Athleisure workwear that works

Joanna Dai regularly put in 12-hour days working on the trading floor in credit syndication at JP Morgan and travelled around Europe on full-on trips every other week.

But it was one particularly gruelling same-day journey to Stockholm and back that made up her mind to quit banking.

“I got dressed at 4:30am and was on the last return flight home, 16 hours later after a long day of meetings,” she remembers. It wasn’t a comfortable journey: “The waistband of my trousers was digging in, I couldn’t move my arms in a suit, and I wished I was in my yoga leggings. I thought to myself, ‘Could workwear feel like yogawear and still look like a power suit?’”

That was 2016 — the year “athleisure” escaped its former ghetto in the gym and went mainstream. So mainstream, in fact, that it entered the Merriam-Webster dictionary for the first time.

“All these technical athleisure fabrics were now readily available,” Dai explains, “and I saw an opportunity to innovate and revolutionise workwear with fabrics that were four-way stretch, breathable, wrinkle-resistant and machine-washable.”

The California-born entrepreneur, who is 37 and lives in Stoke Newington, had grown used to dull workwear. “My very first suits for my first banking internship were from Brooks Brothers — so boxy and unflattering, I lost my individuality and confidence.”

So in 2016 Dai quit JP Morgan — “I’d done eight years and needed a change” — and enrolled on design and pattern-making courses at London College of Fashion, alongside a three-month unpaid internship with designer Emilia Wickstead.

“I was the oldest intern on the team, but seeing how a fashion brand runs from the inside was invaluable.” She travelled to Paris textile trade show Premiere Vision, and returned with swatches of 60 sportswear fabrics to test if they could be tailored, eventually choosing an Italian, eco-friendly knit for her first collection.

Dai started to build her eponymous brand: “The word ‘Dai’ in Chinese means to wear, plus it was short and memorable”, and plunged £30,000 of her savings to bootstrap it. “It was enough to pull together everything on a shoestring budget — branding, graphics, website, photoshoot, product development, a small production run and packaging, but there was nothing left for marketing.”

The entrepreneur launched an eight-piece collection of five dresses, and blazer, shirt and trousers, in July 2017. “I did a trunk show in New York and London for women I knew in finance, which led to enough pre-orders to press ahead with production.”