won’t get into that. But anyway, this wonderful fragrance of the smoke would come up the stairs. And so mom was taking orders for moccasins and mukluks by a person would draw their foot out on a piece of paper. My mom would give that piece of paper to one of the indigenous women. They would make the product, you know, there was a whole like, and they would trade it for, they would often, they would often get money for it or they were happy to get traded for fabric so that they could, you know, and it, it was just a really wonderful symbiotic relationship.

And in the process, I got to feel I got to love these women and really admire and respect them. And it was the beginning of my of a sense of purpose that I had in my life to be an ally to indigenous people.

Glynis Tao

I wanted to talk to you about the sewing circle project a little bit. But before I get to that. Maybe you can go back. But yeah, I’m just so amazed by the story that you told me about the La Parka and how it came to be. And so you’ve always produced your product in Canada.

Linda Lundström

Yes

Glynis Tao

That’s something that you believed in, that you never wanted to go overseas and do any overseas production. You kept it all in Canada. And you also had your own factory and one point in Toronto that you.

Linda Lundström

I do have to say though, Glynis, that there was a period of two years when I was making this whole, I was making a whole concept wardrobe. So by then I had educated the buyers to the idea that you could have a Laparka with a matching sweater with a matching boot, with a matching turtleneck, with a matching, you know what I mean?

Like, so if there was a Laparka in a color called Opal Ice, there was a whole family of products that went with it. And one of those products was sweaters. And at the time it was very difficult to find sweater manufacturers in Canada. I had one that was in Kitchener who did a very good job but I wanted to do these curling sweaters that had all these designs and everything on them. And so somebody said, well, you’ve got to go to China, got to go to Hong Kong. So for two years I did. I was manufacturing my sweaters in Hong Kong.

And I ran into what a lot of companies now and back then were running into, which is in that business, there’s minimums required. You can’t just go and order 23 of that sweater. You have to order 123 of that sweater. You have to pay upfront with a letter of credit before you’ve even seen the product. There were all kinds of contributing factors that led to me feeling a sense of loss of control. And I would say 75% of the shipments arrived exactly as I thought they would. Great quality exactly as I had designed them, but more quantity than I actually had sales for, for example. So I’m left with inventory, which I had to clear. And the 25% that didn’t arrive as I wanted it to, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I just said, no, I can’t do this. This is too, if I’m going to screw up, I want to be the person that screws up here in Canada. I don’t want my reputation affected when somebody makes an error halfway around the world.

And by that time, I’ve got a young family. I’m, you know, I have small children. I didn’t want to be traveling because a lot of people that do manufacture offshore, you know, they’re traveling there all the time. So that’s when I recommitted to made in Canada. And I said, okay, everybody’s going offshore everybody’s swimming downstream. And I was like the little fish that was swimming upstream saying, if we can’t make it in Canada, then maybe we shouldn’t be making it. And so my entire company was based on designing things that could be made in Canada, rather than designing things that had to be made somewhere else.

Glynis Tao

Yeah. And so is that when you decide to open your own lean manufacturing facility?

Linda Lundström

No. Well, I didn’t actually open a lean manufacturing facility. What happened was, at the beginning of my company, I was using contractors for the production of my things. And they were contractors in Toronto. And what started happening was the same thing 75% would be perfect. And 25% would not and we’d have to either recut or correct or whatever. And I just went no I’ve got to be more in control of my own. I’ve got to be able to walk over to something that’s being made and identify if it’s being made properly and if it’s not, then to stop and fix it before it’s all finished. So I had my own sewing machine operators. And when my contractors started not being able to fulfill the quality that I wanted, I began to buy machines, but not all at once, buy sewing machines, hire sewing machine operators, and gradually I brought my production in-house, but I was still using a batch bundle system of manufacturing, which means that, you know, you cut all the size eights and you bundle all the size eights and then you cut all the size tens and you bundle all the size tens and then you move the bundles to the first operation and they do all of the surging on the whatever and then they bundle it back up and move it over to the, that’s batch manufacturing. And I was using that method.

In 1999, I think it was, 1999, we hired a consultant to help us to be better at delivering product to the customer when they wanted it and decrease our turnaround time. Because using the bundle method, there’s a lot of time when those garments are sitting in a bundle waiting waiting for the next operation.

Glynis Tao

Yeah, there’s a lot of work in progress.

Linda Lundström

Exactly. How do we eliminate? Yes. How do we eliminate that wait time? How do we eliminate waste? Basically. And so for a period of about three months, we worked with this consultant and learned about lean manufacturing. And we converted the existing batch manufacturing factory into a lean manufacturing. And it was met with a fair amount of resistance by the employees, not so much the employees who were sewing machine operators, but by the middle management, because what it did was lean manufacturing empowers the person who’s doing the work. So the actual sewing machine operator was empowered to make decisions that would improve the turnaround time, the flow. And it took away the sort of power, I guess, of the middle managers. 

And so what happened was the sewing machine operators began to take ownership for improving our turnaround time. And it became like a really exciting and fun atmosphere because it involved, I don’t need to get into detail about what lean manufacturing is, but it goes from bundling and batching to single unit production. 

So instead of cutting all the size eights that we need for all the customers in all of North America at one time, we would only cut the size eights for the customers that wanted that style and that color early. So instead of cutting something once, we might cut it 10 times. But that was okay because we had computerized cutting machines, their capacity, we hadn’t even reached the maximum capacity that they were capable of, but we had a constraint in our sewing. So by slowing down the cutting, we went from batch manufacturing to single unit production. So one garment would start being made and we put the machines in the order in which the operations had to be made so that garment would be finished in seven minutes. So it went from a cut garment to being shippable in seven minutes as opposed to having 100 garments, 20% made, that weren’t gonna be shippable for another three weeks. So it was so exciting, honestly.

Glynis Tao

Wow.

Linda Lundström

It was so exciting because we started seeing real improvements in the way our customers were, because we had merchandise, we had a whole merchandise concept, some customers only wanted to do two colors of Laparka and all the things that went with it, it didn’t matter to them that somebody in Oklahoma wanted these other two colors. But they didn’t want theirs until later. So what it meant was let’s make these guys first, get them out, and then we’ll go and focus on this order over here. And so our customers were happier, our employees were happier, we reduced our management staff and increased our sewing staff.

Glynis Tao

Wow, so improved the overall efficiency of everything.

Linda Lundström

We don’t use the word efficiency because efficiency applies to batch manufacturing. So it’s very efficient to take a bundle of 100 garments and surge everything.

Glynis Tao

Yeah.

Linda Lundström

And then bundle it. That’s efficiency, right? If you take it in isolation. In lean Yes, versus efficiency because you can be efficient but not productive. You know what I mean? It’s like when you go to Costco and you buy enough kiwi fruit to last you for a month, that’s very efficient. But it’s not very productive when you have to throw half of it out because it goes bad in your fridge. 

Glynis Tao

Wow. Yeah, because I think, you know, this lean manufacturing is being more adopted into production. Now I’m seeing it more, but the still the bundling system is still the most common way that they do production, especially if it’s overseas, their majority is the bundling system. But very rarely do people go into the lean manufacturing. So you are just really like ahead of your time in all of this.

Linda Lundström

Absolutely. And we’ve always been ahead of our time. I’ve always been ahead of my time in terms of embracing technology. When we were back when we were only doing like a million dollars in sales, I brought in Electra, Electra being the company from France that produces the best CAD CAM systems. I brought in Electra pattern making pattern grading. So back in the 80s, I had computerized pattern making. And I was I think I was the first company in Toronto that had that. Even though we were a relatively small company, I didn’t see, like people think, oh, you know, computerized, you have to be a big company. No, you don’t. In our case, it enabled us to become a big company.

Glynis Tao

Yeah, that is really ahead of the time because I don’t know that many people, even when I started in the industry in the 90s, who were using computerized pattern making, it was still very manual.

I worked at Club Monaco actually, which was my first job. They were over on King and Spadina. That’s where the head office was based and they did their manufacturing on King Street when they still did their production locally in Canada. But a lot of the pattern making was still done like manually. And this was like late 90s. But you doing this in the 80s, seriously, this is amazing. So would you say a lot of this foresight from hearing your story now of you having the vision of Laparka, seeing the truck after you felt so much doubt and that make you of, okay, this is the sign to move ahead. And then, you know, being ahead of staying ahead of technology and implementing the lean manufacturing and all the technology and stuff like, would you say like all of this contributed to your overall success and your longevity in the industry?

Linda Lundström

Well, yeah, but there’s another part to this story, Glynis.

Glynis Tao

Oh.

Linda Lundström

There’s another part to this story. It gets even better. So where am I now? Well, guess what? I’m gonna pick up the phone. I’m making paper patterns in my studio. I do not have computerized pattern making equipment. I’ve gone back to the way I was working in 1974 in that two bedroom apartment. And my life has come full circle.

I started in a two-bedroom apartment and I’m now in a two-bedroom house with a studio in the upstairs. But I built a multi-million dollar company at one point. We were doing over 13 million dollars in sales. I realized, I set out, when I was at Sheridan College, I envisioned having, someday having a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility. I didn’t know about lean back then, but I created everything together with a community of people that came, found me, and helped me. I had a wonderful team of people that joined me on that journey, including my husband Joel, who was a chartered accountant, and he came in right at the point where the numbers were starting to get bigger, I needed somebody I could trust managing the money.

Right around to 2008, when for the first time, in 2007 for the first time, I had a decline in sales. And in 2008, the bank called my loan and gave us 30 days to pay back $3 million.

Glynis Tao

Oh.

Linda Lundström

Yeah.

Glynis Tao

So what did you do?

Linda Lundström

I don’t know if you remember what happened in 2008.

Glynis Tao

Yeah. Well, that was the time of the recession, right?

Linda Lundström

There was a world financial crisis.

Glynis Tao

Yeah, the economy tanked, the world financial crisis, New York.

Linda Lundström

World financial crisis. And you know, a lot of Canadian banks were involved in the whole fiasco happening south of the border with subprime mortgages and all that sort of stuff. Somebody in a suit in an office on Bay Street at my bank decided that we were off margin with our loan and we were often off margin with our loan because we had a cyclical business, we were a seasonal business. So there were times when we were over our credit limit and times when the bank owed us money, you know, so it was, it was, and the bank rock and rolled with us through those highs and lows.

Well, somebody decided, okay, we’re being put under pressure here, we better call in any loans that are off margin. So the bank called our loan. I’m now, my girls are teenagers, I’m now in my 50s. I’ve been working hard my whole life. I didn’t have a plan B. I never had a plan B. I never had a plan that, well, if this company in this two bedroom apartment doesn’t work, I’ll do this. If this company in this state of the art, I never had a plan B. So for the first time in my whole career, I started thinking about what my plan B would be, if I had one.

And I just, my husband and I looked at one another and we said, I don’t think we can do this anymore. I don’t think we wanna borrow more money to pay off the bank, owe somebody else money, put everything we have on the line and risk it all again. And you know what, it was a good decision because in January of 2008 when the bank called our loan was the beginning of the financial crisis, it got worse. And so it became a bloodbath. And so we ended up paying back the bank in 30 days, believe it or not.

We just put our heads down and we said, okay, everything’s for sale. We’re gonna liquidate. We’re gonna, anything that’s not nailed down, we’re gonna sell it. And we ended up paying back the bank, which gave us a little bit of breathing room and enough time to find a buyer. And we found a buyer and sold the company in 2008. And in 2010, we left Toronto and moved to our cottage, and that’s where I’m speaking to you from today.

Glynis Tao

Wow, what a story. Oh my god.

Linda Lundström

Yeah. So one of my speeches, I’m a speaker, and one of my topics is the F word. And the F word is how to how to ride that wild bronco that’s failure.

Glynis Tao

Yeah.

Linda Lundström

And now, you know, I live on a lake surrounded by beautiful cedar trees. My husband and I are together. My girls are good. And I have this little studio that’s about the same size as that. No, it’s smaller than the two-bedroom apartment that I had in 1974. And I have paper patterns and I’m having a ball.

My joy, my joy still comes from making things. And so in this little studio, we use lean manufacturing. We don’t have digital patterns, but we do have single unit production.

Glynis Tao

And is this where you make all your Therma Kōta products?

Linda Lundström

Yes.

Glynis Tao

And so now you’re in the studio kind of made full circle, kind of sort of where you started with your first industrial sewing machine still there working away.

Linda Lundström

Yes, I have other machines too.

Glynis Tao

Other machines and you’re doing paper patterns. And you are working with your daughters you co-founded this new company with.

Linda Lundström

Yes.

Glynis Tao

My daughter and my daughter, my one daughter lives in Los Angeles and my other daughter lives in Ireland. And when we began Therma Kōta in 2016, we were working remotely with each other. So when COVID hit, it was no big deal. We were just, it was the same, same way we’d been working for four years.

Glynis Tao

Yeah, yeah.

Linda Lundström

I’m here in my studio and we have FaceTime and we have you know, we talk every day and they’re responsible for the front end, which is, you know, the photo, photography, the website, the image of the brand. Sophie is also a wonderful model. And Mosha is more director of marketing, which is, you know, positioning the brand as a, you know, premium brand of mostly shearling.

So if you go to thermakota.com, you’ll see the shearling styles that we make. And shearling by its very nature has to be cut one at a time. And so one of the one of the unique aspects of Therma Kōta is that we offer our customers at no extra charge a custom-made garment. So they give us their measurements and I often have to call the customer just to verify the measurement because I’m thinking, you know, somebody five foot eight could not have a sleeve that short. So I called them and said, I think maybe we needed a better sleeve measurement. And so it gives us a chance to really interact with the customer.

And then we go ahead and make about 75% of our orders, I would say maybe 80 are custom. And we’ve only had two instances where we had returns and they were both from men. We do make a man’s product as well. And the men made a little error in their measurements. And so I had to, but we’ve only had two returns and we’ve made hundreds of shearling jackets.

Glynis Tao

You are strictly online with this business, right?

Linda Lundström

Strictly online and I said to my daughter when she said, mom, I think we should get into the outerwear business. And I said, well, she said, we could sell at Barney’s, we could sell at Lord and Taylor, we could sell. I said, no, I was in the retail, I was in the wholesale business selling to boutiques for 34 years. I don’t wanna do that. I don’t wanna do it again, I’ve done that. So we decided to focus on online and people place their orders, they pay for their orders, we ship their orders.

Glynis Tao

A very clean order, no extra inventory, no excess production.

Linda Lundström

Exactly.

Glynis Tao

And I know that you have a philosophy. Going back to your mother. You have a motto is waste not want not.

Linda Lundström

Yeah

Glynis Tao

I saw that. And, you know, do you want to speak a little bit about that and how that applies in your business, Therma Kōta now and how you guys approach the sustainability?

Linda Lundström

It’s a philosophy of life, Glynis. It’s the way I look at life. I don’t want to waste anything. Even this morning, I knew I was going to be speaking with you and I decided to sleep in. I decided to just let myself have a nice long sleep because I didn’t want to waste that precious time where I could do that, where I didn’t have something that had to be done. So I was taking advantage of that. But it wastes not want not. I mean, when we lived up in the mining communities up north, I don’t remember us ever having garbage. All the food waste went into the garden.

I designed everything according to the material that I’m using. And a lot of times, when I was teaching at George Brown College, my students tended to do it the other way around. They’d be sketching all these designs and then they’d go out and try and find fabric that would suit the designs. And it was quite often a miss because the design might have been good, the fabric might have been great, but they didn’t go together. So I feel it’s really important to let the material you’re using speak to you about what to make out of it.

Glynis Tao

Um, so just before we wrap up, well, I had a couple questions left, first of all, about you’d spoke about you finding a sense of purpose, which was becoming an ally of First Nations. And that’s the reason why. Is that reason why you started the sewing circle project?

Linda Lundström

Yes, yes. Yeah, no, the sewing circle, the sewing circle is really an intention that I have to support Indigenous communities to be able to make, to be more clothing independent and be able to make things in their community, by their community members, and for the appreciation of people visiting their communities or, you know, for example, right now I’m working with a group in Georgian Bay, the First Nation on Christian Island, and we’re gonna be starting a sewing circle there.

Sometimes the sewing circle is just me sourcing fabric or supplies for a community and arranging for shipment to that community because they may not know who to go to for a particular fabric or whatever. And because I have a network of suppliers from my business, so I can connect, you know, the supplier with the community. And quite often I’m an intermediary for sourcing supplies.

So for example, I’ve had fabric shipped to Pond Inlet, which is a northern point of Baffin Island. I’ve sourced machinery, in that case, machinery and fabric. I’ve sent fabric to Deer Lake, which is one of the communities north of Red Lake, Maskwacis in Alberta. So, Peawanuck, Moose Factory. Sometimes all I’m providing is supplies. I’m an intermediary, I source things. And I don’t charge a markup for that, it’s just something that I love to do.

And the work that I’m doing with the Georgian Bay community is they want to have a store and a workshop where they actually can make things to sell to tourists that are indigenous to that area and to those people of that first nation. And so I’m gonna help them understand how to make patterns, how to do lean manufacturing and make sure it set them up with the proper connections to suppliers.

Glynis Tao

Sounds like a wonderful initiative.

Linda Lundström

Yeah, it started out as one thing and then it kind of took on a life of its own and it’s become sort of a variety of different services, but it’s all intended to support the talent that lies within Indigenous communities that just needs to have access to the right materials at the right prices, you know?

Glynis Tao

Amazing. So last question. For aspiring fashion designers and entrepreneurs listening to this podcast, what piece of advice would you like to share based on your experiences in the industry?

Linda Lundström

Um. Start lifting weights, make sure you’re physically fit. People don’t think of fashion designers as being, you know, having to be physically fit, but it’s really important because it’s a very physically demanding job. It’s not just sketching, it’s lifting rolls of fabric, and quite often they’re full rolls of fabric, which is pretty bloody heavy.

 

Glynis Tao

 

Yeah. So in the beginning, like in most cases, just like yourself, you know, you had to do everything, right?

 

Linda Lundström

 

That’s right.

 

Glynis Tao

 

And that included lifting, heavy lifting, carrying bolts of fabric, right?

 

Linda Lundström

 

That’s right. And you look around and you go, well, there’s no man, there’s no muscular man standing there. People underestimate how physically fit you need to be to be in this business. You don’t know what’s gonna come at you, even lifting finished garments for a fashion show and carrying them, you know.

 

Glynis Tao

 

Oh, no kidding.

 

Linda Lundström

 

Schlepping garments around, schlepping garments around in garment bags. That’s my one piece of advice. My other piece of advice is to find, find a purpose and a path that is unique to you, that you can offer to the world. And that might not come to you right away, but always be looking for what that could be for you.

 

For me, it really started when I said, what can I make that says Canadian, as a kimono is Japanese. And that’s when I started to really develop my identity as a designer. So who you are, where you come from, what your family is all about, what culture did you grow up in? What is your perception of fashion and how does it fit into what you wanna do? I see, it’s one of the questions I have about, when I see a designer who’s clearly not a sample size and is sending models down the runway that are, you know, size two. And yet when that designer walks out on the runway, they’re not size two or anywhere close to size two. And I’m thinking, wow, it’d be so great if you were designing for people your size, you know? There’s some kind of a disconnect there for me. It’s so much easier if you could just so as a result, I’m not a small person myself. I’m 5’9″, and I’m a good size 14, 12-14, and my fit became popular within the population that was my size, because they knew that my things would fit them. And when, and people would come to me and say, oh, your things, I’m so tiny, I’m so tiny.

 

And I go, yeah, well, there are tiny designers that would make things that would be perfect for you. You know, and it doesn’t mean to say that, like I have lots of customers that are five foot one, five foot two, it doesn’t mean that I’ve excluded anybody. It just means that I’m starting from a point of familiarity for me.

 

Glynis Tao

 

Yeah, very good point. And I think that’s what contributed to your longevity and probably still what keeps you going is that you are designing in terms of it from a point of place of alignment. That’s what I see.

 

Linda Lundström

 

Yeah, that’s it. That’s it.

 

Glynis Tao

 

That’s kind of the I feel this theme that’s carrying, carrying through out this conversation that I’m having is that I’m seeing from what I’m hearing you say, you know

 

Linda Lundström

 

Yeah, and you have to be you have to be aware of the signs and signals that the universe has sent. This sounds like me, sound like a wing nut, but I really, I’m proof that if you pay attention to the signs and signals that the universe is sending you, that you will, if you pay attention to the signs and signals that the universe sends you on your path, that are meant to direct you in a certain way, believe, have faith that if you follow that path, it will take you somewhere good.

 

Glynis Tao

 

Oh, I love that. Thank you so much, Linda.

 

Linda Lundström

 

And even going bankrupt, having my company fail in 2008, even that was a gift. And the second thing besides being physically strong that I wanna share with people as a piece of advice is that I’ve gone through life believing that everything is a gift. Everything is a gift. Growing up in the bush turned out to be a gift. Losing my company in 2008 became a gift because now I live on a lake surrounded by cedar trees and I’m working in my studio and I’m still doing what I love. So losing my company was a gift because I would have been in worse shape if I’d clung onto it and not listened to what the universe was telling me.

 

So everything in life in business is a gift. And if you have that belief, if you have that belief, then you will find that no matter what happens, you can survive it, you can thrive and be happy. 

 

Glynis Tao

 

Amazing. I mean, from someone who’s been through it all.

 

Linda Lundström

 

And that’s right.

 

Glynis Tao

 

You know, been through the ups and downs. Where can people find you if they wanna get in touch with you? You’re on TikTok.

 

Linda Lundström

 

I’m on TikTok. I’m on Instagram. Follow me on TikTok at @lifehackslinda.

 

Glynis Tao

 

Yeah.

 

Linda Lundström

 

They can follow me on Instagram. On Instagram, I think I’m @lundstromlinda, and those are my two main platforms. And I don’t participate that much on Facebook, although I do have somebody that is posting for me on Facebook from time to time.

 

Glynis Tao

 

Perfect.

 

Linda Lundström

 

And then if you go to thermakota.com, it’s possible to get a message to me through that.

 

Glynis Tao

 

Okay, amazing. Thank you so much for being here today and sharing your insight and knowledge about the fashion industry with us.