Stitched From Fire

From high-speed IndyCar circuits in Los Angeles to sewing circles with exiled Mormon women in Conifer, from noodle-fueled nights in Shanghai to women stripping mannequins in a Broncos team store, Kady Zinke’s journey is anything but ordinary.

The founder of Kadyluxe has turned chaos into couture…and she’s only just beginning.

By Betsy Marr

Some stories are too cinematic to fictionalize. Twenty-years-ago, I hired Kady Zinke as an intern at my public relations firm. She was bright, ambitious, earnest. Two decades later, watching her helm one of the fastest-growing fashion lines in the athletic apparel world feels like closing a circle. But her story, as I learned, isn’t a clean arc of success. It’s a collage of risk, failure, wild faith, and reinvention all stitched together like the garments that bear her name.

Kady Zinke’s earliest memories move in rhythm. Ballet slippers on worn studio floors, the count of eight pulsing through her bones. Dance was her first language, discipline her second. By the time she reached her twenties, she had mastered both.

After college, she followed the call west to Los Angeles. But the dream wasn’t dance anymore, it was acting. She wanted the camera, the script, the chance to inhabit other people’s stories. What she found instead was a city that tested her boundaries.

L.A. was equal parts seduction and survival. She worked odd jobs, bounced between casting calls, and lived on caffeine and adrenaline. During that time, she also took a job at a public relations firm, spending nights on red carpets and orchestrating celebrity chaos.

“I literally walked Kardashians down press lines,” she laughs. “It was glamorous in theory, but I was also running on no sleep, balancing trays at the (then) Montage Beverly Hills, and trying to figure out who I was.”

She had always loved speed. Engines roaring, adrenaline humming through steel and bone. One night at the Montage, that allure pulled her toward a man who owned an IndyCar team and, as she would later learn, had authentic ties to the CIA.“ He offered to teach her to drive competitively, a proposition as seductive as the city itself. “I was twenty-something and thought, why not?” she says. But it wasn’t the racing that changed her life, it was the way he moved through the world. “He knew everything about me,” Kady says. “Even my medical records.”

The deeper she fell into his orbit, the more extraordinary and unnerving the moments became. He once called her the morning Osama Bin Laden was captured, telling her the exact time to turn on the TV hours before the news broke. On another occasion, she was summoned to the downtown Marriott, where LAPD officers showed her a file on one of her perpetrators — a powerful Hollywood figure — and told her he had been “taken care of.”

“It was surreal and terrifying,” she says. “He used real intelligence tactics to get close to me. I didn’t understand it then. I just knew I was being watched, protected, and controlled all at once.”

He pushed her, questioned her ambitions, and told her she was too smart to be acting. That she should build something instead. “He told me, You need to solve a problem,” she remembers. “And that stuck with me.”

It was glamorous from the outside. But from the inside? It was lonely, dangerous, and exhausting. “I was losing myself,” she remembers.

When that glamour cracked, Kady did what few in that city ever do: she left.

Back in Denver, the air felt lighter. She auditioned for the Denver Nuggets dance team, half on a whim, half on muscle memory. She made it.

Professional sports dance was brutal. Long rehearsals, demanding choreography, hardwood floors that left her knees purple and swollen. “We were performing on wood, night after night,” she recalls. “It was pain and joy in equal measure.”

That pain sparked the idea that would change her life. Dancers wore clunky, unattractive knee pads that were sweaty, bulky, and always in the way. “I kept thinking, Why hasn’t anyone made a better one?” she says. “Something built into the legging itself. Something beautiful and functional.”

Kady remembered the racing suits and protective gear that the Indy drivers with whom she’d practiced wore. They were sleek yet functional, armored yet elegant. “I remember thinking, why doesn’t dance have something like that? We throw our bodies on hard floors every day, and all we get are awkward knee pads.”

The spark was lit. Kady had found her problem to solve.

It was the intersection of her two worlds: the aesthetics of fashion and the discipline of dance. A knee-pad legging that was thin, integrated, invisible, and effective.

She started sketching designs between rehearsals and researching fabrics after midnight. But she was also broke. “I bought a 1961 Buick LeSabre because it was all I could afford,” she laughs. “We made $7.25 an hour to dance. My accountant looked at my one pay stub and said, ‘Where are the rest?’ I told him, ‘That’s it.’ He nearly fell out of his chair.”

But that didn’t stop her. Soon, she was commuting back to Los Angeles, this time not for acting auditions but to haunt the city’s garment district. “I was on a mission,” she says. “If I couldn’t find the product, I’d make it myself.”

The L.A. garment district wasn’t dazzling. It was fluorescent lights, men shouting in five languages, bolts of fabric stacked to the ceiling. It was also Kady’s school of hard knocks.

“They saw me coming a mile away,” she admits. “I was young, female, and clueless. But every mistake was a lesson. I learned how to source, how to negotiate, how to spot a scam.”

She launched a Kickstarter to fund the prototype with $20,000 in small pledges from dancers, yogis, and fitness instructors who believed in her vision. She fulfilled every order—delivering sleek moto leggings as a thank-you to her backers—but the engineer she’d hired to develop her impact technology stole the remaining funds. “It was humiliating,” she says. “But I wasn’t going to quit.”

Out of the ashes, she designed something new: a sleek Italian-fabric moto legging with rose-gold zippers. It was her own version of luxury athleisure. It wasn’t the knee-pad concept, but it was proof of concept: she could design, she could produce, she could sell.

When boutique fitness studios started calling, she knew she was onto something. And then the phone rang from Carbon38, one of the most influential retailers in the activewear world. They wanted her leggings.

“I didn’t even have inventory. We’d given it all to ur Kickstarter donors.” she laughs. “But it was validation. It told me I was on the right track.”

Kadyluxe was born literally from her living room, where fabric bolts doubled as décor and cardboard boxes became furniture.

Scaling production meant finding affordable labor. The solution came from a place so improbable it bordered on satire: a group of exiled Mormon seamstresses living in Conifer, Colorado.

“They’d escaped Warren Jeffs’ sect,” Kady explains. “A friend said, ‘They’re incredible sewers, they just need work.’ So I drove up the mountain with bolts of metallic spandex in my Mini Cooper.”

The women stitched in long skirts and braids, hymns humming under their breath. “They were asking me about dating, drinking, sex,” she recalls, laughing. “They’d sip coffee (technically forbidden) and sew push-up bras for NFL cheerleaders. It was surreal.”

And yet, their work was immaculate. Those pieces ended up on the sidelines of the Dallas Cowboys, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and in Pure Barre studios across the country. “Ironically, one of my old ballet rivals—someone who I had always been intimidated by—became an NFL cheerleader and ended up ordering uniforms from me,” she says with a grin.

But she couldn’t keep driving fabric up the mountain forever. She needed scale…and science.

Kady cold-called the Colorado School of Mines and left a voicemail for a metallurgist named Dr. Terry Lowe. To her astonishment, he called back. His daughter was a ballerina. He understood.

Together, they experimented with flexible materials that could absorb impact without bulk. The result earned Kady a $30,000 state innovation grant and, eventually, a patent. Then, a few years later, another opportunity arrived: a $250,000 award from Colorado’s Office of Economic Development and International Trade through the Advanced Industries Accelerator program.

“I think I was one of the first women to win it in my category,” she says. “We used that money to expand R&D, file additional patents, and figure out how to manufacture the tech at scale. We discovered a proprietary way to integrate it seamlessly into other fabrics, like a hidden layer of protection.”

The applications blew past fashion. “It can be used in shoes, helmets, football gear, military uniforms, even aerospace,” she says. “Imagine lighter materials that still absorb impact. We can do that cheaply and sustainably.”

But turning prototypes into product required a new kind of education. So she booked a $500 flight to Shanghai and landed in a world that changed everything.

There she met Bob and Tina, an American expat and his formidable Shanghainese wife, who became her mentors. “They took me under their wing,” she says. “Bob was this gruff guy from Jersey; Tina knew every factory in China. They taught me everything.”

Days started before dawn, driving to factories on the city’s fringes; nights ended in noodle shops, steam rising as Bob sketched patterns on napkins. “That was my MBA,” she says. “Not in a classroom, but in back-alley workshops.”

After seven trips to China, Kady came home fluent in the language of production. She finally had a sustainable business and the respect of an industry that had once dismissed her.

Then, just as the momentum crested, came the gut punch.

Kady had broken into collegiate licensing creating sleek, flattering university gear for women. It was lucrative and innovative until Lululemon noticed. “They saw what we were doing and went after the same market,” she says. “Overnight, we were outgunned.”

The setback nearly broke her. “I’d been hustling nonstop, working 16-hour days, skipping holidays, missing life,” she says. “I hit a wall. I didn’t even recognize myself anymore.”

She packed a bag and flew to South America for a series of ayahuasca ceremonies. “I needed to burn everything down and rebuild myself,” she says.

In the jungle, beneath a canopy of stars, she drank the bitter brew and watched her identity dissolve. “I saw every version of myself,” she says quietly. “The little girl in ballet slippers. The actress. The hustler. The woman who never gave up. I saw the things that were keeping me small and I forgave them all.”

When she returned home, something had shifted. “It was like my cells were on fire,” she says. “I wasn’t chasing anymore. I was creating.”

Not long after, a thread from her past tugged forward. The Denver Broncos Cherrleading Coach, a client and supporter of Kady’s, ushered her into NFL conversations. A reminder that sometimes the path back to the future runs through where you began.

And then, her phone rang. It was a high-powered Denver Broncos executive. He wanted Kadyluxe to design the team’s new women’s collection.

“I thought it was a prank,” she says. “Then I realized it was real.”

For a local brand, the deal was monumental. Local licenses rarely, if ever, become available and typically, these decisions are quite political in nature. To say Kady was an underdog would be a massive understatement. For Kady, it was personal. “Denver made me,” she says. “To come full circle and design for the team that defines this city and to have it come through my dancing roots…it meant everything.”

When the collection launched, chaos followed but in the best way. The Love Letter Sweater sold out in hours. The Vinti Cardi disappeared next. Even the hand-drawn Game Changer Tee flew off racks. NFL.com sold out. The Broncos team store sold out. Kadyluxe’s own site sold out. “Girls come up to me crying,” she says. “They’re so grateful to finally have something stylish and feminine. Something that celebrates their team without being tacky or loud. It’s what we’ve all been waiting for.”

“It was the fastest women’s sell-out in Broncos history,” she says, still incredulous. “Women were literally undressing mannequins in the team store.”

The executive called again, this time to marvel. How does it feel? he asked. Kady pauses when she recounts it. “After everything, L.A., the losses, the burnout, to hear that from him? It was like the universe whispering, See? You were never small.”

The success made national headlines in the licensing world. For Kady, it was more than a commercial win, it was emotional closure. “From dancing on the Nuggets’ hardwood to dressing the Broncos’ sidelines,” she says, “all the pain had a purpose.”

The Broncos collection cemented Kadyluxe as more than a brand. It was a portal to something bigger.

“When I look ahead, I see Kadyluxe evolving into a lifestyle platform,” she says. “Fashion is just the entry point.”

That platform, in her mind, spans beauty, wellness, and spiritual growth. “I want to share everything that’s helped me,” she says. “From plant medicine and healing modalities to fabrics and products that carry real energy. It’s all connected.”

Her new obsession is high-vibration clothing—pieces designed with intention, crafted from materials that elevate rather than drain. “Linen has one of the highest frequencies of any fabric,” she explains. “I got these incredible linen sheets once, and they changed my sleep, my energy, my everything. I thought, Why doesn’t everyone know this? That’s what I want to share. Fashion that feels as good as it looks.” In Kady’s world, leggings can align your energy, sweaters can raise your frequency, and what touches your skin can shape your spirit. It’s audacious, yes, but so was every chapter of her life.

She envisions Kadyluxe as a digital ecosystem: part marketplace, part community, part movement. A space where women discover not only chic apparel but rituals, fabrics, and tools that make them feel alive. “It’s not just about what’s in your closet,” she says. “It’s about how you live, what you touch, what you let touch you.”

It’s the next evolution of a story already too wild to invent. A story stitched from risk, stitched from grace, stitched, truly, from fire.

FEATURED PHOTOS BY VICTOR OF VALENCIA/ FLYAMENT COLLECTIVE