Meet Elissa Kravetz of Sun Child

Today we’d like to introduce you to Elissa Kravetz.

Elissa, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I started my career in fashion when I was in my junior year of college. I walked into the shoe department at Nordstrom in Maryland, and met Steve Madden. That kismet meeting led to a summer internship, which led to me joining his Marketing Department straight out of college.

I spent three years working directly with Steve, first in marketing and then running his in-house PR, traveling between New York and Los Angeles.

After that, I moved to Los Angeles and opened my own PR firm. I spent nearly two decades in publicity, with bi-coastal offices and an incredible roster of clients.
During that time, I also founded an anti-bullying nonprofit called The Farley Project and spent several years traveling around the country speaking at middle and high schools.

In 2014, I traveled to Goa on a yoga retreat led by a dear friend of mine. On the last night of the retreat, I met an extraordinary family at a night market who sourced vintage saris. I had an overwhelming desire to help the family, and at the same time I became completely obsessed with the fabrics. Two years later, Sun Child officially launched.

It started incredibly small. I was selling dresses from a rolling rack in my tiny kitchen and out of the back seat of my car.

In 2019, life took another turn. I went through a major health scare and was in and out of the hospital for much of that year, which kept me from traveling to India.
In January 2020, still recovering from surgery, I finally got back on a plane to Goa for what was supposed to be a six-week trip.

Shortly after I arrived, COVID hit and the borders to the Country closed.
I was given the option to return to America or stay in India, and I chose to stay.

I ended up staying n Goa for two and a half years before coming back to the States.
I built a home, adopted a couple of street dogs, learned how to drive here, and built the Indian infrastructure of Sun Child — relationships with tailors, artisans, factories, sari suppliers, and partners across the country.

Nearly a decade later, Sun Child has grown from that one rolling rack into a brand with our Showroom headquarters in Topanga Canyon, a strong direct-to-consumer business, incredible boutique partners around the country, and, as of this summer, we launched on Nordstrom.com.

What’s most important to me is that the brand is still rooted in the same ethos it had from the beginning: beautiful fabrics, incredible people, and pieces that make women come alive.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
No, it has not even remotely been a smooth road.

2019 was one of those years that completely brought me to my knees. In February ’19 I found out I had an 18-centimeter tumor on my kidney. I went through multiple procedures and surgeries that year and spent a large amount of time recovering at home and in the hospital while still trying to keep the business alive.

That same year, my dog Lillee, who had been my soulmate for 14 years, passed away, and my father was diagnosed with stage three pancreatic cancer. I
t was an enormously challenging year personally, and I also had to cancel my annual trip to Goa, which at the time felt terrifying because so much of Sun Child depended on me physically being here.

Somehow, the business kept going.

Then I came back to Goa in January 2020 and got stuck here during COVID.
What could have been another obstacle became one of the biggest turning points in my life and in the company. I stayed, built a life here, and built the infrastructure of the business in India in a way I never could have done if I had only been traveling here for short trips.

I now spend half the year in Goa and the other half in LA. While the back and forth traveling is invigorating and feeds two different parts of me and the creative heartbeat of the brand, the back and forth travel and jet lag can sometimes be quite intense.

One of the many things that I am incredibly proud of is how much we’ve built with such a small team and without traditional outside funding.

My right hand, Becca, has been with me for six and a half years, and between the two of us and an amazing part-time team, we’ve built something that from the outside looks much larger than it actually is.

That has been both the magic and the challenge.
Sun Child has grown through grit, loyal customers, word of mouth, creative instinct, and constantly reinvesting back into the company. The next phase now is building enough infrastructure & strategic growth around the brand.
It’s time for us to have a full time team!

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Sun Child is a luxury ready-to-wear brand created from vintage sari silks and other beautiful textiles sourced throughout India.
We work slowly and intentionally, and we try to be as waste-free as possible, using scraps and remnants from the fabrics whenever we can. We work with local tailors and artisans rather than building the brand around mass production.

What has become really special to me over the years is the emotional connection women have with the brand. There’s something that happens when they put on a Sun Child piece.
We call it the Sun Child effect. Their posture changes. Their confidence changes. Their energy changes.
The Women who wear our pieces feel beautiful, sexy, powerful.

In addition to our strong e-commerce business, we host one-on-one appointments from our showroom in Topanga Canyon and offer FaceTime appointments for customers who aren’t in Los Angeles.

A huge percentage of the women who shop with us have been with us for years, and many have been there almost from the beginning, which I know is rare in fashion.
Sometimes an order comes through and I look at the backend of Shopify and realize, ‘my God, she’s been shopping with us since 2017..’ That brings me a lot of pride and joy.

Over the years, Sun Child has been collected and worn by artists, icons, and some of the raddest humans on the planet.
We were incredibly excited to see the brand featured on Season 3 of The White Lotus, and this summer we launched on Nordstrom.com, which has been such an exciting next step for us.

One of the things I’m most proud of is our customer community and the loyalty around the brand. I’m also proud that I kept going during the times — and there were several — when I genuinely wanted to quit.

Fashion can look incredibly glamorous from the outside and building an independent brand without traditional funding is hard. There were so many moments when it would have been easier to stop, and we didn’t.

Nearly a decade later, Sun Child is still here, still growing, still evolving, and I still have the same feeling I had the first time I saw those saris in Goa: “This is so beautiful. I need to do something with this!” That feeling has never gone away.

What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
I think fashion, like so many industries, has become so incredibly fast. Too fast.
We’re constantly being sold to, constantly consuming content, constantly on our phones, and there’s so much pressure for brands and founders to always be performing.

I think the pendulum is going to start swinging back toward something more human and real.

I came up in fashion and PR at a time when relationships were everything. You picked up the phone and called an editor. You walked into a store and met the buyer. You built relationships with customers, stylists and retailers over years.
I miss that way of working, and I think consumers do too. I hope there is a simplicity to it all that resurfaces.

Over the next five to ten years, I think the brands that resonate most will be the ones that feel real and authentic — brands with a strong point of view, brands that aren’t afraid to be themselves and not take it all too seriously. Brands with beautiful product, craftsmanship, a story people can connect to and actual relationships with their customers.

People want to feel something.

I also think people are becoming more thoughtful about what they buy. They want pieces with personality and longevity rather than an endless stream of disposable product.

Technology will obviously continue to change the way we shop and communicate, but I hope the most interesting shift is that we use all of that technology without losing the human element. For me, that will always be the heart of fashion.

Pricing:

• Dresses $385
• Caftans $385
• Jumpsuit Sets $650
• Boyfriend Shirts $395
• Kimonos $450

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.iamsunchild.com
• Instagram: @sun.c.h.i.l.d

 

Image Credits
Sun Child, LLC.