Natali Bolgar 25 years

- For 25 years now you've been delighting your customers, making women feel confident and happy. And for everyone, your brand is synonymous with femininity, success and style. Let's go back to the beginning of your journey.

How did your interest in fashion begin?

- Creativity and style were with me from birth — culture, traditions passed down from my ancestors. My great-grandfather made shoes, my great-grandmother embroidered, and my mother worked as an embroiderer too. As a child I loved taking my mother's clothes, a needle and thread, and altering them to fit me — that was my first experience of "design."

- After 9th grade I knew exactly what I wanted: to sew. So I went to study as a sewing machine operator. It was the 90s, everything was scarce, clothes were hard to buy. So I studied and sewed clothes for myself, my mother, and the whole family. And it turned out that was exactly what I loved doing.

- Then came a lot — working at a tailoring shop, my first dress made on my mother's electric sewing machine... That's how I started sewing pieces and selling them on consignment.

- Then I decided to move to Odesa. I arrived, and I loved the city immediately. I was turning 21, and Odesa was turning 200. Symbolic.

- There was a lot of work here. Another tailoring shop, then a small garment workshop, and buying my first "serious" sewing machine. That's where the real creative work began: me, an industrial sewing machine, and a tiny room in a dormitory.

- That's where I made my first dress out of red silk and took it to the market. It was a first small success: there was a crowd of interested buyers, I wrote down phone numbers, took orders, sewed all week, then went back to sell again. That's the story.

- Is that the "iconic" dress model?

- That was the first model, made in '94, in the summer. After that I kept sewing, kept creating. My style was distinctly my own, and I needed to set it apart from other manufacturers. So in '97 our first label appeared — and was sewn in for the first time.

- Tell us about your signature style — how did your 4 core clothing lines take shape?

- My style is very simple, but for me it was essential to keep the balance between the tailoring craft — the patterns, the color, the fabric textures — and the proportions. All of these combinations had to work together, to come out looking aesthetic and beautiful. I was the designer myself from 1994 to 2016. That's an enormous amount of time spent in the fitting room, with pins stuck into my own body. Because I had to feel the comfort of how each model fit. That style is in the brand's DNA — it was there then, and it's reproduced now.

- Over time I started paying attention not only to the authorship of the silhouette and the collection, but of the fabrics too. I started ordering my own prints at the factories, my own colors from Pantone.

- Later I began adding sub-lines to the collection, and 4 core directions emerged. The base is office style; smart-casual is more relaxed, trend-driven. Classic appeared in the form of cocktail wear — classic cocktail suits and dresses. Their job was to let a woman wear them anywhere, and have them feel relevant everywhere. A dress, a satin suit — but one you could wear to work, to an evening event, to a wedding. And the ultra-trend sub-style — minimalism, absolutely simple forms.
But the simplest things are always the hardest to create.

- Name your favorite dress.

- One of my favorite models is the shepherdess dress — I designed it in 2014, and here I am today, in 2022, wearing it. Natali Bolgar is timeless. I honestly can't single out one specific model. It depends on my mood, on what I feel like right now.

- What inspires you?

- What inspires me is the very process of change — the changes I made as a person, and the brand made as an entity, as a culture. And also the process of creation itself, when something imagined becomes material and you get to enjoy the result. When a woman puts on our clothes and looks ten years younger, when her eyes light up with joy the way a child's do. That's what the results of a life are, because life runs its course regardless. But I will pass values on to my children and grandchildren. The brand will keep living, creating, building. And that's what I'm working on. The goal is clear and understood. This is a business meant to be passed down as a tradition. The foundation has been laid, 25 years of the brand are behind us, another 200 will pass, and the brand will still be alive — because it carries within it the values of change and relevance.

"Natali Bolgar is a phoenix that keeps rising again and again."

- What do you dream about?

- My dream is to keep growing the company, the holding it has become. To grow the brand. For the brand, it's all just beginning. Dressing 100,000 women every year in the next couple of years. In 10 years, dressing a million women every year, so they get the joy and the feeling we put into it.

- How would you "characterize" your brand yourself?

- Natali Bolgar is a balance between the spiritual and the material. We create clothes you can touch, put on. But we also create something you can't touch — an emotion, an atmosphere, a state of being. The brand has to be full enough that it can be shared. An enormous number of people fill this brand up, so that happiness can be shared. It's a very happy brand. A kind of talisman for women. When a woman puts on our clothes, everything falls into place for her.

- The foundation, the principles, the standards I laid down are my personal qualities and my family's values. It's a quality, aesthetic product, growth, friendship, mutual support and hard work. And really, for me, business is first and foremost about people. Business for people, people for people. It took many, many years to build this "foundation," but it's a very solid one, because despite all the defaults of 1998, 2004, 2008, the economic and financial crises — we always stayed afloat. We're like a flagship that never betrayed itself, for all these years.

- Finish the phrase: today, Natali Bolgar is…

- Today, Natali Bolgar is a big, close-knit family — there are already more than 150 of us! No matter what, we keep working, because a big family is a big responsibility. For the employees, for their families, and not only for them... Our main task right now is to provide a reliable home front and a strong economy. From the first days of the war we've been helping the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Territorial Defense and the Red Cross, sewing warm clothing and outerwear. Since the start of the war we've sewn about 1,000 pieces. We also have a support program for women affected by the war and for internally displaced people. In total, we've handed over 363 pieces of clothing and footwear from the brand's regular collections in response to requests for help.

- We've also held the Week of Kindness charity initiative twice now, donating all the profit from selected items to the MASHA FUND. The funds raised went to help women and children affected by Russian aggression. Thanks to our brand's customers, more than 100,000 UAH was raised. We keep working, producing, selling, and even opening new stores. And doing that during a war takes courage — in fact, another one is opening very soon. And of course, we never forget our main mission: to make women beautiful and happy, and to remain an island of stability for our customers and our employees.