Reshma Chattaram Chamberlin is the Co-Founder and Chief Brand and Digital Officer of Summersalt, the lifestyle brand she launched with Lori Coulter to rethink the way women shop for swimwear and, ultimately, the way they experience their wardrobes. Built on 1.5 million measurements from 10,000 women’s body scans, Summersalt has challenged the traditional approach to fit, design, and inclusivity while expanding beyond swimwear into sleepwear, intimates, activewear, and other everyday essentials.
Before Summersalt, Reshma spent more than a decade building brands, designing digital experiences, and advising early direct-to-consumer companies through her own business design strategy firm. That experience gave her a front-row view of what brands were getting right—and where they were missing the customer entirely. She brought that perspective to Summersalt, using design thinking, data, and a deep understanding of the customer to build a brand around how women actually live.
In this conversation, Reshma shares what she learned from moving from advisor to founder, how her approach to leadership has evolved as Summersalt has scaled, and why staying close to the customer remains one of the most important disciplines in building a lasting brand. She also talks about how travel informs her creativity, the women who inspire her, and the cultural shifts she’s watching in fashion and retail.
For over a decade before Summersalt, I was on the other side of the table — building brands, designing digital experiences, and helping direct-to-consumer companies find their voice at a time when DTC itself was still new. I ran my own business design strategy firm, and what that vantage point taught me was how much design thinking — really understanding a customer's emotional experience, not just her transaction — was still treated as a nice-to-have instead of the foundation it should be.
Swimwear, in particular, kept showing up as a category no one had reimagined. It was intimidating, exclusionary, and built around one narrow idea of what a woman's body should look like. I'd spent years watching brands get the emotional connection with their customer right, or catastrophically wrong, and I knew exactly what it would take to do it differently. When Lori and I met and she shared her vision for a data-driven, size-inclusive swimwear brand, I already had the playbook in my head for how to build the brand and the community around it. That confidence didn't come from a single moment — it came from years of pattern recognition.
I love that description, because it's so true — and it's something you don't fully understand until you're living it. Early on, I thought leadership meant having the answers. Now I know it means holding steady enough that your team doesn't feel every bump in the road the way you do.
Scaling a company means the highs get higher and the lows get lower, and if a founder reacts to every swing in real time, that anxiety trickles straight down into the culture. So more and more, our job — Lori's and mine — has become about absorbing that volatility. We feel it fully, we sit with it, and then we come to our team with clarity and calm, even when the truth is complicated. That's not about hiding reality from people; it's about giving them a stable place to stand so they can do their best work. That shift — from needing to have every answer to being the steady center — has been the biggest evolution in how I lead.
Travel has always been where I do my best thinking. There's something about being outside your routine — a new city, a new culture, a different rhythm of life — that makes you notice things you'd otherwise walk right past. So much of Summersalt's design language comes directly from that: the colors, the prints, the silhouettes, even the way we think about a woman's wardrobe as a journey — getting there, being there, coming home.
But travel has shaped more than our product; it's shaped how I think about our customer as a whole person, not a demographic. When you travel, you see how universally women everywhere want to feel confident, comfortable, and like themselves — whether that's on a beach or in the school pickup line. That's given me real conviction that creativity works best when it comes from genuine curiosity about people, not from staring at a trend report. I try to bring that same openness and observation into every brand decision we make.
If I had to pick one, it would be: never stop listening to your customer, and actually mean it. Not listening as a checkbox — glancing at a review here and there — but building real systems for hearing her, whether that's our customer happiness team, our social comments, or the 1.5 million body measurements that built our fit technology in the first place.
The businesses that struggle are usually the ones that fall in love with their own idea instead of staying in relationship with the person they're building for. She has told us, time and again, exactly what she needs — a longer torso option, a cozier fabric, a way to feel good getting into a swimsuit — and our job has simply been to listen closely enough to act on it. That discipline of staying curious and humble about what you don't know yet has been the real engine behind everything we've built.
Professionally, I'm endlessly inspired by the women we've had the privilege of featuring through our "Every Body is a Summersalt Body" campaign — women like Ilona Maher, who has used her platform so unapologetically to redefine what a strong, confident body looks like. She reminds me why representation matters so much in a category like ours.
Beyond my family — my passport. It sounds simple, but it represents everything I value: curiosity, adventure, and the reminder that there's always a bigger, more interesting world outside whatever is stressing me out that day. I keep it in my bag more often than not, even when I don't have a trip planned, just in case inspiration — or an opportunity — strikes.
I'm loving how blurred the line has become between resortwear and everyday dressing. Women aren't waiting for a vacation to wear pieces that make them feel joyful and confident — they want that feeling built into their daily wardrobe, whether they're at school drop-off or actually on a beach. It's exactly the wardrobe philosophy we've built Summersalt around, and it's exciting to watch the rest of the industry catch up to the idea that comfort, fit, and joy don't have to be reserved for a getaway.
I'm also genuinely energized by how AI is starting to personalize the shopping experience in ways that feel helpful rather than gimmicky — better fit guidance, smarter recommendations — when it's built on real customer data and care, not just used as a buzzword.
