Today we’d like to introduce you to Lieve Saether.
Hi Lieve, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I’ve spent most of my life moving between worlds — Europe and the United States, different cities, different cultures — and somewhere in that constant motion I developed a deep instinct for what makes a space, or a person, feel like themselves. That instinct became Turnstyle Design, my interior design practice, which I’ve been enjoying for over 22 years.
Interiors work is intimate in a way people don’t always expect. You are inside someone’s life — their home, their routines, their private self. And over two decades of that work, something kept coming up. My clients — accomplished, interesting, self-possessed women — would look up from the conversation about their home and say some version of the same thing: I just want to feel better in what I’m wearing. I don’t know where to start.
They weren’t lost. They were underserved.
That realization, combined with my lifelong love of problem-solving and a deep belief in female self-expression as something worth designing around, became LIIEVE.
The HIRO shirt started as a personal obsession — a re-engineered white shirt built around how women actually move, with an interchangeable sculptural collar system that makes one piece infinitely yours. It’s about fewer, better things chosen with real intention. It’s about dressing for yourself, not for anyone else’s expectations.
We came to Austin years ago looking for somewhere real to raise a family — somewhere grounded and full of genuine community. Austin gave us that. And building LIIEVE here, in a city that rewards people who actually make things, has felt exactly right.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Building something genuinely new is its own kind of obstacle.
A first challenge is one I didn’t fully anticipate: I built something that requires experience to understand. The HIRO isn’t a shirt you scroll past and immediately get. The collar system — a patent-pending brass rivet attachment that lets you swap sculptural collars in and out — is genuinely new. There’s no reference point for it. Which means every layer of marketing, every piece of content, every conversation is also an education. You’re not just selling, you’re building comprehension from the ground up. In a world of algorithms that reward the instantly familiar, that is a real uphill climb.
Then there’s technology. Starting again — learning the platforms, understanding what the data is actually telling you, figuring out where your customer lives and how to reach her without losing your brand’s voice in the process — is humbling in ways I didn’t expect. Meta, Pinterest, email flows, conversion tracking. None of it was part of my vocabulary two years ago. All of it is now.
The manufacturing journey has been its own kind of education. Custom-milled cotton. Working with production partners across the world to hold a standard that doesn’t compromise. That takes time, correspondence, and a willingness to push back when something isn’t right — even when the easier path is to let it go.
And all of this while running Turnstyle Design, my interior design practice, which has its own clients, deadlines, and demands. There is no version of this story where I handed one thing off to build the other. They run side by side, every single day.
What keeps me going is the moment someone tries it on. The conversion data tells the same story — women who find LIIEVE through a personal recommendation or a direct experience buy without hesitation. Because once you feel it, you understand it. My job right now is closing the gap between the woman who hasn’t found it yet and the moment she does.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about LIIEVE?
LIIEVE is a luxury women’s apparel brand built around one deceptively simple idea: that a single, perfectly engineered piece — worn with intention — is worth more than a closet full of things that don’t quite work.
The hero piece is the HIRO shirt. Most white shirts fail women in the same predictable ways — the bust gap, the pull across the shoulders, the cut that was designed for a body that doesn’t exist.
Our HIRO was re-engineered from the ground up: custom-milled cotton, proportioned for how women actually live in their clothes, with none of the compromises the market has quietly accepted as normal. And then there is the collar system — a patent-pending interchangeable sculptural attachment that transforms one shirt into something entirely new depending on the day. The collar is not an accessory, it is expression. A different collar is a different mood, a different version of herself she chose to meet that morning.
What sets LIIEVE apart is the system itself — nothing like it exists on the market — and the conviction behind it. These are not trend pieces. They are forever pieces, made to be worn for years and passed down. LIIEVE exists for the woman who has nothing to prove and everything to express.
Risk taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
I don’t think of myself as a reckless risk-taker. I think of myself as someone who takes considered risks — which I’d argue is the harder discipline.
The decision to launch LIIEVE while running a long-standing design firm was not impulsive. It was the result of years of observation, a clear problem worth solving, and enough self-knowledge to trust that I could carry both. I didn’t blow up what I’d built to start something new. I built alongside it. That requires a different kind of courage than starting from nothing — because you have something real to protect, and you choose to move anyway.
The deeper risk, the one I don’t talk about as often, is the creative one. After two decades of bringing my eye and my instincts to other people’s spaces — I stepped into an entirely new industry and built something from scratch — no client brief, no established playbook, just conviction and a willingness to learn everything I didn’t know yet.
And I put my name on it — literally. LIIEVE is Lieve. There is nowhere to hide in that. A fine art background teaches you early that putting your work into the world is an act of exposure, and you either make peace with that or you don’t make anything.
My view on risk, distilled: the biggest risk is not the one that might fail. It’s the one you never take because the timing wasn’t perfect. The timing is never perfect. You build the foundation as carefully as you can, and then you go.
Pricing:
- The HIRO shirt — $298
- Sculptural collars — from $98
- Hand-painted collars — one-of-a-kind, $198
- Free shipping on orders over $350
- Shop at LIIEVE.com
Contact Info:
- Website: https://LIIEVE.com
- Instagram: @LIIEVEBrand
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liieve-brand-9329a92a3/
- Other: https://www.pinterest.com/Liievebrand/
Image Credits
Bordeau Photography
