Jamie Haller Conquered the Penny Loafer. That’s the Beginning Between a clothing, shoes, and accessories label, designer Jamie Haller is a busy woman. She’s also an award-winning interior designer. As part of our fourth annual Made by Women series—which spotlights the best women-owned products and companies—we’re talking to Jamie Haller, the fashion and shoe designer behind her namesake label, as well as an interior designer. With this series, we’re committed to giving female founders who own 51% or more of their business a platform. This not only allows them to introduce their brilliant products to a wide and potentially new audience, but it also helps you—the discerning shopper—discover the best stuff out there. Jamie Haller just can’t help herself. Whether she’s designing shoes, clothes, interiors, or a currently hypothetical collection of home goods , the Los Angeles-based designer is always creating. She launched her namesake, self-funded brand in 2020, though she was still employed as a designer for a different company at the time. She started with shoes, a new frontier for the industry veteran who’d spent the previous 20 years working in ready-to-wear for various women’s brands. Things began to pick up in fall 2021 when she launched the Penny Loafer , a lived-in take on the classic must-have. Haller’s version was “inspired by the handsome lines of a 1970s Italian men’s loafer with the casual soul of a slipper,” according to her site, and is hand-crafted in Italy. The shoe was a hit, praised equally for its design as its comfort, and is currently available in 19 different colors and materials, including pink or leopard ponyskin, white leather, and tan suede. Then came ready-to-wear in 2024, a return to Haller’s roots. Like the loafers, the collection has a built-in ease. It’s inspired by the designer’s affinity for quality materials, vintage menswear and denim, as well as her life as 40-something mother of two. “My line is really aimed at the consumer who wants to buy something for everyday wear that they’re going to lean on that’s a wardrobe staple, not just a fashion piece. Somebody who loves luxurious fabrics and who wants a very beautiful make and a very beautiful hand-feel,” Haller says. “It’s a very elevated take on something that’s essential to a woman’s wardrobe.” The result is a collection you might as easily envision on Meghan Markle or Gwyneth Paltrow as you would on a well-dressed fashion lover anywhere else. Staple pieces like oversized cotton shirts, slinky modal tanks, and pleated khaki gauchos can be thrown on pretty much whenever or act as the foundation for a more sophisticated or sexy ensemble. “I’m a real woman in her forties with a real body that has kids, who works and works out and is really living a normal life,” she says. “There’s a part that’s addressing the things on your body that feel good as a woman—where the button hits to elongate your neckline, how jeans grab your waistline on a body that has maybe changed a little bit.” The San Diego native often looks inward—sometimes literally, taking inventory of the items in her home—to give herself a sense of direction and to recognize the silhouettes and materials she’s returned to again and again. “There are these ideas that are very personal to me, how I like to dress,” she says. “It’s just very emotionally led and it’s something I feel. It’s not like a researchable position on a mood board.” Haller’s intuition informs not just the Jamie Haller brand, but her work in interiors, too. Like with shoes, Haller learned the craft on the fly, absorbing all the lessons she could while restoring her own home. After more than a decade of renovation projects, during which she became fluent in the language of construction, Haller began taking on clients in 2020. Though she had to pause her work with individual clients to focus on ready-to-wear, she still consults via The Expert, an online design platform. She finds the shift in focus to be energizing. The relationship between both of Haller’s worlds is a symbiotic one. She might become obsessed with an interiors color palette before those same shades bleed into her clothing collections. She’s just always chasing her instinct. “I’m just the type of person who says yes to anything that excites me,” says Haller. Below, the designer opens up about her many creative endeavors, her early fashion gigs at Wet Seal and Bebe, the unlikely job she landed as a teenager, and more. Glamour: Why did you feel like it was a good time to launch your company when you did? Jamie Haller: I started the brand in 2020. The thing that was really interesting at that time was the world was changing and I was changing. I was physically becoming a different person. I was having another child. I was also really deepening my work in interior design in that COVID time period. I felt like I was becoming a new person. I was changing, and I just assumed my style would too. I was going to become a new person, but I didn’t. I think I kept waiting. You get older and you’re like, “Oh, I’m not like that anymore. I’m more serious now,” or whatever it is. Once I was able to realize that I knew everything I liked already, it was all there. I could really lean into everything I believed and I felt very refreshed from my two years not talking about clothes. With shoes, I was able to learn and fully immerse myself in something that I didn’t know. When you work in fashion for so long, there’s a language you pick up. There’s all these voices in your head when you’re a designer. There’s the voice of the buyer and the voice of the merchandiser and the voice of your boss and the voice of the customer. You’ve got to balance out your vision and own voice within that. So when you don’t have any of that preconditioning, there’s no voice. It’s just purely what you want. And exploration and doing something that is based on curiosity. Was it scary? Was there a particular challenge that still haunts you? When I started my business I was 40-something. I had had the luxury of working for other people for twenty-something years, and I think that’s probably not what people do as much now. But I amassed so much experience and visibility and understanding of so many areas of the business. I had the luxury of seeing how things were sold, seeing what types of stores things were sold in, seeing how things would sell. I had the luxury of being there when e-commerce became a thing and learning how to do it and understanding digital marketing. I had the luxury of learning about fit and patterning from a variety of different types of companies, and learning about denim. So I was able to just amass all this knowledge through experience. Also, I was older and I had been able to create stability for myself in other ways where it was not like, “This has got to work or I’m going to fail.” My business is self-funded. I’m not coming to it from this place without risk. But I was so confident in what I know of myself that it didn’t feel risky. It felt risky to stay. If I stayed anywhere, I would die in my soul. I had to go do something so that I could continue to feel energy. Following that confidence allowed it to unfold in a way that was super authentic. I didn’t have a lot of fear around that. Do you think consumers care about who actually owns the business they spend money on? And if not, should they? If it’s important to you to support businesses by minority groups or to support businesses by women, that’s all great. But I think what matters to me is if it’s owned by individuals—humans—or if it’s owned by corporations with a revolving door of humans. Am I supporting a business that is the blood, sweat, and tears of a creative and a maker, or am I supporting a business that is a hedge fund company bouncing around entity to entity? That’s the thing that feels so unreal; it doesn’t feel like you’re supporting creativity. It feels like you’re supporting money. What was your first childhood dream job? I was going to be a broadcast journalist at one point. It was just something that was happening until the moment when I figured out I could work in fashion, and then it was like “this is what I’m doing.” What was your first actual job? I grew up in East San Diego and I had a job at a skate shop. I also worked at Burger King for a couple of years. I really liked working on the broiler because it’s where the cute boys worked in the back. I worked at Applebee’s. I got fired after two months. I was not good at being a waitress. Then I got a job on the movie Titanic and I was an extra. That was a big job. And then after that I moved to Los Angeles and went to school to do fashion. Did you make it into the film? I’m in a lot of different scenes, and there’s some good ones. I was there for seven months. It was super fun. I loved hanging out in the costume department; I had six costumes, really amazing costumes. I did see that you worked at Wet Seal at one point… I did. It was my first fashion job. What was that like? It was so fun. When you’re going to do fashion design in California versus New York, it’s a completely different trajectory and availability of jobs. I loved Wet Seal. The whole market was different then. There wasn’t an upper contemporary market, so were really drawn towards what they could afford. It was a great, amazing first job. People talk a lot about the early aughts aesthetics coming back into fashion. Do you envision a world in which something that you took from Wet Seal would make it into your current collection? There’s something in this collection that now—I wouldn’t say this is from Wet Seal, but I could very easily say when I worked at Wet Seal and later Bebe, I designed dozens and dozens of black stretchy going-out pants. What’s a key piece of career advice you’d pass on? My parents always said, “Follow what you love. Don’t worry about the money. The money will come.” I watched both of them doing miserable jobs, like factory work, so it was like, “don’t do what I’m doing. Do the thing you want to do so that you’re happy, because you’re going to do it your whole life.” What’s your favorite low-stakes treat after a productive day? Putting my phone aside. I’m really addicted to my phone, unfortunately. I think the best treat is getting an hour with my kids on the couch and just cozying up. It’s hard. I juggle a lot so a little family downtime is the best part. What is your go-to thank you gift? Hand-blown little glass goblets that come in pairs; they’re kind of wavy and bubbly and mismatched. If you weren't in your current career, what would you be doing? If I wasn’t focused on expanding the clothing line, I’d probably be focused on expanding the interior design line.