The Exit Interview
Jessica Weiß launched LesMads out of love, not a business plan—and that, she always said, was what made it catch so fast. She and her co-founders built something genuine at a moment when German fashion blogging was still finding its footing: Burda media backing, genuine enthusiasm, and the kind of unfiltered voice you can only sustain before you start thinking too hard about the audience. Then she walked away from it voluntarily, which is a kind of nerve that’s easy to underestimate.
This blog ran a long interview with her when it ended, and what stuck with me was how clear-eyed she was about the whole thing. We founded LesMads for completely different reasons than to make money, and that’s what made for the quick success,
she said. A new approach to the fashion world, some bluntness, definitely a bit of naivety at the start, and a whole lot of love for fashion and writing about it.
Burda had helped them professionalize fast—she’d learned an enormous amount—but that same professionalization was, in its way, what made leaving possible. She’d reached whatever ceiling existed for that particular project, and she knew it. Giving all of this up seemed unthinkable just a few months ago, but with LesMads we honestly achieved everything there was to achieve. So I made a conscious decision to leave. It feels strange—but after a few weeks, it’s already settling.
She spent the following year at the German edition of Interview magazine, building their online presence from scratch. A proper institutional job, by her own account. Then, about a year after the LesMads farewell, she came back—with a new project called Journelles and four collaborators: Alexa, Hanna, Julia, and Kerstin. Same subject: fashion. Same conviction that the industry takes itself too seriously.
Fashion has to be fun,
she told me. In an industry that often gets far too serious about itself, for me it’s primarily about discovering something new every day, trying out styles, conveying moods. That sense of fun was one of the reasons I co-founded LesMads five and a half years ago. I traveled halfway around the world for it, stood in front of and behind the camera, wrote a book, won an award, and poured my entire heart into it. Not a single day went by when it wasn’t fun. This past year I tried something new and built the online presence for Interview Germany. Richer for that experience, I’m now turning back to my greatest passion: running my own blogazine.
What I find genuinely interesting about this trajectory is how deliberate it was. She built LesMads from nothing, recognized when it had hit its ceiling, left before it could hollow out, spent a year in institutional media learning something different, and came back to the independent format with more experience and, presumably, fewer illusions. There’s a version of that story that gets framed as restlessness or indecision. It doesn’t look like either to me. Some people know what they’re actually built for, and Jessica Weiß seems to be one of them.