Goodbye, Dear Dora Maar

My heart is broken. What now?

I was working on my podcast yesterday and noted that it can takes a bit for something to hit me. Sometimes things take a bit for me to process. I think my heart is tender and my mind only lets a little in at a time. The end of Dora Maar is hitting me slowly. In painful stabs.

In case you were not aware (though I believe this audience has huge crossover; Dora Maar muses include writers here like

Jalil Johnson

and my pal

Patina with Dina Aronson

and others I’ve interviewed in my newsletter like Rose Li and Tess Bruns) — Dora Maar was an innovative community, a blend of inspiration and shopping, all built around the notion of muses and curation. Interesting people, telling their stories, and curating shoppable collections of secondhand and sometimes new offerings.

Dora Maar was, in so many ways, magical. I’ve been in retail now for decades, and I’ve worked with some of the great innovators, and Dora Maar was something I personally decided to invest in. Not only did I love the idea and what it stood for in terms of community and circularity, but it also brought together a technology developed especially for the platform, which made curating joyful and easy. And even more critically, at the helm were some of the most passionate leaders I’ve encountered in my career.

One of the best things about Dora Maar was that it allowed for so much storytelling with a community of others who really loved and loved obsessing over all things style and fashion. As a muse, I was able to share my gently loved pieces with people I knew would love them as much as I had. It gave me a way to continue their life (I often got personal notes from the next owner!) with tenderness, thoughtfulness and intention.

When Dora Maar recently closed their doors, they gave us the option to have our things moved to the outlet or shipped back to us. I received two boxes full of pieces I unwrapped and had to look at carefully and re-home.

Any business that involves selling second hand is going to have challenges with production and scale. Each piece is different. Each has to be shot and written about in a detailed way. We all make fun of The Real Real, which uses AI for description writing and other functionality, resulting in things like a skirt shot on a head like a hat and everything under the sun being called an “evening jacket.” But Dora Maar had so many advantages: an ownable tech, and active online community of shoppers and sharers, and a growing number of retail partners who might use the site and its curatorial element to sell off excess stock in a new way.

It is a great idea, with such great potential. Of course, not all great ideas, potential, and people win. I suppose that’s the main reason for my sadness. I sometimes (often) let myself believe that they do.

What now — where to sell your things