Jasmine Walker

I grew up in this industry — my father worked in it, I modeled as a child, and I learned sourcing sitting beside him in New York and Vegas, in the rooms where the products behind the labels actually get made. I ran my own showroom for four years before COVID. The work has run under a few names since, and Reklaw Collective is where all of it lives now.

The showroom carries international lines into American doors — British, German, Italian, Brazilian, Argentine, Colombian — with a long lean toward women-owned and minority-owned brands and toward things made well: handmade, eco-conscious, built to be worn. I sell to high-end specialty stores, and I have represented more than seventy jewelry lines alone.

I know both sides of the table because I have sat at both. When I finally built a line of my own — forty-five pieces, composed in an afternoon at sourcing — twenty-two stores picked it up at my first market, Anthropologie’s bridal collection among them. That is what a line can do when the wholesale infrastructure under it is right, and building that infrastructure is most of what I do all day.

And I am usually the only person who looks like me in the room — at a five-thousand-person trade show, maybe three of us. I stayed behind the scenes for years. I am done with that: people relate to me, and being visible is part of the work now.