We grew up in the same small Alberta city, and our first meeting barely counted as one: a passing moment at a restaurant in Edmonton, forgotten almost as soon as it happened. It took thousands of miles, an entirely different life, and a chance encounter on a sun-warmed street in Costa Rica for us to truly find each other and become friends.
Laura — South America, 2023
Six months backpacking through South America. She fell in love with color, print, and the effortless, youthful energy of the women she met along the way.
Alysha — Cortona, Tuscany, 2023
Moved abroad to study fashion, art, and European history in a small Tuscan town. She learned to look at four-hundred-year-old rooms in Florence the way she'd later learn to look at a dress: structure first, then feeling.
Costa Rica
Neither of us went looking for a business partner. We just recognized something in each other immediately: the same restlessness, the same ambition, the same pull toward building something instead of just admiring it from a distance.
Italy to Spain — Five Months, 2024
So we did the only thing that made sense: we left again, together this time. Starting in the north of Italy and working our way south, then into Spain, where Barcelona's color and unapologetic style undid every quiet, structured idea Alysha thought she believed about fashion, and gave Laura's love of color a whole new education to draw from. Somewhere between long train rides and late nights arguing over sketches in cafés that were about to close, the idea for Valvella became impossible to ignore.
New York City — April 2025
We moved to New York to build it for real. Alysha brings the foundation: a business degree, and the instinct for structure and strategy that turns an idea into something that can actually survive contact with the real world. Laura brings the momentum: the relationships, the instinct for people, the ability to move a sketch off the page and into someone's closet.
The Garment District
That balance got tested immediately. We spent six months just finding the right people to build this with, walking into buildings floor by floor, floor 1 to floor 40, pitching an idea that didn't have a studio, a team, or a single finished dress behind it yet. Most of those meetings went nowhere. A few didn't.
Today
We've been in our own studio for a year now, working alongside Amy, the first person outside the two of us to become part of Valvella full-time. We are two girls who chose to bet on ourselves, in a city that isn't home, building the brand we spent years talking about before we ever had the nerve to start it.
This is that bet, made real.
— Laura & Alysha
Discover The Grand Tour
Four dresses, each named for a place that shaped how we see beauty.
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