I love my Tess office and showroom! I can sit at the design table that Mike built for me, look out over the Austin city skyline, and become inspired! We’ve so enjoyed hosting Austin in our showroom, with fashion blogger evenings, personal fittings and shopping with the designer! I love showing behind-the-scenes here at Tess, and would welcome you to my studio anytime!

I have to say, creating a website has been the hardest part of opening a new business! I admit I had no idea of the complexity of merging design, function and coding to make my vision for Tess come alive on the screen! Since this article ran, we’ve re-coded our site to increase your shopping functionality and experience and we’ve changed how we photograph and present our Tess dresses. Nowadays, we present the lovely garments on a dress form, to allow you to dream and plan your Tess wardrobe for each season. Then, we take our Tess dresses on location to film them in the wild, as you’ve seen in our upcoming Summer Collection, which you can preview here.

What a wonderful team of people we have here at Tess! Each one of them has brought a wonderful joy to their work and their talents, and I’m so lucky to have them with us! I can’t wait to see what another year will brings for all of us here at Tess - and what fabulous fashion we’ll bring to you all! One whole year in business ... and so many more to come!

My favorite part of the process! How can you describe that feeling when you see your scribbled little sketches come to life in beautiful fabrics of wool, silk and linens? It’s just wonderful to see the garments move and live when Andrea, our fit model, tries the dress and checks wearability and fit. It makes me quite giddy!

This last weekend, we had so much fun presenting Tess on the runway! This fun Friday evening took place in partnership with The Salon at the Domain, who created fabulous Tess-inspired up-dos for the event! It was a flirty little show, with twirly skirts and Rat Pack tunes. Each of the models had so much fun hamming it up!