On her design team

It’s just me and my assistant designer and we do everything together. I’ll come up with a lot of designs and I’ll explain them to my assistant designer and we’ll start working on them and then she’ll keep working on them while I’m in Dallas and she’ll send me pictures daily and we’re constantly in touch, so when I come back the pieces are made and I try them on myself and make sure they not only look good but they also have a good fit and then we go from there. I’m very involved in the design side and the business side.

On her namesake line

Originally when we started with the fast fashion brand, we didn’t really have good timing. We opened 16 stores right before the [economic] crisis happened, so then we redirected our energies to a different market and now we’re coming back with Lublu. We’re working through showrooms and finding retail partners and the store in Dallas will be the only store, but we’re planning on opening more in the future. We’ve learned from our past experiences and now I believe we have more insight and we’ll be more strategic and focused while we launch Lublu. We really believe that Lublu will do well.

On fashion week

That’s definitely our plan in the future, not in the near future but in a few years, that’s definitely a goal that we aspire to. Hopefully we’ll show during New York Fashion Week at some point. But we’re planning on waiting a little bit and having more of a presence in the States.

On great street style stars

That was a fun street style project we did in February and it was a really fun, girly environment and my friends came to support me and we all tried on different outfits and took pictures together. I felt like this type of photoshoot with Tommy [Ton] would communicate the whole essence of the brand; it’s clothes for really stylish girls that are jet setting all over the world, always busy, living a very interesting life and always having different events to go to, so they need different outfits for every part of their busy life. And I feel like I’m strongest at designing cocktail dresses and evening outfits. Leandra, Mira and Tommy are just my friends, we were all in town together doing New York fashion week, so it was just a fun project that we did.

On manufacture everything

This past year we started our own production house, just two hours outside of our design studio in Moscow, so everything for Lublu is made in Russia, in-house in our own facility. It’s been amazing since we started producing our own clothing, because we’ve been able to enhance quality control and be more flexible to the demands of the market. For example, our production schedule was cut down from nine months to two months, which gives us incredible flexibility.