Casey Dworkin
Losing everything gave Casey Dworkin the clarity to build something new from scratch.
It’s not easy for her to talk about, but a 2015 apartment fire that destroyed everything she owned helped Casey Dworkin truly zero in on what she wanted from this life.
Not long after, she took her first big risk. She’d been working for two years running sales and operations for a small luxury footwear line called Ivy Kirzhner in New York City, a great first gig after earning her degree in creative studies, which was a marriage between product design and design and merchandising. But the owner of a new contemporary shoe company, Messeca, invited her on board to serve as a brand director, a role she knew would afford her more creative control.
“I wasn’t sure if I could do it,” she says, “but I told myself ‘I’ll be damned if I don’t try.’”
On a personal level, the fire left Dworkin permanently changed. “My relationship to material possessions was flipped totally on its head,” she recalls. “Starting over from scratch not only changed my perspective in terms of being grateful for the things I still did have, but it made me so much more conscious of the items I chose to buy. From that point on, everything I purchased was something I really thought long and hard about, and my relationship to consumer goods became very intentional and much more minimal.”
Professionally, Dworkin absorbed everything she could as brand director at Messeca. But in the background, a vision began to take shape of what it would be like to strike out on her own.
“I started to develop an idea for what an intentional brand of footwear would look like, and from that moment on, starting my own brand became my driving force,” she says.
“Life is short” is a lesson she learned from the fire, Dworkin explains, and so in 2017, she went full steam ahead and launched her own brand of sustainably minded, ethical footwear called Sylven New York.
“The company is rooted in the idea that we should coexist with our environment,” she says.
Many of the footwear styles are designed to be waterproof, and Dworkin uses a lot of recycled and upcycled materials. Comfort and durability are paramount, she says.
“I approach my decision-making process for my company much like I approached rebuilding my life after the fire, making sure that everything serves a purpose as well as serves the good of the world,” Dworkin says.
As often as she can, Dworkin uses deadstock, which is leftover material from larger brands, and she slows down the production process, which means less waste.
Sylven New York is an online business, but Dworkin occasionally has opportunities to get her boots on the ground (she approves this pun) at pop-up shops around the city. The pop-ups make it all feel real for Dworkin.
“Having my own company was part of my 10-year plan,” she jokes, “not my five-year plan. But I think my life circumstances have pointed me in this direction and taught me that there is no time like the present.” — Katie Clark
