Styled by someone who knows you.

That's not just our tagline. It's the whole reason Tortue exists.

I'm Nina, and I started Tortue in 2022.

For years before that, I worked in fashion — as a Sales and Training Manager for a European ready-to-wear brand. I've always been drawn to supporting women, encouraging them to build something of their own.

Then, overnight in 2021, I suddenly lost my hearing. It was one of the darkest times of my life.

My friends were the ones who encouraged me to launch Tortue. In that darkness, they gave me purpose again — a reason to get up, something to build. I will be forever grateful to them for that.

What I knew for certain, even at the very beginning, was this: I didn't want to build another shop where clothes just sit on a rail waiting for someone to notice them. I wanted to build something built entirely around actually knowing the person you're dressing.

I don't think a stylist's job is to sell you clothes. It's to actually know you — your shape, your life, what makes you feel like yourself — and keep showing up with exactly the right thing, visit after visit, year after year. That's the whole idea behind Tortue, and it's not something I built alone. It's the thing every one of our stylists carries forward with her own customers, in her own way.

Woman Built

Tortue is a company built by women, for women — genuinely, not as a slogan. From the friends who helped me build it in the first place, to the stylists who now host home boutiques all over the country, this has always been women building something for other women, with real understanding of what that actually takes.

I have a strong dislike of the phrase "age-appropriate." I've watched too many women told, gently or otherwise, to start dressing quietly and disappearing a little at a time. That's not what I see in this job. The women who've been with Tortue the longest are, almost without exception, more interesting than they were when they started — more confident, more themselves, less interested in what anyone else thinks they should wear.

Four years in, and it's been a genuinely exciting, rewarding ride. I've learned skills I never expected to need, met more wonderful customers than I could have imagined, and laughed more than I ever thought running a business would allow.

It hasn't all been easy. We're a small company, built without financial backers — everything bootstrapped, every step earned rather than funded. We've navigated a supplier change that tested us properly. But what's carried us through, every time, has been the same thing: our values, our passion, and a stubborn kind of determination that isn't going anywhere.

What hasn't changed, through any of it, is the importance of the team — around 20 stylists across the country now, each one building the same kind of relationship with her own customers that I set out to build when this started. That's still the whole point.

If you're new here, welcome.

Have a look around, and when you're ready, find your stylist — or if there isn't one near you yet, every one of our stylists also offers video sessions, so distance was never really the barrier it looks like.