Seven Sisters was the First Store in America to Carry Paloma Wool — Here's the Story
Some discoveries feel less like business decisions and more like recognition.
In 2016, before Paloma Wool appeared in Nordstrom, before Ssense carried them, before they became one of the most talked-about slow fashion brands in the world, Seven Sisters brought them to the United States for the first time. We were the first American retailer to carry the brand — and looking back, it was almost inevitable that we would be.
Where it started
Before Seven Sisters, I spent years working at the Portland Art Museum. I studied studio art and art history at Smith College. The visual world has always been my first language — the way a line moves across a surface, the relationship between image and material, the difference between art that decorates and art that communicates.
When I first encountered Paloma Wool, I wasn't looking for a new clothing brand. I was looking at the work. Hand-drawn faces rendered in fine line, spreading across denim and silk like sketches pulled from an artist's notebook. Figures that felt alive — curious, a little melancholy, deeply human. The clothes were extraordinary, but what stopped me was the art on them.
Paloma Lanna, the Barcelona-based founder and artist behind the brand, was collaborating directly with artists in those early years, creating pieces that felt less like fashion and more like wearable drawings. For someone who came from the museum world, it was an immediate and visceral yes.
Five years of something special
We carried Paloma Wool for five years — through seasons of extraordinary pieces that our customers fell in love with instantly. The brand grew quietly at first, then quickly. The hand-drawn prints, the sustainable and local production in Barcelona, the refusal to follow seasonal trends — it all resonated deeply with the Seven Sisters community, who had always understood that the things you wear can carry meaning.
During those five years, we watched Paloma Wool go from a secret to a sensation. We were proud to have been part of that story.
The pandemic changed everything
When the pandemic hit, everything shifted. Like so many small businesses, we faced impossible decisions. We made the difficult decision to step back from Paloma Wool — the kind of choice that pandemic-era small business owners know all too well. But here's what that chapter taught us: the instinct that brought Paloma Wool to Seven Sisters in the first place — the eye for something true, something made with artistic intention and ethical care — that instinct didn't go anywhere. It's the same instinct that brought us Cordera, Maison Louis Marie, Mijeong Park, and every other brand that has found a home here over the past thirteen years.
What it means to discover something first
Being the first American retailer for Paloma Wool wasn't a marketing strategy. It was a natural consequence of paying attention — to art, to craft, to the quiet signals that something is being made with genuine love and intention.
That's what Seven Sisters has always tried to do. Not to follow what's already arrived, but to find what's just becoming. To bring it to Portland before anyone else, and to share it with the community of people who are looking for the same thing we are — beauty that means something, made by people who care.
We may no longer carry Paloma Wool. But we were there first. And we're still here, still looking.
— Jillian, founder of Seven Sisters
