ABOUT ERIKA
A little sketching in Indiana started all of this .
Fashion designer. Costume technician. Lead seamstress. Founder. Here's the long version of the story you've seen pieces of.
THE STORY BEHIND ELE
"A week later I had a flight to Florida to get murdered or have the job of a lifetime."
I'm Erika. I grew up in a small farm town in northwest Indiana drawing clothes in the margins of all my textbooks, watching red carpets, and holding bigger dreams than anyone from my small town could imagine . Nobody around me had that dream. I had it anyway.
"I wanted to make art people could wear and feel incredibly beautiful in."
I received a BAA in Fashion Design with a Theater minor. I worked at a bridal shop and took apart the dresses nobody wanted so I'd have fabric to sew with in school. I applied everywhere. I kept running into the same wall: I needed experience, but I couldn’t afford to work for free.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF MY EARLY CARRER
Eating tuna packs. Wearing fast fashion clothes. Taking apart cast-off bridal gowns for fabric. A suspiciously vague job posting for a major cruise line and a flight to Florida a week later. The rest is the story, and yes I did it for the plot.
I worked as a costume technician and lead seamstress for theater, aqua, ice, and parade shows on ships all over the world. Shipyards. Studios. Hotels. Theme parks. A year on tour backstage training local wardrobe crews. Every place was a different classroom and the discipline of fitting a cast before curtain taught me more than any single course could have.
Eventually the pace caught up with me. I got burnt out, and very sick, and had to come home and rebuild. ELE is what I built instead; a place where the knowledge I fought so hard to get is free for anyone who wants it. Where the stories from every port I've worked get to live somewhere. Where belonging isn't something you have to earn first.
ELE exists because of all of it; the sketchbook in Indiana, the tuna packs, the ships everywhere else. It's built for every person who had the dream before they had the means, and showed up anyway.
WHAT ELE BELIEVES
The principles behind everything here.
Knowledge should never be gated
Sewing education is free on YouTube — always. Nobody should need money to learn a craft.
Slow over fast
Built carefully, not all at once. The Collective grows when the time is right — not before.
Come as you are
All bodies, all backgrounds, all skill levels. Belonging isn't something to earn first.
Craft has a culture
Sewing is never just sewing. It carries textile heritage, labor history, and human stories.