Too Hard Is Never A Good Reason: The Integrity Of The Helfrich Collective

A couple of years ago, 30 minutes before she was to give a presentation on bone marrow transplants, Dr. Brianne Helfrich, founder of the Helfrich Collective, got a life-changing call from her PR person. Supermodel Emily Ratajkowski was wearing the brand and posting about them on social media.

“I mean, I was in an academic conference and I was screaming,” Dr. Helfrich told me. “I was FaceTiming my mom. I was calling everyone. I was like, this is the biggest thing ever. And then I had to go give a presentation on bone marrow to this whole group of people. It was such a whirlwind, a crazy moment for me. And it led to our feature in Vogue. It was my two worlds coming together.”

Brianne Helfrich’s work absolutely straddles two very different industries, she effectively has two careers, and the seemingly diametrically opposed professions actually support each other. What she learns from one often applies to the other, and the root of everything she does is integrity.

“As a brand, Dr. Helfrich said, “we’ve worked really hard to be as honest as possible. I started my brand because of my own mental health issues, and I’ve been really open and honest about the struggles of being a founder while also getting a PhD at the same time, how I’m always juggling so many things.”

“And no,” she continued with a grin, “I don’t have everything figured out. I don’t have a background in business, so a lot of this is trial and error and mistakes. I’m learning. And I think that people really resonate with that because it shows that there’s a person behind the brand.”

Helfrich Collection is a relatively new brand, it was founded in 2021, and the founder is already thinking about the sustainability measures she’ll insist on as her company continues breaking its own records.

“For us,” Dr. Helfrich told me, “the pre-order model was a way I felt we could practice sustainability in a capacity that worked for us. Obviously, we’re a smaller brand, so there were certain things that we had to factor in. Because there’s so much excess right now, I really wanted to make sure that we were only producing products that we knew were going to quote-unquote have a home, that someone was actually going to wear. There’s a lot more we can do as we get bigger, when we have more bandwidth. But right now, fashion is such a pollution industry, and I am always thinking about what we can do to minimize our contribution as much as we can.”

The Helfrich Collective is a loungewear brand, subtle and elegant and purpose-designed for your comfort.

“Of course I want the pieces to stand out,” the designer explained, “but I didn’t want to design them to be the entire outfit. I want everyone to be able to put their own personality, their own spin on it. Personally, I love very neutral, subtle types of outfits and clothing because then I get to really make them my own. I can add a jacket. I can add sunglasses. I can add some pop of color or textiles if I want. I want to give everyone the opportunity to make their own clothes. I felt like that was the way I really wanted to go with my brand. I didn’t want it to be something that was too loud. I wanted it to be very understated, very elegant, very simple, yet something that people are really drawn to at the same time.”

From the start, Helfrich Collective has been cautious and continuous of production quantities. The impact of her brand matters a great deal to its founder; she insists on taking the time to do a job the right way and is not concerned if that means she misses the arbitrary dates assigned by fashion’s calendar. She’s definitely delayed or pulled releases or skipped entire seasons.

“We did our pre-order model for our last collection, and it was something I was really excited about, though I was really nervous because there had been a little bit of backlash about pre-order models generally and people having to wait for items, that sort of thing. But I really wanted to drive home the point that we’re doing this on purpose. We’re not trying to do this because we want to sell so many items, we’re trying to build up hype around our collection. This is something that we’re doing purposefully and I think this perspective comes from my background in bioethics. I want to make sure that we’re trying to do everything as ethically sound as we can.”

The hard sciences don’t always get attention in fashion, though the industry absolutely relies upon them, but that’s not the connection Dr. Helfrich found between apparel and medicine. Like most of us young adults, she had to carve out a space for herself in the world.

“I grew up thinking I was going to go to med school and be a medical doctor, and when I was 16, I started modeling in New York,” Dr. Helfrich told me. “I’m very tall, six feet, I got bullied for my height, so modeling was the thing to give me confidence. Getting to walk in New York Fashion Week and getting to see the creativity behind clothing, it’s not about wearing the clothes, it’s how you style them and the passion behind it. Seeing all the designers, I think they were always in the back of my mind. It wasn’t that I necessarily at that moment thought, ‘I’m going to create a fashion brand and this is what I want to do.’ It was something that, once I had a bit of an opportunity to think about what I want to build, something that I want to create under my name, fashion was the first thing that came to my mind. I wanted to build something.”

“I got my PhD and my master’s in bioethics,” the founder continued, and I giggled in what might (generously) be described as a self-effacing manner and asked her to explain to me exactly what that meant, and how exactly clothing became her throughline.

“First and foremost,” Dr. Helfrich generously explained, it’s the ethics of healthcare. So, decision-making, consent, autonomy, non-maleficence, all of those components.”

Following a long childhood illness, which felt overly and endlessly full of hospitals, Dr. Helfrich always sort of assumed that she herself would become a medical doctor. In between, as a teenager and continuing into adulthood, she worked as a model. It seems like her life is always balanced between worlds. And mostly, this seems to be the way she thrives.

But there were setbacks at first, like when she didn’t get into medical school on her first try. When that happened, she paused and took a beat to reconsider what she wanted, what it was she wanted and why.

“Although I love the medical sciences,” Dr. Helfrich told me with a smile, “patient care is the reason that I wanted to go into medicine. I thought I would be a really good doctor because because I grew up in and out of the hospital, I know how scary those moments are, especially in pediatrics. Parents don’t want to be there, the patients don’t want to be there, no one wants to be there. I know how terrifying that is. So, when I didn’t get in and I didn’t get accepted, I found bioethics. It’s basically patient relations. How can we make the most ethically supportable options for patients, for their families, and for healthcare as a whole? Once I was in my program, I realized I really loved pediatrics. I don’t know what it is, I don’t have kids and I don’t have any young nieces or nephews or anything. I think honestly it was probably because I used to be that patient. And so I relate to them a lot.”

“I focused on end of life for pediatrics,” Dr. Helfrich said about her dissertation, “which is definitely a very heavy, difficult topic. But it’s something that we need to discuss because we want pediatric patients to have the best end of life options possible. I always make the argument that just because something is hard to talk about doesn’t mean we shouldn’t. Just because something is hard to do doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. That’s something I’m really passionate about.”

Having two careers, especially in such different fields, might sound like a lot. But it makes sense to me; the different kinds of work feed different parts of her. The same way that I get different things out of writing something I’m proud of than I do from sewing perfect doll clothing for my daughter.

“It definitely is very drastically different from my work with Helfrich Collective,” the founder said, “but I think it’s good, it fulfills me, that scientific, academic side that I love. But then also I have the creative, business side. So it’s honestly a really nice balance and I think having it has helped me.”

From the very first days of her brand, Helfrich has committed to some very generous charitable giving. It is normal for brands to dedicate website space to the causes important to management. Helfrich Collective has so many partnerships that it requires a crawler in the lower third to make certain all names get time in front of customer eyes. I asked Brianne how she decided who to work with or donate to, how she figured out what was possible for her to do.