Recently, a blue puffer jacket made Maryam Nassirzadeh cry. She was trawling her storage when she found it, searching for things of her own that she could add to an upcoming sample sale she was planning at her store. For Nassirzadeh, who designs clothes and accessories and shoes, preparing for the sale was starting to seem like more than a business obligation. She was approaching it as a spiritual purge.
MNZ is unusual for staying afloat without ever managing to scale or employing more than a handful of people at a time. Nassirzadeh has no investors. Those who know her well say the brand has no imagined customer: The MNZ woman is simply MNZ herself. For years it seemed as if her personal charisma, social connections, and sharp hiring instincts were enough to keep the brand humming, no matter how hard it felt behind the scenes.
When it comes to running her brand, Nassirzadeh puts great stock in intuition. She means this in roughly the opposite way that Rami Atallah, the founder of SSENSE, did when he, “I look at data day in and day out. That’s what feeds the intuition. Intuition is not just ‘I feel like doing it.’” Nassirzadeh is all about discovering what she feels like doing. She explains her concept of “divine timing,” which to her means accepting the rate at which all events, including business deals, occur.
In 2011, Nassirzadeh decided it was time to become a designer again. By then, she and Kak had married and had one child. Nassirzadeh took on a recent fashion graduate, Melisa Denizeri Orley, to help with design and production and launched with a small run of shoes. “She was really into an early ’90s-ish Prada sort of thing,” says Denizeri.
Meanwhile, the collections kept coming and the shoes, especially, kept selling. In 2019, people who worked there at the time say that the brand sold about 13,000 pairs of shoes, making up about 80 percent of the brand’s business. MNZ started 2020 in a relatively stable place. As the pandemic hit and other brands scaled back in an attempt to stay afloat, MNZ added menswear to its new collection, including well-cut trousers and shirts and jackets.