This year, America turns 250. It's the kind of number that makes you pause; two hundred fifty years of people arriving with very little and deciding to build something anyway.
I think about that a lot, because it's not so different from how Maymont started.
I didn't set out to build an American brand. I set out to build the clothes I couldn't find in Belarus, with two people, in what was closer to a garage than a studio. That part of the story has nothing to do with America at all. But somewhere along the way, this collection stopped being something I made for people I knew and became something I was asking strangers, on a different continent, to believe in.
That's a very American kind of ask, even if it didn't start here. Show up. Bring the work. Ask for a chance. Let the work speak for itself once you've been given the room.
In 2025, we opened Maymont's first U.S. boutique — not in New York, not in a city built for fashion, but in Greenville, South Carolina. I didn't choose Greenville because it was easy. I chose it because it was real: a community that would tell me honestly whether this was working, not because I was Belarusian or because the story was interesting, but because the clothes were worth wearing.
Greenville didn't have to make room for a brand no one here had heard of. It did anyway. The shop owners who welcomed us before they owed us anything. The women who walked through our doors that first week and came back the second. The people who told a friend, who told another friend, until a studio from Belarus started to feel like it belonged on a street in South Carolina. I didn't expect that kind of welcome. I don't take it for granted.
A year later, I still think that was the right call. Before Greenville, we'd already stood on a stage most people only watch from their phones: New York Fashion Week, the first time a Belarusian brand had been given that room. Greenville was proof it could stay — and more than that, it was proof this city was willing to claim us as its own before we'd fully earned it.
I don't know what share of American brands were started by someone who wasn't born here. I'd guess it's higher than people assume. There's something about this country that has always made room for people to show up with an idea and very little else, and ask to be let in on the strength of the work alone. Greenville is where I felt that most.
This year, while America is busy marking two hundred fifty years of exactly that kind of story, I'm marking a smaller one: one studio, thirty hands, a boutique in Greenville, South Carolina, and a city that decided to take a chance on a brand from somewhere it had never been.
Thank you, Greenville. For the welcome, the trust, and for being part of my American chapter. It's still being written, and I'm glad it's being written here.
Thank you for being part of my American chapter. It's still being written.
With gratitude,
Katerina 🤍🤎
Founder & Designer
