For Suzanne Wade, founder of Rank & Sugar– a handcrafted, sustainable Army apparel brand based in Nashville – the need to create led to a brand of reinvention.
“I’ve always been an artist," she says. "There was no paved road that I grew up with, so I learned to work with what I had which made me scrappy and resourceful. Many generations of my family had been artists so I knew I would follow suit. Although I grew up in Louisiana, I went to art school at Parsons in L.A. and then I finished up at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island where I studied graphic design. I moved back to New Orleans and did graphic design there for about a decade after graduating until I moved up to Connecticut. At this point in my life, I was married, had kids, and wanted to pivot and move towards interior design which I had a love for. I ended up doing that for about 13 years.”
Wade’s initial interest in graphic and interior design stirred up a deeper passion to connect with her clients. Through her own creativity and passion, she changed career paths one final time. “I’ve always loved anything in fashion," she says. "My graphic and interior design background bolstered up my pursuit of fashion design since I had been learning all about color study, shapes, and how things relate to each other. Rank & Sugar all started with an M51, which is a World War II jacket. At the time, it felt like my life was exploding into a million pieces, but putting on this jacket was a magical combination of feeling safe and protected but also empowered– which were the two things I needed most at that time,” Wade says. “So being that I can’t leave anything alone, I taught myself to embroider and started embroidering things that felt infused with love and peace into these pieces that had really been through the war. During that time in my life, I had lost my voice along the way so part of the need to embroider words on things came from me finding my voice again.”
Through her own experiences, Wade developed a brand that would connect with others. “Rank & Sugar is such a study in the comeback story and reinvention," she says. "Honoring things that are imperfect is so much more interesting to me than perfect, sparkly, and new. I love taking these pieces that hold so much history and bringing them back to life by infusing them with so much love for others. The little things like that keep me doing this every day. Nothing makes me happier than getting a message from a customer when they really connect with a piece and feel good in it. Or feeding off other artists– it’s such a gift to see what others are creating and to collaborate with them to make something new. Ultimately, creating Rank & Sugar was about self expression– my need to create– and finding my voice while being unapologetic about it. I want to make my own art that also puts a smile on someone’s face and makes them feel good about what they are wearing. That’s why I do this.”
Rank & Sugar’s aim goes beyond pleasing its clients. It benefits the environment as well. “The focus is on slow sustainable fashion," says Wade. "Fashion in general is such a huge contributor to our global problem of pollution and warming. It pretends to be so glamorous but there is absolutely nothing glamorous about that. For me, it is a mission to take what we have and look at it in a new way– bringing it back to life. We have a section on our website called ‘Customize your Closet’ and the whole point of it is to take pieces from people’s closet clean-outs that they might not wear or that don’t resonate with them anymore so we can completely reinvent them. I love that stuff. Anything we can keep out of the landfill I’m all here for.”
RankAndSugar.com