Recho Omondi Is The First Guest On The Incredible Women Podcast Season 10: Supernovas

Season 10 opens with a force from the podcasting world: Recho Omondi. Her critically acclaimed show, The Cutting Room Floor, pulls back the curtain on the often opaque fashion industry, welcoming a diverse roster of insiders for sharp, candid conversations.

Fashion wasn’t always Omondi’s plan. Her first love was in performance, music and dance, which awakened an obsession with costumes and, ultimately, with clothes. Even so, she started out on a pre-med track before pivoting to pursue her true calling. After graduating from the Savannah College of Art and Design, she landed in New York, cutting her teeth at Barneys and later working behind the scenes in design and patternmaking for industry giants including Calvin Klein. In 2013, she launched her own label, Omondi, drawing on her Kenyan heritage and New York life. Although the brand is now shuttered, she described it as “a personal diary told through clothes”.

That instinct to challenge the status quo carried through to 2018, when she founded The Cutting Room Floor with the tagline “fashion’s only fashion show”. What began as a side project soon gained traction after a few viral episodes, transforming into a full-time career. Today, the podcast is a go-to space for unfiltered conversations with the people shaping the industry – and her impact hasn’t gone unnoticed: in 2023, The Business of Fashion named her in the BoF 500, its definitive list of those influencing the future of fashion.

In this opening episode, Omondi sits down with NET-A-PORTER’s content director, Alice Casely-Hayford, to discuss risk-taking, telling the stories she wants to see, and building a platform on her own terms.

Highlights from Recho Omondi’s episode…

“I’m a big failer. I like to just fail and just try things on my own. So I got started failing and I think what I realized is that it was so hard to build a brand, or at least to the scale that I had aspired to. And I think the podcast really was grown out of frustration because I felt like even though I had all of these relationships in the business, none of them really understood the plight of a designer.”

“I never approach any interview trying to have a clickbait viral moment. I mean, there are times where somebody’s saying something and I’m like, ‘Hmm, that’s gonna be something’. But you know, I’ve never coerced them into saying it… I think it’s more that I’m trying to get to some kind of real answer or concrete truth.”

“I’m very excited to see a lot of content creators being recognized for the celebrities that they are, you know, because they’re so deeply influential – and they may not be celebrities in the sense that they’re not getting magazine covers and they’re not sitting down on late-night television, or any network television for that matter, but the phone is their network television.”

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NET-A-PORTER will donate one British Pound for every first listen to this episode in its week of release** to UN Women UK, an organization working for the empowerment and rights of women and girls globally, helping them realize their full potential.

For the past five years, the Incredible Women podcast has offered an intimate look into the lives of trailblazing figures shaping our world. From boardrooms to red carpets, studios to stages, we’ve uncovered what it truly means to be ‘incredible’ – exploring the fashion choices that gave women confidence at defining moments, the pivotal decisions that changed their paths, and the vulnerability that makes them relatable. This new series goes even further, spotlighting not only what these women have achieved, but how they’ve redefined what’s possible.

Supernovas features an extraordinary lineup: Hollywood actors America Ferrera and Gillian Anderson; bestselling novelists Rebecca F. Kuang and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; fashion podcaster Recho Omondi; and acclaimed chef Ruth Rogers, founder of London’s Michelin-starred River Café.

Hosted by NET-A-PORTER’s content director Alice Casely-Hayford, each conversation promises an inspiring and eye-opening insight into the lives and legacies of these remarkable women. Incredible Women: Supernovas launches on Tuesday, September 9.