Building an Upcycling Business by Upcycling the Business - COM/VERGE Episode 2 with Josefina Coll

COM/VERGE — The Business and Art of Fashion Upcycling — sits down with a founder who redesigns her business every single year. Mariángeles Aguirre talks with Josefina Coll, founder of Josefina Studio Berlin, for a conversation that works as both an origin story and a working case study in what a fashion business looks like with no product at its center.

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Starting From What She Didn't Want

Josefina moved from Montevideo to Berlin in October 2021 chasing a stable 9-to-5 in fashion, only to find the job she wanted didn't exist. She fell back on sewing as a survival skill, posting on a barter-based Facebook group called Swap Your Skills — offering alterations, teaching, and design work in exchange for anything from massages to tattoos. The post went viral within the group, people started offering to pay instead of barter, and Josefina Studio was born almost by accident.

Four and a half years later, Josefina Coll runs a studio that has trained over 600 students, built activations for New Balance, Adidas, Zalando, and Zara, among others, and is now training other designers to teach in her place. None of it was planned. 

Most designers start with an aesthetic vision, a product, a collection. Josefina started with a list of things she didn't want to do — and built backward from there.

She didn't want to sell products, manage stock, or think in sizes and quantities. She'd already done that once, running a small clothing brand with a friend back in Uruguay, and it wasn't the freedom she was chasing. So when she arrived in Berlin wanting an ordinary 9-to-5 in fashion and discovered the job simply didn't exist, she didn't force herself into the market that was available. She built the one that wasn't.

That's the thread running through her whole story, going back to her teenage years in Uruguay, when there was no fast fashion, and no interest in dressing the way her mother wanted. Sewing classes gave her a way out — and the discovery, at fifteen, that making her own clothes could also mean making her own income. "I can just invent what I want," she says, "to serve the purpose that I want at that time." That sentence has basically been her business plan ever since.

Services, Not Stock

What that barter post accidentally revealed was a gap in the Berlin market: nobody was offering upcycling as a structured, flexible service. Brands existed. A few alteration shops existed. Nobody was teaching it — certainly not in small, adaptable groups.

So instead of a label, Josefina built a studio: workshops, styling, custom work, teaching. The appeal wasn't just market whitespace. It was structural. A service business only asks for your time when someone actually books it. No standing inventory, no dead stock, no guessing at what size range to produce. For a solo founder who candidly admits she doesn't enjoy sewing or selling as standalone tasks, that model was the only one that made sense.

Burnout Is a Signal, Not a Failure

The most useful part of this conversation isn't the growth story — it's what happened when the growth story hit a wall.

Early on, Josefina took nearly every request that came her way: zipper repairs, costumes, copied dresses, anything. It worked, until it didn't. She burned out from sewing itself, and from a business that demanded she be physically present, needle in hand, every day — which meant she couldn't take the time to visit her family in Uruguay without her income stopping entirely.

Her response wasn't to push through. It was to redesign the business around what she could sustain: less custom sewing, more teaching. Teaching, she says plainly, is both what fills her up and what's more profitable — a rare alignment she doesn't take for granted. "Something can feed your soul," she says, "but if you're not making money with it to survive... it doesn't matter."

Even teaching has limits. After years of beginner workshops, she's now hitting a different kind of fatigue — repetition — and is deliberately building new formats to keep the work alive for herself. The studio's current frontier isn't more students. It's training other designers to teach, so the business can scale without scaling her personally.

What Brand Partnerships Actually Look Like

Josefina has run large-scale activations for some of the biggest names in retail, and her read on how brands engage with upcycling is refreshingly unsentimental. Engagement depends far less on brand size than on whether there's one genuinely invested person inside the company. Ask a brand to hand over its own deadstock for an activation, and the answer is often a flat no — nobody seems to know, or wants to say, what actually happens to unsold inventory and returns at scale.

Still, she doesn't dismiss the brands that show up for marketing alone. Even a surface-level activation, she argues, nudges a customer's experience away from pure discount-driven buying and toward participation. That's a real shift, even if it's not the whole solution.

Reinvention as the Actual Product

Josefina named the studio after herself specifically so it would never be locked to one offer, one format, or one identity. Every year, she sits down and re-evaluates: is this service still serving her, still serving the people paying for it, still compatible with the life she wants — including months spent with family in South America? If not, it changes.

Asked what she'd upcycle if she could upcycle anything, her answer isn't a material. It's the upcycling business model itself. She wants founders in this space to stop operating in isolation, cut off from marketing, tech, and project-management knowledge that could make their businesses scalable instead of self-consuming. Right now, she says, upcyclers are too often just "sewing to sell," with no access to the infrastructure that would let the work support them long-term.

It's a fitting closing note for a founder whose entire career has been proof that the existing playbook was never obligatory — you can write your own, and rewrite it every year you need to..

Listen to Episode 2 of COM/VERGE 

COM/VERGE is produced by RIVED, the digital ecosystem for fashion upcyclers.