How We Impact the World with Eric Fransen

Two Harbors native and now Brooklyn, NY fashion designer Fletcher Kasell was riding the subway last month with Tanner Richie, partner and co-founder of the fashion brand Tanner Fletcher, when their phones blew up with congratulatory messages. Turns out their photo was part of a Vogue article featuring emerging and new designers. The next week Tanner Fletcher launched its Fall line at New York’s Fashion Week and then the founders were off to Paris’ Fashion Week.It has been a whirlwind since Kasell launched his brand and company during the pandemic. After stints at luxury brands Barneys and St. Laurent, Kasell found himself pandemic-related unemployed and wondering what was next.To bring in some extra money during COVID, Kasell and Richie started making tote bags in their apartment. They had some initial success selling to friends and family and caught a break when several boutiques started carrying the tote bags. “And these things were selling so we’re like, Hey, maybe we can keep going with this and develop it more than just a side project,” said Kasell.Tanner Fletcher was born. A genderless fashion brand that was created out of the founder’s own challenges with shopping for clothing. Kasell and Ritchie both liked to wear quirky things and shopped between men’s and women’s departments. “We just really wanted to make fashion that could be bought by men or women or anyone for that matter,” Kasell said.Tanner Fletcher is a luxury apparel brand that is inspired by interior design. Most items are inspired by wallpaper patterns, textures, interior designs, and a lot from the 1960s and ’70s. A focus from the beginning was to ensure everything was top quality and that the brand had the freedom of creativity.At the start Kasell wanted to take their genderless fashion brand to the luxury market. “When working at Barneys, which is also a luxury department store, I just got inspired by all these fashion designers from France, Italy and here in New York, and they are doing beautiful things,” said Kasell.I asked Kasell how he wanted to impact the world. Kasell said, “Growing up in a small town, somebody like me, who is a little bit different, I really want to inspire others to not feel like an outcast, feel good, and feel like they can inspire others like them to be able to accomplish whatever they want to accomplish. I want to be that voice that is saying, you can certainly do whatever you want to do, spread your wings, and just go for it.”

In 1983 Betty Lessard, founder and owner of Betty’s Pies sold her business and retired. Little did she know that fifteen years later the phone would ring and Carl Ehlenz, the newest owner of Betty’s Pies would be calling to find out what happened to her famous lost pie recipes.  At closing, in 1998 Ehlenz was finalizing the paperwork for Betty’s Pies, which included the building, land, and restaurant assets. Ehlenz casually asked the seller, "Do you have the pie recipes?" the seller said she had her recipes but didn’t have Betty's original recipes. Ehlenz started to panic as he discovered that over the previous fifteen years, the recipes had changed. Ehlenz’s and his business partner, Marti Sieber, tracked down Lessard’s phone number and within five minutes Lessard had pulled up to introduce herself.   That encounter started a relationship that lasted more than fifteen years.  

Whitney Wasko came back to the University of Minnesota after spending spring break in Sweden and told her Swedish professor, “I’m going to move to Sweden.” Her professor asked a reasonable question, “How are you going to do that?” The girl from small-town Two Harbors replied, “I don’t know, but I’m going to figure it out.” That was in March of 2017. Wasko graduated in May, and that August she left for Sweden.This is the type of attitude I see all the time with entrepreneurs. Once they have their heart set on something, they figure out how to make it happen. Perhaps Wasko didn’t know she had this mindset, but she proved it in the summer of 2017 when she boarded a plane to start her new life. That plane trip brought her to the part of the world in which her ancestors lived their lives, which (of course) included taking saunas (I’ll get to this in a bit).Wasko’s move in 2017 came quick, but also made sense. When she decided she wanted to move to Sweden, it was perfect timing. She had just finished college, wasn’t dating anybody, and didn’t have a job lined up in the states. Wasko said, “It was the first time in my life where I was kind of like, the world is your oyster. If you’re going to take off and move to Europe, now is the time to do it.”2013 Two Harbors High School graduate Wasko continues to live in Stockholm, Sweden and works with the women’s luxury French brand, Maje Paris. “It’s a luxury fashion brand and we’re trying to spread French chic throughout the world,” said Wasko. She is Maje Paris’s store manager in Stockholm, and visual merchandising ambassador/coordinator for Scandinavia. This unique position for an American requires her to speak English, Swedish (fluent) and French (a bit). Besides managing the day-to-day in Stockholm, Wasko works with the other stores throughout Scandinavia on the visual merchandising side and communicates directly to the main office in Paris.Let’s get back to those saunas. Full disclosure, I spent many an evening on Salo Lake at the Wasko family cabin when coaching hockey with her dad, Steve Wasko. I have memories of Whitney and her twin brother Austyn loving the sauna life.Turns out the Waskos still love their saunas. A few years ago, the Wasko family visited Whitney in Stockholm. Their master plan for the trip was spending a day in Helsinki, Finland to take a sauna and swim in the Baltic Sea. The family went to Löyly, which is one of the finer public saunas in Finland, and their mission was accomplished.What’s next for Whitney Wasko? The plan is to be in Europe for the foreseeable future. She’s made Stockholm home and is very happy there. She does work for a French company, so it is quite possible that she ends up Paris. But for now – Stockholm is home. Whitney Wasko… she’s impacting her world from Stockholm, Sweden.It’s difficult to tell somebody’s full story in a weekly column. To hear the complete interview with Wasko you can listen to the podcast by the same name – How We Impact the World. I’m Eric Fransen, and today I’m impacting my world from Charlotte, North Carolina. If you have comments, feedback, or column ideas you can email [email protected].

How We Impact the World really means, how do people from Lake County, MN make a difference in the world. I want to share stories about world-renown surgeons, entrepreneurs that are solving water issues in Africa, and travel with former residents that have gone back to their ancestral countries of Sweden, Norway, and beyond. All these people and many more grew up in Lake County and then went off to impact the world. I want to bring them back one week at a time.  My name is Eric Fransen,  and I want to tell their story.