photo: Maria Emilia
About Nica
Nicacelly was founded at the intersection of strategy, creativity, and contemplative inquiry. Originally launched as a slow fashion label committed to sustainable production and remix aesthetics, Nicacelly has since evolved into a full-service creative consultancy and business development studio, supporting individuals and organizations with branding, growth strategy, messaging, and design.
Rooted in a deep study of visual art, yoga practice and philosophy, and social enterprise, Nica (b. Nicole Markoff) brings over two decades of experience across nonprofit collaborations, visual storytelling, and brand writing. With a masters in fine art and over 1,500 hours of contemplative training, her interdisciplinary methodology connects ideas to actualization, building custom frameworks that allow complex ideas to find the right language and visual strategy to communicate clearly.
Today, Nicacelly as an agency builds machines that make the art: from websites to internal strategy, campaign systems to content messaging. Each solution is custom-built to align vision with function, and support the next phase of emergence.
And yes, she still makes art.
Spider Plant Hustle
In the spring of 1983, my mother’s spider plant that hung in the corner of the den by the porch door had grown a bunch of offspring. They hung low on their arching stems. I clipped them into their own pots: paper bathroom cups with a 5-year-old handful of soil. As the mother plant produced more, I clipped more.
After a fair collection, I took to the road. I walked down the suburban Jersey block and knocked on my neighbor’s door. They bought two for fifty cents. The next neighbor bought three.
Six years later, at the age of 11, I would ride my bike by, and through the window, I could see the grown spider plants in their window.
At that point, I had gotten into fashion. Tie dye fashion.
After running the math on blank shirts, dye, and color options, I covertly used my father’s office ditto machine to copy a handwritten order form for custom tie dye shirts. These museum-quality 8.5x11” pieces of ephemera were distributed across the suburban New Jersey neighborhood: 10 mailboxes east and 10 west, a few north and a bit south. You know, regional.
I got 20 orders.
And then I filled them.
And delivered them.
I discovered profit.
And customer relations.
This brilliant project ended abruptly after my mother forbade me to put anything else into mailboxes, in lieu of potential federal indictments for mailbox tampering.
In 2000, when the longer road called, I ventured across the US in search of fresher fruit and more sunshine. Destination: Oakland, California. I was introduced to and worked for two profound entities: Women’s Initiative for Self Employment: a nonprofit enabling women living on the fringes to start and grow their own businesses, and Hieroglyphics Imperium Records: a hip hop label that was the first artist-owned record label on the west coast.
This experience had a kaleidoscopic effect. Not only was I embedded in the prospect of starting my own business with WISE, but I was also shown what that future could look like as an independent with multiple channels through the hip hop world. And amidst all that: collaboration as the key to mutual success - from ideas to form to expression to sharing. While being independent was the foundation, no one got further on their own; further together was part and parcel of the art, the practice, and the business.
That’s when Nicacelly was born.
I found some merch-style teeshirts in the back from old tours that had small rips or ink marks from the printer. I started cutting them up, and transforming them into garments for women. Because at the time, the only offerings for women were small mens’ shirts (this was just prior to the birth of American Apparel and a more contemporary blanks industry). So I got funky with it. And it started to fly.
While the word “slow fashion” had yet to hit the lips of designer activists, it was being practiced by many independents at the time. Nicacelly as a clothing line addressed multiple issues in the fashion industry at the time: waste, brand recognition, refabricating unsold new products and keeping things from the dump while exploring more sustainable and experimental fabrics.
Further, I was adamantly anti-sweatshop (still am), and employed only fair-wage and local factories. Natural color was favored over commercial dyes. And this particular expression earned a few awards including best SF independent designer for two years in a row.
The endeavor went international, and production of new garments out of dead stock fabric grew from Oakland to Chiang Mai, Thailand. Rappers from Kuala Lumpur wore custom pieces to the GRAMMYs. Some pieces were received by Erykah Badu. A little flash on Pimp My Ride. One of my favorite interviews on Pacifica Radio. And yes, dressing one of the Housewives of Atlanta.
It was a time of brilliant collaborations.
The collections produced a cross section of aesthetics that formed the foundation of an ideology that embraced acculturation as a strategy to produce that which had not met before.
It looked a little bit like this:
Dead stock over new fabrication.
Make more with less.
Renew and repair.
Refresh and redesign - from the inside out.
What is needed, and then wanted?
This paradigm grew from observation, with a perspective to include not just what the entrepreneur (me) wanted, but also how the expression could serve beyond the initial object. And this awareness was part and parcel of the contemplative studies that began to build the root system of how I would live my life.
After 14 years, I returned to art school to earn an MFA and simultaneously, a 500-hour deep yoga study (since which I have earned over 1200 hours). Between the rigorous initiation into visual language, and dropping into a depth of field through contemplative studies, new threads wove into my offerings. I also became the brand manager for an international and bilingual entity that took a similar sampling approach of hip hop to the practices of yoga, massage, and acrobatics.
The remix continued.
It wasn’t too long after that branding projects came through the door: from writing to visuals, and collaborative work with other organizations. I endeavored projects that ranged from album cover designs and logos to manifesto-writing for both internal and customer-facing applications - for independent entrepreneurs, as well as nonprofit organizations local, national, and international.
One thing united all these pieces:
Ideas that begged for actualization.
The how and the what to the why.
... and further why nots: New channels of revenue, and how to balance them with the core offerings. Pricing and communicating why those prices are what they are. Understanding what we are producing and how to share that in ways that actually affect the bottom line.
Nicacelly now encompasses full business builds, consulting, design, communications… for both organizations and individuals.
The beautiful line from Sol Lewitt, which I got on a small pin that I still hold on my shrine to this day:
The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.
I welcome thinkers of all backgrounds to bring their ideas.
Let’s make something beautiful happen. For everyone.
Let’s snip some spider plants together and grow something new, shall we?