Czech designer turns secondhand fashion into brand On The Boat

Czech entrepreneur Jana Hořejšová is behind the fashion label On The Boat, which makes clothes not from new fabric but from secondhand items and textile waste. The brand's online store alone generates up to 300,000 crowns a month in revenue, and in September Hořejšová's collection opened Prague Fashion Week.

Hořejšová's path to success was anything but straightforward. Born in Děčín, she was sewing clothes for dolls as a child and later altered her mother's and grandmother's clothes. By the age of twelve she already knew she wanted to build her life around fashion, and after school she studied clothing manufacturing in Liberec.

She gained her first professional experience in the workshops of Pietro Filipi in her native Děčín, where she sewed samples for later mass production. Later she ran a textile workshop in Kamenický Šenov herself, where she learned to divide work among seamstresses and calculate the time needed to make a garment. That experience, which at the time felt like a detour from her dream of her own designs, now helps her run her own brand.

Around the age of thirty, Hořejšová unexpectedly changed careers completely, moving into traditional Chinese medicine. She completed a four-year distance-learning course and worked at a holistic medicine centre in Bratislava, focusing on dietetics based on the principles of Chinese medicine and on musculoskeletal problems. For more than five years she helped clients, including people recovering from cancer treatment, but the intense emotional work with people wore her out.

After having two children and caring for them constantly, Hořejšová felt the need to create for herself again. “I needed to recharge creatively and get back to sewing,” she explains. She did not abandon the principles of Chinese medicine entirely, but carried them into her brand's philosophy — above all into the effort to avoid creating unnecessary waste.

The brand On The Boat began with simple T-shirts made of organic fabric, and during the pandemic, while spending time with her family in the Canary Islands, Hořejšová saw how much rubbish the sea washes up on the beaches — this finally cemented her decision to make fashion out of recycled and unwanted fabric.