Growing up in Toronto, Canada, Tanya Taylor, now founder of her namesake womenswear brand and a second eveningwear brand, Delphine, didn’t really know she could build a career in fashion, she says. However, as someone from a “very entrepreneurial” family, she’d always dreamed of running her own business.

“ I took for granted that our dinner table conversations were always about small businesses, the people you work with, the values you have in your work and how rewarding it is when you can build a company,” Taylor says. That foundation led her to study finance at McGill University, but Taylor couldn’t shake the “creative itch” she felt to join the fashion world. So Taylor moved to New York City, where she didn’t know anyone at the time, and applied to the Parsons AAS Fashion Design program — after which her “whole world changed.”

Taylor went on to work for Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen on their contemporary lifestyle brand, Elizabeth and James, for several years.

“ What I found so inspiring, and what I still like to think about today, is how personal they were with their design process,” Taylor recalls, “and how working for a female founder that was creating product for a customer that they could really relate to, whether through age or just lifestyle, felt fun. We weren’t guessing who this person was. It wasn’t fantasy; it was grounded in reality.”

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