Story

Our Story

Nazia Siddiqui is the founder, CEO & designer of Transcend. She fell in love with natural fabrics and hand-crafted textile art like embroideries, block prints, handwoven cloth while living in India. Shopping for clothes meant going to the bazaars with her mom, picking out fabric and trims together, and bringing them home to watch her mom cut and sew an outfit they'd designed side by side. It was intimate, skilled, and nothing went to waste. In India every neighborhood has infrastructure that allows for repair, upcycling and donations. 

When Nazia moved to the United States at 15, that world disappeared. Shopping suddenly meant malls and fast fashion like H&M, Zara, synthetic fabrics, no artisan in sight. Exciting at first but she felt increasingly disconnected from her own clothing. She couldn't find the beautiful, craft-made pieces she'd grown up with. So she decided to create a brand that made natural fabrics and artisan made craft accessible to customers.

Nazia launched Transcend in 2020 as a brand rooted in sustainability and ethics. From day one: plastic-free fabrics, biodegradable and recyclable packaging, fair wages, and direct bonuses paid to the makers and artisans who bring each piece to life. Check out our ethos here.

But running a craft brand gave Nazia a front-row seat to something she hadn't anticipated: how broken the broader materials system is. Brands were discarding usable fabric. No studio would take small-batch domestic production. Customers wanted repair and upcycling but couldn't find it anywhere.

So Transcend kept adapting. In 2023, we started sourcing Kantha textiles from Bangladesh (50-70 year old vintage saris quilted by locals to preserve the textile). This was eye opening and we decided to incorporate the quilted kantha fabric to make our now infamous bomber jackets and coats. 

In 2024, we started establishing a local network of refugee seamstresses in Seattle, WA who allowed us to offer repair services to our customers.

In 2025, we wanted to create our first Seattle made collection using locally sourced upcycled materials but no one else would take small-batch, local production runs. What started as solving our own problem became a service for other brands: small-batch manufacturing, textile waste upcycling, and repair. Real work, real wages, real circularity. We opened our first brick and mortar space - a hub where retail, production and community come together seamlessly. 

We formalized what we'd been building by hand: a hyper-local circular supply chain where textile waste becomes local production feedstock and local jobs. We also learned something the circular economy conversation rarely says out loud - supply without cultivated end markets is just better-organized landfill. So we built the demand side too. A retail kiosk at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport became a reality in June 2026.

On the B2B side, we actively partner with organizations of all sizes to offer upcycling and manufacturing services. Wholesale partnerships with boutiques and clothing rental companies. B2C services include alterations, repairs, custom tailoring, upcycling for individuals.

We are proud to have our work recognized with Transcend being named as one of America's Top 100 Small Businesses in 2025, accepted into the NextCycle WA Accelerator, participating as a Seattle Restored business, and in 2026 being selected as a Tory Burch Fellow.

In 2026, Seattle Public Utilities awarded Transcend a second grant of $100,000 to build the Seattle Circular Textile System Pilot: workforce training and credentialing for circular textile skills, digital technology for materials intake and tracking, and physical reuse infrastructure to connect material generators to producers across the region. Our goal is to allow this technology to elevate and scale the work we are already doing for materials reuse.