Summary: Czech designer Jana Hořejšová founded the fashion brand On The Boat, using secondhand clothing and textile waste as raw materials, with online monthly revenue reaching up to 300,000 Czech korunas; her collection opened Prague Fashion Week in September 2020. The brand started with organic fabric T-shirts before shifting to recycled fabrics.

Key Points:

  • On The Boat, founded by Jana Hořejšová, makes clothes only from secondhand clothing and textile waste, with its online store reaching up to 300,000 CZK in monthly revenue.
  • In September 2020, her fashion collection opened Prague Fashion Week.
  • The brand initially started with organic fabric T-shirts, then shifted to recycled and discarded fabrics after seeing beach waste while her family lived in the Canary Islands.

A Czech designer set her sights on piles of old clothes rather than the fabric market: Jana Hořejšová founded the fashion brand On The Boat, whose clothing materials come entirely from secondhand clothing and textile waste. Through online channels alone, the brand can reach up to 300,000 Czech korunas in monthly revenue. In September 2020, her collection opened Prague Fashion Week.

Hořejšová's path was ordinary but winding. Born in Děčín, Czech Republic, she sewed clothes for dolls as a child and also helped her mother and grandmother alter clothes; by age twelve she had decided to spend the rest of her life in fashion, and after graduating she went to Liberec to study garment making. Her first professional handwork experience came from the Pietro Filipi workshop in her hometown of Děčín, making sample garments for later mass production; afterward she ran her own textile workshop in Kamenický Šenov, learning to assign work to seamstresses and calculate the labor hours needed for one garment. At the time she felt this was a detour from her dream of founding her own design brand, but today these experiences are the foundation for running her own brand.

Around the age of thirty, Hořejšová suddenly changed careers entirely and entered the field of traditional Chinese medicine. She completed a four-year distance-learning course and worked at a holistic medicine center in Bratislava, mainly in Chinese dietary therapy and musculoskeletal issues. For more than five years she helped clients including cancer survivors, but the intense emotional labor gradually left her exhausted.

After the birth of two children and long-term care for them, she once again felt the desire to express herself: "I needed to replenish my creative energy and get the sewing machine moving again." She did not completely abandon the ideas of traditional Chinese medicine, but embedded them in the brand's logic—one of the most important being to avoid creating unnecessary waste as much as possible.

The brand began with simple T-shirts made from organic fabric. During the pandemic, the family stayed in the Canary Islands, where she saw with her own eyes how much trash the tide pushed onto the beach. This ultimately led her to make a firm decision: to make clothes from recycled and unwanted materials.

For the secondhand clothing trade, this case offers a glimpse: old clothes and textile waste are turning from "disposal goods" into raw materials for independent designer brands, and the focus of brand storytelling is also shifting toward resource reuse.

Source: Czech designer turns secondhand fashion into brand On The Boat · Originally published on 2026-10-05