The Founders

I’ve run an art academy for twenty-five years — creative director, design critic, professional development coach. Design engineering, branding, fashion, costume. My work is with people who have talent and need it to go somewhere.

What I actually teach is sustainable success. Not how to get through today — how to build something that still holds up in ten years, or twenty. The fundamentals. The infrastructure underneath.

I’m a design engineer by training, which means my trade was always materials. Animation, architecture, interior design, graphic design — different mediums, same discipline.

The other half of my life has been physical. Sports since I was young, the gym for as long as I can remember. I’ve paid attention to how my body responds for decades — not from a textbook, but from doing it. And living that way while also figuring out what my body could and couldn’t eat meant the two were never separate for me.

That’s the connection. The mind and the body hold each other up. You can teach someone how to build a life on what they’re good at, but if the body isn’t taken care of, it doesn’t last. Longevity is the whole point — in a career, in a body, in a life.

At RE I’m the one who found the problem and wouldn’t let it go. I designed what this is — how it looks, how it feels, what it gives you, and what it should be like to hold one in your hand.

That minute is not a small thing. Nobody is going to build the life you want for you, and you can’t build it on a body you’ve ignored. The minute you take for yourself is where the rest of it starts.

Doriano has never had a boss. He has spent three decades building businesses from nothing, as a founder, investor and innovator, and the part he loves most is the part nobody sees: sales, finance, operations. The structure that lets a good idea become a real company, and stay one.

Grafic is the proof. In 2003 he co-founded a single luxury boutique. Today it’s three, two for men and one for women, with an online store that sells around the world. Along the way he has built and backed many companies, and he invests in real estate. He knows what it takes to make something last.

He runs his body the same way. Somewhere past forty he stopped treating fitness as a hobby and started treating it as infrastructure: the gym most mornings, years of CrossFit, a decade racing cross-country mountain bikes on a relay team. And the lesson he learned the hard way is the one RE is built on. Training is the easy part. What you feed yourself decides what you get back.

So when Mina fell in love with a block of cheese in a piazza, he was the one who said: make something people can buy. Mina is the vision and the voice of RE. Doriano is the structure underneath it, the partner who believed it could be built, who refused to let it stay an idea, and who makes sure it stands.

We met eighteen years ago and have been inside each other’s businesses ever since — different industries, different clients, different problems, and constantly consulting one another anyway.

We’ve built a lot together. A house, interiors, experiential events, shows designed for both of our businesses, and several personal projects nobody ever saw.