After 34 years, designer-founder Wendy Mullin, whose first retail clothing shop was in the back of an NYC record store, is done with online retail.

BY CHRISTINE LAGORIO-CHAFKIN @LAGORIO

Model wearing Built by Wendy clothing. Photo: Courtesy company

Wendy Mullin was an undergraduate at the University of Kansas when she set up a clothing rack on a sidewalk in Lawrence, Kansas, to peddle her hand-sewn garments. Passersby thought it was a garage sale.

The self-taught designer and sewist enrolled in New York City’s Fashion Institute of Technology the following year to professionalize her skills. That didn’t quite go as planned, either.

“I didn’t really connect with the fashion world that much,” she says. But her boxy garments, guitar straps, edgy patterns, and hand-silk-screened shirts were right at home in a little kiosk in the back of a record shop, where she worked a part-time job. Her brand, Built by Wendy, grew from there, and by the mid-aughts she’d opened two shops in New York, and two in California. With her indie-rock aesthetic and music roots, Mullin became known as a stylist for bands such as Sleater-Kinney and Pavement.

Her brand retained its handmade feeling, and was mostly made in New York City from the late ‘90s through 2010s.........

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