Meet the Oddli Founders: Eleanor Chen and Jensen Neff Know Sustainability Can Be Fun

Recent Stanford grads Eleanor Chen and Jensen Neff are best friends. They are also the cofounders of Oddli, a fashion company that prioritizes the use of deadstock materials and ethical practices in its pieces. Oddli is many things, including an exploration of more ethical fashion-industry practices; an invitation to revisit your sense of child-like joy; and a collection of beautiful clothing with a tongue-in-cheek playfulness. Ultimately, though, Oddli is a celebration of individual identity, chasing adventure, and acknowledging how incredible it can feel to connect, create, and share with others. All of this is born from the many ways that Chen and Neff celebrate their own friendship each day.

Neff and Chen founded Oddli in 2021. In the years since, they’ve received cosigns from Salem Mitchell, Orion Carloto, Reneé Rapp, Role Model, and Sabrina Brier. They’ve partnered with Urban Outfitters. They’ve hosted pop-ups in LA and NYC. And all the while they have kept the spirit of Oddli alive.

Neff and Chen have always wanted Oddli to embrace the energy of what they love doing in their friendship, such as going to the beach, painting, exploring, having picnics, etc. The kinds of activities that bring people together. It’s no wonder, then, that they’ve built such a strong community. After all, Oddli’s tagline is: “If you see someone wearing Oddli, say hello!”

We sat down with the Oddli founders to chat about the future of sustainability in the fashion industry, building their company, and the need for individuality and uniqueness now more than ever.

Teen Vogue: Tell me a little about when you were first getting started. What were some of the moments when you realized Oddli was really resonating with people?

Jensen Neff: Well, I feel like the vision for what the brand could be was always so clear and unwavering in Ellie and I’s heads. It really is the same brand we dreamed of when we first started working on it together as a class project at Stanford. We always believed in it with the same fervor.

It probably started gaining traction at a faster rate a year and a half ago. We released women’s boxer shorts made out of deadstock that were kind of this idea of celebrating female strength, playing with gender, and playing with what clothes are meant to be worn indoors and outdoors. It really resonated. We had a lot of the spirit of Oddli in that product, and it allowed the brand to take off.

Eleanor Chen: Even in college, Jensen was sewing stuff — patchwork pieces from upcycled scrap for our project. I could tell that there was this energy. I think even when we were in college, people were drawn to the pieces she was making for our school project.

JN: I think it was always just so clear that we really wanted a brand that reflected the energy that existed in our friendship. It’s always just been following that. There’s been an unwavering belief of the need for it in the world.

TV: What elements of your personalities and childhood experiences do you each bring to Oddli?

JN: I think that if Ellie and I had met at any phase of our life, we would have been not only friends but also trying to build little businesses together. It’s funny because we grew up on opposite sides of San Francisco and the Bay Area. Both of us — at, like, mirrored times in our childhood — were building bottle-cap necklace businesses, lemonade stands, mug-swap programs, and community events. It’s cute, thinking about if we had met when we were younger. It’s like Oddli was going to exist no matter what. We really are just like yin and yang.

I’d say that my childhood in Northern California was really inspired by creating in the landscape of Northern California. My grandpa lived with us for the first three years of my life. He was just such a huge part of my life, teaching me about imagination and world-building from a very young age. My weekends were spent setting up a hose, and us two would create little fairy houses around the river that was created from the hose.

Andy Goldsworthy was a huge inspiration growing up. Like, how can we find color and form in nature and turn it into art? That, paired with falling in love with art history when I entered high school. I remember taking my first art history class my senior year of high school and thinking, “This is what I’m meant to be thinking of, alongside brand building.”

EC: I think you see those parts of her now — in the fabric warehouse, combining things into a beautiful piece. That’s so reflective of her childhood of seeing beauty and knowing how to put it together.

On the other hand, I was, like, a tomboy and, I think, a team leader. I was always running around playing basketball, and also the youngest sibling. I was always trying to figure out how to get along with lots of types of people — my siblings and outside. What I was most in love with was including people, getting everyone motivated, seeing what made people buy in, have a good time and feel comfortable.

JN: Ellie, I think, really her strength at this point in the business is that every single person she is talking with, whether it be a vendor in downtown LA or the head of a $200 million dollar company, she is treating them with an immense amount of respect, care, and intention. That is the most important thing for her — treating everyone around her with kindness and respect. I think it’s just built into the company, especially with a lot of these people in the fashion industry who aren’t used to having a CEO sit down with them and hear their story. You can feel the love.

EC: The question is cool because part of the brand is trying to get people to return to a sense of child-like playfulness. Like, how do we bring people together and have that essence of maybe who we were? How do we get back to parts of ourselves as we grow up in our 20s and 30s?

TV: A big hallmark of Oddli is uniqueness. You make custom pieces and use unique materials. You’ve stated that Gen Z needs a community centered on individuality now more than ever. Why do you think uniqueness and individuality are so important in this moment?

EC: Right now we are all being inundated with everyone being and wearing the same thing. I think there is a push against that, to go back to who we are at our core, and trusting that inner voice that makes each of us different. We aren’t all born the same, but with social media and micro-trends, and the speed at which both of those move, we’ve all been told to be more similar. Because of that I feel like we are all looking to find our own individuality more than before.

JN: Objects can be a reflection of what we care about and help us to find ourselves. It’s really fun creating objects through Oddli that feel like there is an extra step of care and uniqueness. Like with the Oddli name shirt: I think, partially, why they took off is that we’ve done tens of thousands of these shirts now, and not one of them is the same. Every single one is hand-sewn, so there are slight changes in each one, but also every single fabric combination of the shirts is different.

Scaling that process took a lot of care and work behind it. We’ve been seeing that the shirt has naturally become something that customers wear on their most important days — whether it be birthdays, first dates, graduation days, or bachelorette parties, there’s this feeling of fun and a sense of celebration in the piece because of the uniqueness.

TV: When you were starting out, what are some things you were shocked to learn about how sustainability works in the fashion industry?

JN: When we started, we were just naive and optimistic, as a classroom setting can allow for, because you are working in outer space, basically. It gave us enough hope to try with a really ambitious mission of building Oddli. I think we stopped using the word “sustainability” pretty much a year into building the brand.

EC: There was not a definition that resonated with us. I came in thinking that we were going to track the exact amount of carbon we put off with each shirt. As we got into the weeds of downtown LA, in the fabric district at manufacturers', what we ended up being drawn to was more the quality of the pieces and who we are working with. It was different, like Jensen said; things are just hypothetical in the classroom, rather than being on the ground working with people.

I wish there was more of a strict governing body, but I think at the moment it's up to brands and brand leaders to define what [sustainability] means to them. It’s honestly in their own consciences. For us, maybe we are deciding between a recycled poly or non-recycled poly, or an organic cotton made with the best yarn ever versus a normal cotton, and the labor is more ethical — these are all situations that come up daily.

The way we think about it is, it doesn’t affect how much people buy. You see that in the fashion industry. The biggest companies are fast fashion. People ultimately just want to buy clothes that are at a good price and that they feel good about. So, for us, when we make those decisions, it’s what do we feel good about and how will we sleep at night. Knowing that at the moment we’re in, if you are bringing new stuff into the world, it should be done in as ethical a way as possible.

I think sustainability did translate into an ethics framework for us that we are continuously evaluating. We are trying to balance price points, because if we do things in an ethical way, you also have to price it in a way people will buy or else you can’t even continue making a business. For us, we want to keep growing Oddli, but at every point make sure we’re doing it in the most right way we can.

JN: Something really genius that Ellie has done is, basically, made the bold decision to involve the customer in our ethical framework. Not all of them, mostly through the Oddli Club or through her TikTok, but kind of this idea of saying, “This is where we are. We are 26 and 27. We are facing this decision of whether to dye with a local, family-run manufacturer that uses synthetic dyes or do natural dyes and ship it across the country to a huge conglomerate. That’s the sort of decision. Neither seems perfect to us. We are leaning this way, what do you guys think?”

I think it’s been really well-received. There’s this critical eye in Gen Z that is so tired and exhausted of the empty marketing slogans, not only with sustainability but also with DEI, size inclusivity, and all of it. We would rather just be really honest about where we are and explain it’s definitely not perfect, but this is what we are facing.

TV: Can you talk a bit more about how you mood board and the tone and energy you hope to capture?

JN: Leading the creative of the team, a huge priority is allowing everyone in the company to feel inspired. I think creative energy can build off each other, and it’s just the best feeling. We have a thing called Friday Muse, which is really fun. It’s basically every week a different team member — it rotates — presents on something that is inspiring them. It could be fashion shows from the '80s, a specific brand’s hero product, or something that interests them in art history. It’s very broad.

I feel like there’s this really fun energy in the brand right now, in that we get to build these little worlds and enter them together. The whole team just feels really inspired right now, which is fun — everyone from the button manufacturer down the street to us.

TV: How do you deal with the weight of owning a brand that's so successful?

JN: We are so lucky to have met each other. We really are. Our skills, interests, personalities, and working ways are this perfect, intricate web. I really have never had one day of doubt. This is what I’m meant to do and who I’m meant to do it with. Even when things are super hard, I could not do it without her.

EC: I trust her creative vision so much, and I love business and numbers, which I’m really grateful for. The weight of it is a lot, especially now having five full-time people, and a lot of small manufacturers. We’ve all grown together. But with great responsibility, there’s also great opportunity.

I think with something like Oddli, with anything where it grows, you can look and say, “Oh, that happened very fast.” [But] to us, it’s been putting one foot in front of the other. We are still at the beginning of the journey. I want everyone to have a piece of Oddli in their closet in 5 to 10 years. We always knew it wasn’t going to happen overnight, and that it was about discipline and the belief to keep going.

So the responsibility isn’t like, I woke up one day and was managing a payroll of millions of dollars; it was inch by inch, continuing to grow more and more. The amount we deal with now is a lot more than last year, but we’ve been getting ready for it. We are continuously stepping into shoes that are a little too big for us, but with each other, and the amazing loyalty of our customers.

TV: Do you have advice for young girls who want to get into something like this, building a brand of their own?

JN: We have so much fun encouraging and talking to young women, telling them they can do it, because that’s what we needed to hear as young women. The customers are really amazing. They’re just excited, inspired, and awesome. My main advice is: “You can do it. You’ve got it in you.”

EC: I would say notice what genuinely interests you in your day-to-day life. It can be a moment of wonder, like getting out to the ocean or something. Follow those little moments. We all have them. Just be open to that and follow where it leads you.