Madison Maxey

She grew up in San Diego, and NBCNBCNBC (National Broadcasting Company) is an American national commercial broadcast television network. It was founded by RCA in 1926, began as a radio network and later developed television. With ABC and CBS it is one of the three traditional U.S. broadcast networks; it passed to General Electric with RCA in 1986, merged with Universal to form NBCUniversal in 2004, has been controlled by Comcast since 2011, and is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry News calls her a San Diego native. In a 2016 interview with ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry she said that her mother is a flight attendant and that her father was an aerospace engineer at Northrop Grumman who “loved to make things.”⁠[1][2]

She began sewing at the age of eight. The FBomb wrote in 2012 that as a child she asked for sewing machines for Christmas rather than cell phones or makeup, and that in high school she sewed each of the costumes for her school plays by hand; in Marie Claire’s profile she said that in high school she loved making things, especially stuffed animals and clothes.⁠[3][4][5]

She said in 2012 that she had been interning in the fashion industry since she was 16 and had worked with French wedding-dress designers and Tommy Hilfiger; in her NBC News profile she says that she had been working in the industry “since I was 15 or 16.” In the summer before her first year of college she interned for the designer Donna Ricco, who, she said, encouraged her to keep designing. The FBomb wrote that she sat in on college classes in the summers, missed days of school to intern at New York Fashion Week, toured the offices of Teen Vogue, won a CFDA and Teen Vogue scholarship at 18 and had done her ninth internship, at Nylon magazine, the previous fall. Marie Claire writes that she interned at Tommy Hilfiger and Nylon.⁠[6][2][4][5]

She recalled in her Forbes interview that in high school she ran a Kickstarter campaign for a shipwreck-inspired garment collection that she entered in a global designers’ competition: “I raised $700 but I didn't win.”⁠[1]

She said that she moved to New York at 18 and has not left since. NBC News writes that Parsons School of Design was the only college she applied to; she studied fashion design there and quit after one semester. NBC News writes that she already knew much of what the school planned to teach her, and that what she did not know, such as 3D programming, she taught herself.⁠[1][2][6]

Accounts of how she left school differ: in an interview of December 2012 she said that she felt it was the right time to make her dreams come true, so she “took a year off of school” and took the plunge; The FBomb wrote in June 2012 that she had to return to school that spring to study a subject chosen by her parents; SURFACE and Marie Claire write that she left school after winning the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry.⁠[6][4][7][5]

In December 2011 she founded the fashion label Madison Maxey Inc., which made blazers in fun and interesting cuts under the motto “Blazers for the Individual,” and launched a Kickstarter campaign. The FBomb describes her as a 19-year-old CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry native and says she wanted to start something now rather than wait until she was $240,000 in debt and desperate for a job.⁠[4]

She said in her Forbes interview that she wanted to make women’s blazers from leftover materials, and that a woman who had given her money on Kickstarter gave her $4,000 to finance the company; the venture did not become a company.⁠[1]

Mic writes that after launching a line of blazers with the help of Kickstarter she learned to program and coded her own website. In an interview with Physics World she said that she started programming because she needed a website to show her work, and saw parallels between putting code together and putting pattern pieces together to make a garment.⁠[8][9]

She said in her Forbes interview that at the time she was also working at General Assembly, which offers classes on programming and digital marketing related to startups; Built In writes that she left Parsons to study web development there and completed a work-study program in an entrepreneurship co-working space.⁠[1][10]

Brooklyn Magazine wrote in September 2015 that she attended Parsons on a Teen Vogue and CFDA scholarship and left before getting her degree, having already taught herself everything from materials and pattern-making to designing and constructing clothes; programming classes at General Assembly took her down a new path, and she went on to become an entrepreneur-in-residence at General Assembly and a fellow at both the Brooklyn Fashion + Design Accelerator and Autodesk.⁠[11]

On December 24, 2012, Her Campus’s “How She Got There” column published an interview with her, introducing her as 19, chief executive and co-founder of the Madison Maxey label and a fashion design major at Parsons The New School for Design. She said that she organized the label with her business partner, Tessa, and an intern, Dani; that she did the designs but mostly worked on outreach; and that Donna Ricco often supplied the fabric for the label’s recycled collars. She was also interning with an education program in New York City at the time and often ran to coffee shops and to her PR office in Brooklyn for quick meetings.⁠[6]

She said that she woke up at about 7:30 a.m., answered email in bed until 8:30 and then ran errands, went to meetings or worked on projects; in her spare time she studied Chinese and played the saxophone, and she had recently taken up skateboarding. She said she hoped within ten years to expand into menswear and corporate uniforms, and that her ultimate goal was to get her blazers into Anthropologie. What she wished she had known was “just how difficult it is to get appointment with buyers”; her mistake had been not telling people about her startup and describing only her café day job.⁠[6]

She was on the list of 20 Thiel Fellowship fellows of 2013 announced on May 9, 2013 (listed as Maddy Maxey). The list published by Business InsiderBusiness InsiderBusiness Insider is a digital business-news organization.Open the full entry (republished by Entrepreneur) gives her age as 18 and her home town as San Diego, California, says that she wanted to revolutionize the fashion industry and had earlier founded a popular fashion blog, and says that as a Thiel Fellow she would improve clothing patterns and enterprise software to make garment manufacturing more efficient, with the goal of making domestic production profitable. Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry gave each fellow $100,000, and during the two-year program the fellows could not work or be enrolled in school.⁠[12]

Forbes writes that her proposal was to use 3D modeling to design clothing patterns with fewer seams, which would lower production costs; she said in the interview that she then realized she would need more of a reputation in the industry to change something as fundamental as pattern-making, and so started The Crated.⁠[1]

Forbes, Mic and United NationsUnited NationsThe United Nations is an international organization founded in 1945 under the Charter of the United Nations. It has 193 Member States, and its headquarters are in New York City.Open the full entry Academic Impact describe her as the first fashion designer to win the Thiel Fellowship; Built In calls her the first fashion student to receive it. On her age when she won, Mic and New Lab give 20, unlike the 18 in the list of fellows.⁠[1][13][8][14][10][15]

Loomia’s company history states that the company was founded in 2014 as a design and technology studio called The Crated; Forbes’s 2016 “30 Under 30” gallery and the United Nations Academic Impact profile say instead that she founded The Crated and Loomia, respectively, in 2013, and SURFACE wrote in February 2016 that The Crated had been operating for about three years. Built In writes that she used the Thiel Fellowship grant to start the design studio; Brooklyn Magazine and SURFACE call her a co-founder of The Crated; the SmithsonianSmithsonian InstitutionThe Smithsonian Institution is a museum, education and research institution created by the U.S. Congress in 1846 with the bequest of the English scientist James Smithson. Based in Washington, D.C., it runs museums such as the National Air and Space Museum and the National Museum of Natural History, as well as the National Zoo.Open the full entry’s Lemelson Center profile calls her a co-founder of Loomia.⁠[16][13][14][7][10][17][3]

An article published by the Brooklyn Fashion + Design Accelerator on November 25, 2014, describes The Crated as a New York–based tech design consultancy and product design studio that co-develops enhanced apparel and wearable technology with fashion and technology companies, run by her and Mari Kussman, who had more than a decade of experience in the fashion industry and expertise ranging from physical computing to scent engineering. The article says that the two had worked for fashion brands such as Tommy Hilfiger and Helmut Lang, and that she had also worked with companies outside fashion, such as General Assembly.⁠[18]

NBC News writes that The Crated did top-secret design research and prototypes for clients such as American ExpressAmerican ExpressAmerican Express Company is a payments company headquartered in New York that issues credit and charge cards and operates its own payments network; founded in 1850, it is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.Open the full entry and The North Face, and for others that could not be named; because the products are expensive and hard to produce, she tells clients upfront that they will pay.⁠[2]

She and Mari Kussman were both Research Fellows of the Brooklyn Fashion + Design Accelerator and planned to research the future of the wearables industry with a group of students from Parsons School of Design, with a focus on Gartner’s technology hype cycle. The article introduces her as a 2013 Thiel Fellow who had been named a “female founder to watch” by Women 2.0 and spoke frequently at events such as TED, Autodesk University and Yahoo.⁠[18]

The article says that she and Mari Kussman had just launched the TiltBit, a module for gesture control, on the BitLab of littleBits; with it anyone can prototype a circuit that triggers outputs based on gestures, for example attaching it to a glove and turning on a light by tilting one’s hand. She said that “we can use the body as a UI.” She also held that wearable technology was still in an “uncanny valley” and that the real innovation would lie in smart textiles and the garments themselves.⁠[18]

On September 8, 2015, GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry announced that Made with Code, its initiative to inspire girls to try coding, was teaming up with ZAC Zac Posen: a dress fitted with 500 LED lights displaying designs coded online by girls would be the finale look of Zac Posen’s Spring/Summer 2016 runway show. Google’s article introduces her as a fashion engineer and Made with Code mentor who coded and fabricated the dress’s LED technology, working alongside Zac Posen as he designed it.⁠[19]

The Brooklyn Fashion + Design Accelerator writes that at the show at Industria Superstudio the model Coco Rocha did the honors of closing it in the dress, and that afterwards she and the Made with Code girls joined other guests at a reception celebrating the partnership with Zac Posen. Mic writes that it was the first LED matrix dress at New York Fashion Week.⁠[20][8]

NBC News writes that her best-known work is the circuitry and LED electronics of a light-up gown made for Zac Posen and worn by Lupita Nyong’o for a Star WarsStar WarsStar Wars is a space-fantasy film and entertainment franchise created by George Lucas and now owned by Lucasfilm, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company.Open the full entry event. In a 2015 interview with Brooklyn Magazine she named the programmable LED dress made for Zac Posen and Google as one of her three biggest accomplishments.⁠[2][17]

On October 7, 2015, Brooklyn Magazine put her on its “30 Under 30” list, introducing her as 22, a creative technologist and co-founder of The Crated who had moved to Brooklyn from San Diego. She said that Brooklyn offered “so much infrastructure and culture” for creative growth.⁠[17]

She named as role models the Adafruit team, Nan-Wei Gong of Google’s Project Jacquard and Francis Bitonti, and called her biggest accomplishment a three-way tie: receiving the Thiel Fellowship, discovering how to create textures for 3D prints using scripts and SLA, and making a programmable LED dress for Zac Posen and Google. She said she had no firm idea of where she would be in ten years, because “reality regularly surpasses my wildest dreams.”⁠[17]

On October 9, 2015, Mic presented Kelvin, her heated garment: a thin, liner-weight jacket warmed by printed soft circuitry. Mic gives her age as 22 and says that she is not a typical fashion designer but a self-described “creative technologist”; she said her team had surveyed New Yorkers and found that commuters liked the idea of wearing a blazer in winter without being cold on the way to work. She said that the components for turning the jacket into a heated jacket cost about $30, with the supply chain and labor as the remaining hurdle, and that she hoped to partner with a few companies so that fashion companies could use Kelvin to add smart garments to their collections.⁠[8]

Mic also writes that she had made an audio-responsive T-shirt and a light-sensitive T-shirt, and earlier technology to optimize pattern-making so as to reduce production time and labor; she wanted technology in clothing to be invisible and said she was most excited for chemical advances that let clothes clean themselves and electronic advances that let garments harness kinetic energy.⁠[8]

Brooklyn Magazine wrote on September 9, 2015, that one of the first things she aimed to manufacture was a climate-controlled jacket; she said that her team used materials that garment manufacturers would be comfortable with, “so they can just sew these things together.”⁠[11]

In a Forbes interview published on October 12, 2016, she said that the company had just been rebranded as Loomia and had taken on investment at the beginning of that year; it had generated profits the year before, but for cash-flow reasons she used the new funds to develop a product. Physics World writes that the company was renamed when it took on investors; she said that Loomia started at about the peak of the “hype cycle” for wearable technology, when people were very interested in investing, and that “We didn't raise a tonne of money, but it was definitely something I couldn't have funded on my own.” Built In writes that she renamed the studio Loomia after realizing that the main issue stopping such products from scaling was finding a soft, flexible circuit material.⁠[1][9][10]

She said in the interview that the company had so far sold prototyping services in its studio, such as a smart jacket or sweater heated by electronic circuits woven into the fabric, with customers including Google, Flextronics, TopShop and VF Corporation; it was making a material that functions like a circuit board for smart soft goods, to be launched at the beginning of the following year, with uses such as safer work gloves that give feedback about what one is touching and a mattress that wakes the sleeper by shaking. She argued that companies should charge for the intelligence put into their products and not only for the products themselves: “It's making innovative stuff, being able to introduce higher-margin products that are more useful.”⁠[1]

Forbes writes that she was to present at that year’s Forbes Under 30 Summit in Boston and show a one-of-a-kind prototype garment that she had built for it. United Nations Academic Impact writes that Wareable magazine named Loomia its start-up of the year for 2016.⁠[1][14]

On January 4, 2016, Forbes published its 2016 “30 Under 30” Art & Style list, which included her at 22; Forbes’s write-up cites a black LED dress funded by Google and designed by Zac Posen as an example of her technology. Forbes’s interview of October 2016 also mentions in its introduction that she was on this list, and SURFACE wrote in February 2016 that she had been featured on the Forbes “30 Under 30” list.⁠[21][1][7]

SURFACE’s profile of February 9, 2016, gives her age as 22 and says that she designs second-generation wearable technology, textiles infused with circuits; she said that over about three years The Crated had done consulting and prototyping for different companies and that its next phase would focus on enabling technologies for the field, since there were few industry standards. Projects the article lists include research on a second-generation spacesuit for the Man Vehicle Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a co-branded project led by Google and Zac Posen, an electrically heated jacket, a collection of UV-responsive apparel, and computer-generated graphics made with JavaScript, Illustrator and parametric equations for epitrochoids. She said: “The goal is to satiate this sense of curiosity.”⁠[7]

On March 3, 2016, VICE published a profile of her in its Trailblazers series, presented by Adidas. In it she described trailblazing as “being willing to follow your convictions and forge a new trail,” said that “There's a level of humility that has to come with trailblazing,” including being able to admit being wrong or having made a mistake when trying a new idea, and called occasionally failing when trying something new “part of the fun.” She also said, “I enjoy the process of making something with my hands,” and of her concept Meld: “I can still work on Meld but it was a concept, and I like to play with concepts.”⁠[22]

On May 31, 2016, VICE wrote that the Armor vest, made by The Crated with StrongArm Technologies, had premiered the week before: the vest tracks the wearer’s temperature, posture and stress, using textile circuitry printed onto the fabric with custom formulas and machinery developed by The Crated and a printed graphene temperature sensor constructed by Bon Bouton. The article describes her as founder and president of The Crated and says that she aimed to convert the surface of textiles into working circuit boards, had explored a conductive nylon made by mixing graphite and silver nano-powder, and had prototyped machines to deposit conductive material onto fabric, since no factory-fitted machines then existed to produce such items on an industrial scale. She said: “The trouble with textiles is that they're really delicate, they're stretchable, they're flexible, they're unpredictable.”⁠[23]

Built In wrote in 2019 that The Crated had worked with the New York–based StrongArm Technologies on harnesses that monitor factory workers’ biometrics.⁠[10]

On December 12, 2016, Marie Claire announced the winners of its first Young Women’s Honors, and she received the Lord & Taylor Rose Award as “The Futurist.” The article introduces her as 23, a creative technologist and founder of the Brooklyn-based Loomia, which develops electronic textiles, or “smart fabric,” and envisions electricity-conducting clothes capable of heating themselves, sensing when the wearer is lifting something too heavy, or telling parents if their child is being pushed around at school.⁠[5]

The article states that Loomia’s partners and collaborators included The North Face and Topshop, and that the Barack ObamaBarack ObamaBarack Obama (born 1961) is an American politician and lawyer who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017, the first African American to hold the office. He was previously an Illinois state senator and a U.S. senator from Illinois, and he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.Open the full entry administration had sought her advice on wearable technology.⁠[5]

New Lab writes that Loomia, one of its member companies, was founded by her, with her as technical lead, and makes three components for soft-material manufacturers — the Loomia Electronic Layer, the Loomia Tile and the Loomia Data Exchange — for smart apparel that can change color, produce heat or light up while collecting, securing and monetizing data for the consumer’s benefit. She said that Loomia did not want to own people’s data and sell it, and that blockchain “offered an opportunity to handle data in a way that respects the consumer.” New Lab writes that users could record in an app how often a garment is worn and washed, log the data on the blockchain and sell it back to the manufacturer for tokens; any use of the data requires the user’s explicit consent, and the products do not track location. New Lab also writes that Loomia’s chief executive, Janett Liriano, is a master electrician with design and production experience in film and theatre.⁠[15]

Built In writes that in 2017 Loomia held a token sale through Tile in which buyers could pay in EthereumEthereumEthereum is an open, general-purpose smart contract blockchain that launched in 2015, and its native asset is ether (ETH). The project was proposed by Vitalik Buterin and advanced jointly by eight co-founders; the network now uses proof of stake and centers on the EVM, the account model, a rollup scaling roadmap, and the open EIP process.Open the full entry; the article does not give the amount raised. Built In also writes that the Tile tracking tag, with hardware built by The Tomorrow Lab and software by Fueled, collects data on frequency of wear, location, activity level and the wearer’s temperature and syncs through an Android app with the blockchain-based Loomia Data Exchange, and that it was then marketed to business customers; on location data, this differs from New Lab’s account.⁠[10]

On December 21, 2017, Loomia announced in a press release (published by Textile World) that the outdoor retailer L.L.Bean would explore blockchain applications with Loomia: the two companies would study data collected by apparel fitted with the Loomia Electronic Layer to learn how long and how well products are used and how often items returned under L.L.Bean’s 100-percent satisfaction guarantee are still in use, starting with outerwear such as jackets and boots. The release says that the Loomia Electronic Layer is made of flexible circuitry that can heat, light and sense, remains washable and dryable, and collects data such as temperature, motion and frequency of wear; the LOOMIA TILE handles secure, anonymous data transfer, so that consumers can share their data with the brand in exchange for rewards, with the data secured by blockchain and governed by the consumer’s expressed consent.⁠[24]

The release states that Loomia was led by its founder and technical lead, Madison Maxey, and its chief executive, Janett Liriano; other core team members and advisers were Sol Lederer, director of blockchain, Ezgi Ucar, director of product development, Marco Paúl, vice president of operations and supply chain, and Paul Raffin, a former executive of J.Crew and The Frye Co. Carole Kerner, a former president of Donna Karan Collection, joined as an adviser at the same time. The release lists Loomia’s clients as including Google, The North Face, Zac Posen and Calvin Klein, and introduces her as a Forbes “30 Under 30” honoree and a 2013 Thiel Fellow.⁠[24]

On August 13, 2019, Innovation in Textiles wrote that Loomia was partnering with Eastprint, a printed-electronics company with 40 years of experience, to manufacture soft-circuit systems at scale, with Eastprint’s facilities in MassachusettsMassachusettsMassachusetts (officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States; its capital and largest city is Boston. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on February 6, 1788, the sixth state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 7,029,917.Open the full entry and Mexico to be set up for the purpose. The article says that Loomia had begun as a consultancy building prototypes for Fortune 500 clients before becoming a product company focused on scalable soft-circuit systems, had raised just over $1.7 million in venture funding, held two granted patents after three years of research and had been admitted to the Material Connexion library; over the previous year the two companies had run several trials of a soft-circuit production process that does not use ink and had produced a heating system that had FCC certification and was ready for sale, and they were trialing the technology with Fortune 1000 companies.⁠[25]

On November 27, 2019, Built In wrote that during her residency at Autodesk she had worked with a chemist on a conductive ink made from silver nanoparticles and elastic, which she later dropped over durability concerns; Loomia eventually chose to laminate circuits onto fabric rather than use conductive ink, knitting or weaving, making custom circuits for each function and connecting them to an external battery. The company supplies pre-cut e-textile pieces that customers sew into their own products, such as heated car seats, lighting for construction workers’ safety jackets and smart vests for factory workers, and its customers were divided equally among the transportation, healthcare and outdoor-product sectors. She described the team’s approach as a design process rather than an engineering approach of meeting a fixed specification: “We just kept iterating and developing and trying new things.”⁠[10]

On December 2, 2019, Physics World published an interview with her that describes her as founder and technical lead of Loomia, a start-up based in New York and California that designs and manufactures e-textiles for wearable technology, outdoor gear and automotive interiors. The interview states that the company’s Loomia Electronic Layer, a flexible, washable textile with integrated circuitry, was developed by her with the chief technology officer, Ezgi Ucar; the material is deliberately not stretchable, to keep its electrical properties consistent; and its manufacturing process is designed to move from prototype to production without expensive automated knitting machines that need specialized training. She said that reports she had seen placed e-textiles as heading toward the “plateau of productivity” of the hype cycle, and that she personally agreed.⁠[9]

She said in the interview that by the time her Thiel Fellowship ended she had worked on wearable technology for some big-name companies, so people were willing to take meetings with her when she began seeking funding.⁠[9]

On October 19, 2023, Specialty Fabrics Review wrote that the Brooklyn-based Loomia Technologies had become a trusted supplier in the network of the Smart Textile Alliance, a London-based not-for-profit organization; the article names her as Loomia’s founder, and she said that the company was excited to be part of an alliance formed by the e-textile pioneers Christian Dalsgaard and Mili Tharakan and hoped its solution could add to the growth of the field.⁠[26]

A “Modern Makers” profile published by Manufacturing USA in September 2024 describes her as founder and chief executive of Loomia Technologies, Inc., a member of AFFOA (Advanced Functional Fabrics of America), the advanced fibers and textiles institute. She said that she started her career in design and found hardware and materials engineering by digging deep into design problems, and that the need to scale led her to advanced manufacturing; the profile says that her work laid the foundation for six patents that form the basis of the Loomia Electronic Layer, an award-winning soft, flexible circuit material used for custom heating, cabling, lighting and sensing components. She said that Loomia makes electronic components for cars, robots and more, and that most of the work is testing the electrical performance of components and laminating rather than weaving or sewing.⁠[27]

The profile says that she had led efforts for the F.I.T. Museum, the Forbes 30 Under 30 Summit, CNBCCNBCCNBC is an American business and financial news cable channel launched by NBC in 1989; it merged with its rival FNN in 1991 and since January 2026 has been part of Versant Media Group, spun off from Comcast.Open the full entry’s Jump Jive and Thrive and Google Creative Lab, had led workshops for The North Face, Google, Flextronics, Adidas and Corning, and had lectured at Columbia UniversityColumbia UniversityColumbia University, formally Columbia University in the City of New York, is a private research university in New York City and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1754 by royal charter from King George II as King's College, it is the oldest institution of higher education in New York State and the fifth oldest in the United States. It was renamed Columbia College in 1784 and adopted the university name and moved to Manhattan's Morningside Heights in 1896. It has 17 schools and four affiliated colleges, with 35,978 students enrolled in fall 2025. Legal scholar Jennifer L. Mnookin became president on July 1, 2026.Open the full entry, Parsons School of Design, New York UniversityNew York UniversityNew York University is a private university in New York City, founded in 1831, and one of the largest private universities in the United States.Open the full entry and the University of Illinois. She said that getting a new process into production is an exercise in resilience, and that the work her company does has a very small impact on the world for now: it makes components, helping products be a little easier to make or work a little better.⁠[27]

On January 28, 2025, AFFOA announced that it and Loomia were introducing the Gentoo Textile Heater for ultra-cold environments, and stated that a Loomia and AFFOA webinar on February 19 would feature Loomia’s chief executive, Madison Maxey, speaking about the technology behind the flexible heater, and would also cover data from thermal-chamber testing and real-world applications in ultra-cold settings. The announcement describes Loomia as based in Brooklyn, established in 2014 and holding eight granted patents, and says that it had earlier partnered with AFFOA on a heated-handwear solution, supplying its e-textile technology for a heated glove insert.⁠[28]

Physics World writes that in the early 2010s she took part in artist residencies involving hardware projects, which were early applications of e-textiles. Manufacturing USA writes that she held creative-technology residencies at the School of Visual Arts, Autodesk and Pratt’s Brooklyn Fashion + Design Accelerator.⁠[9][27]

She said in her Forbes interview that during an arts residency at the School of Visual Arts she explored soft goods that could do many things, using shape-memory alloy wire; that her studio did a research project for the Man Vehicle Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a second-generation spacesuit; and that she developed a stretchable conductive ink for fabrics.⁠[1]

She said that she spent five months in an artist’s residency at Autodesk in San Francisco, where she built a machine that prints conductive materials onto textiles. VICE writes that a video profile of her studio was made during her Pier 9 residency at Autodesk; Physics World writes that during the Autodesk residency she studied digital fabrication for e-textiles, including conductive inks. Loomia’s company history states that the Loomia Electronic Layer originated at Autodesk as a conductive ink and deposition solution.⁠[1][23][9][16]

Manufacturing USA states that she holds a degree in materials science from Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry.⁠[27]

NBC News, in a profile written when she was 22, says that her father had died two years earlier, after the family had taken several trips together; her advice to her younger self was “Get to know my dad better,” and she said, “When you travel with your family you get to love them and know them.”⁠[2]

NBC News writes that she frequently visits Japan, calls herself a “maker” and makes little use of social media: “I’d rather call my friends on their birthday.” Her favorite music to play loud is Beirut’s “Ganglar” and anything by Charles Mingus.⁠[2]

She plays the saxophone. In Marie Claire’s profile she said that a lot of jazz, especially jazz improvisation, is about learning skills, notes and rules and how to break them, and that in her industry “there aren't many rules yet, so it's a great chance to create my own.” In the Manufacturing USA profile she said that she spent a lot of time making things when she was younger, and that hands-on work, from 3D printing to sewing, helps her imagine how physical items come together; outside work she loves walking around and has recently taken up roller skating.⁠[6][5][27]

She said in 2012 that her mistakes had taught her: “If you present your projects with passion and confidence, people are usually excited to help you”; when hiring she looked for a self-starter. Her advice to people in their twenties was that starting a business “takes more time than you'd think, costs more money than you have and requires more work that you've probably ever done.”⁠[6]

Her career advice in 2015 was “Make things. Investigate the unknown,” together with learning basic physical computing and coding; in 2016 her advice to Marie Claire’s readers was “Learn skills,” because someone who can build, sew, code or design something will always have a place.⁠[17][5]

She said in 2019 that she wished she had learned earlier about managing a start-up, hiring and making financial decisions, and cautioned founders that too many networking opportunities can be distracting and that hiring very senior people may not suit small teams. In a United Nations Academic Impact profile she said that programming “isn't necessarily writing code in a terminal”; she argued that creating new materials can give soft-goods industries an economic boost by letting companies capture value for function, and that smart apparel can stimulate businesses, create opportunities for creative people and open a strong path to domestic manufacturing.⁠[9][14]

Manufacturing USA’s profile says that she advises newcomers: “Just change one variable, try again, and measure the result,” and that she regards focus and critical listening, communication and organization, and conservative planning as key skills; it quotes her: “Pair engineering with design from the start. With these two skills, you can make just about anything you want.”⁠[27]

Loomia: Official website: https://www.loomia.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[29]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[30]

Brooklyn Fashion + Design Accelerator: Official website: https://bkaccelerator.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[18]