Sophie Collé has no illusions. At just 28 years old, she’s one of New York’s preeminent up-and-coming furniture designers. But her meteoric rise came with some hard-fought truths. She knows what people say about her on the internet. She knows that design is a luxury, both for consumers and designers. Since her rise to stardom in 2020, she’s gained a lifetime of hard-earned wisdom and isn’t afraid to tell it like it is.
On a Saturday afternoon in late November, I met Sophie in the sun-filled hallway of her Bushwick building. She floated ahead, guiding me through the winding entryway to her iconic loft. I’m met warmly by her partner, Zoë, and their four cats. Although I’ve seen the space many times on my feed, like most things, it’s even more memorable in the flesh. Sophie’s studio has evolved a lot since its days as a zillennial Barbie dreamhouse, and so has she.
Clean-faced and adorable, she wore what I gather to be her uniform look: a boxy button-down and cotton shorts, hair falling loosely around her face. She’s got a spattering of tattoos. The chain link snapping in the middle of a forearm stands out - a premonition of the conversation to come: an indicator of her depth, groundedness, and all that she’s learned in her tenure as the furniture industry’s sweetheart.
JACKET Vintage, TIGHTS Stylist’s own, HEELS Zara
Increasingly resistant to her darling status, we discussed this new phase in her life and career, marked by a growing sense of maturity and self-conviction. A little older and wiser, Collé and her space are coated in a warm patina of intention and personality, the type of thing you can’t buy at the MoMA design store.
I asked Sophie what she thought about “aesthetic” (the concept, the word that seems to have become a personal identifier) after being tossed from box to box by design publications over the years. Her reflection is rife with maturity, “aesthetic, for a lot of people, is safety. You can latch onto one thing, and that’s who you are. It’s easy to explain.” It's an answer earned from a near-decade of reckoning with the realities of being a creator, consumer, and chronically online person.
Collé is well acquainted with the anxiety of online self-definition: figuring out who you are in the moment, declaring it, and staying there for the next five years. Self-confined, enforced by follower expectations, it’s a continual struggle, being bound to her early Instagram virality. She says people still approach her, shocked that she’s no longer rocking the bleach-blonde locks of her initial fame.
But now, as Sophie looks to the future, she’s at peace with whatever box the internet wants to put her in. “All press is good press,” she shrugs. Besides, she’s got bigger fish to fry: How do you reconcile the tension between commercial success and critical acclaim? Where’s the sweet spot between financial stability and creative satisfaction? How do you run a luxury design studio while remaining accessible?
While she’s still sub-thirty, she feels a stark difference between 23 and 28. She is no longer the wunderkind blond who arrived on the scene during the pandemic, and her participation in the design industry has changed drastically over the past five years.
Internet virality popularized her signature colorful, imaginative furniture back in 2020, landing her a major career break just a few years later: developing Splat T ables with Areaware in 2022 and then being stocked in the Moma Design Store in 2023. But this quick rise wasn’t all sunshine and roses.
When she started her business—rather, when the Internet launched her project from hobby to business—she was trying to do the impossible: solve for accessibility in the luxury furniture space. Her early career began in rooms filled with Manhattan’s elite, working for interior designers who catered to high-income households.
When the pandemic put a pause on that business, Sophie found herself back home in Maryland and began experimenting with furniture design, an itch she’d longed to scratch since her days an Industrial Design major at Virginia Tech. She began posting her work casually on Instagram, and before long, her playful, imaginative designs garnered a sizable following. This was exciting, and at 23 she felt invincible, convinced she could sell $800 tables for a $125 price point.
Sophie was a one-woman show, running design, production, and sales all by herself, left to deal with the whims of an impatient Internet Community. But precocious popping off had its costs. As demand overtook Sophie’s tiny operation, orders were backlogged, products occasionally broke in transit, what started as a quest to create cool, playful work for the average consumer began breaking the bank. She quickly accumulated credit card debt, taking losses on the cost of production, and her customer base grew frustrated.
A tale as old as zillennial time, internet fame turned into internet infamy. Selling to a customer base that was used to two-day shipping turnaround times became a challenge as she managed the entire production process herself. When Collé’s products, which prioritized quality and affordable pricing, couldn’t meet those timeline expectations, things got tricky. As her platform grew, she found herself landing on the darker corners of the internet, like a niche Reddit thread for New York influencers. She doesn’t exactly identify as an influencer, but admits she was a little too reactive on the internet at times.
“Once you read about yourself on Reddit… that’s as much looking in the mirror as you’ll ever get,” she shares, red nails wrapped around a cup of tea. “if I could read a book about everything that’s ever been said about me, good or bad, I would.”
Sophie’s not shy about her ambition - she wants people talking about her - but she’s also profoundly reflective and committed to doing things right. As right as you can, anyway, in a system where quality, accessibility, and equity don’t always fit nicely together.
Sophie says her internet era forced her to zoom out and see the bigger picture—not only of her industry but of human nature. Someone will always have an opinion, but that shouldn’t inhibit executing an authentic and aligned personal vision. Success also requires honesty, Collé reflects, “It’s important to admit when something flops.” It took her almost a year to fulfill backlogged orders or refund clients. “Humiliating and humbling, two good things to feel,” she says, and you can tell she means it.
TEE Stylist’s own, BLAZER Vintage, TIGHTS Sombodee
Sophie’s current state is very Saturn Return-Coded (if you subscribe to that; I do). She’s smack dab in the middle of rebuilding her business, which entails some rather unsexy details: getting ahold of the right fabricators to bring her vision to life and reimagining her working relationships. But she’s rolling up her sleeves and doing the work without complaint.
Part of her return is taking back agency over her image, Putting herself back in the public eye on her own terms. When collaborating with us, she was clear but firm when she expressed her desire to work with an all-female team to ensure comfort on set. I respected her request tremendously, especially in the age of demure-ification, where Reddit threads love to vilify a woman speaking her truth.
Quieting the noise is challenging, but her intuition seems deeply attuned to the people around her. Collé is intentional about those she invites into her circle, and that collaborative intentionality provides clarity to her inner voice, “gut instinct is always there, but running a business alone is very isolating. Sometimes it’s easy to fall into the mindset of ‘if an outsider is saying it, it must be true.’”
Coordinating the photoshoot with Collé’s busy schedule was difficult, and we got around to the profile a few months later than anticipated. However, the delay showcased one of the biggest lessons of Sophie’s career to date: things of value (and more specifically, quality) are not afraid of time … even if we exist in a society that would have us think otherwise. After years of being on set with teams that were more interested in Sophie the product than Sophie the person, she was uncompromising about the photoshoot experience she wanted. As a queer woman in a male-dominated industry, she says that in the past, it’s been easy to override her intuition - and on this shoot, she wanted things to feel like her.
BUTTON DOWN Nordstrom, SHORTS Vintage Soft Humans, TIE Nordstrom, BOOTS ASOS
JACKET Weekend Collective, BUTTON DOWN Nordstrom, SHORTS Vintage Soft Humans, TIE Nordstrom, BOOTS ASOS
On official shoot day, the Sunday before Thanksgiving, we revived Brat Summer, blasting Charli XCX through the spacious studio. Sophie stepped in front of the camera for her first look, leg up on her signature Splat table, tie tossed over the shoulder of her oversized blazer. She looked more like the CIA’s latest recruit than the bleach-blonde girl in overalls the internet fell in love with four years prior.
The rest of the day was a beautifully fevered frenzy as Madeline Manning rotated Sophie through a half-dozen hand-selected looks. Ava Mihaljevich ensured no hair was out of place and that Sophie’s 20-inch extensions glistened with the Y2K sheen reminiscent of Avril Lavigne. Bridget O’Donnell, on makeup, made sure Sophie was cherubic from head to toe, contouring her ears and ankles in between takes to ensure absolute perfection. Art Director Cecilia Smith and photographer Leanna Šiupinys brought the vision to life, capturing all of Sophie’s personalities, from serious, steel-toe-boot-stunting-boss to “cunty elf on a shelf” (Sophie’s words). By the end of the day, the entire lot was deliriously tired but riding a rare high: the unadulterated joy of bringing a shared vision to life.
So here she is, on her own terms. Sophie Collé’s got big plans she’s primed to execute as she enters this next phase of her career, and we’re all watching. Her raw honesty and growing self-awareness imbue her furniture and designs with something more universal: the experience of growing into who we’re meant to be. Collé’s evolution reminds us to embrace the mess, learn from the flops, and keep reaching for the future—even if it’s not perfectly designed yet.
JACKET Vintage, TIGHTS Stylist’s own, HEELS Zara
STORY CREDITS
PHOTOGRAPHER Leanna Šiupinys, STYLIST Madeline Manning, HAIR Ava Mihaljevic, MAKEUP Bridget O’Donnell, PRODUCER Erica Bogdan, ART DIRECTOR Cecilia Smith, PHOTOGRAPHY ASSISTANT Keely Whipple, EDITED BY Gemmarosa Ryan
HERO IMAGE CREDITS
DRESS Madeline Marie
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