Shawn Kaplan, Founder. World of Wellness New York Fashion Week, World of Wellness Events, Miami Swim & Active Fashion Week, and S.A.F.E. Sports Active Fashion Entertainment Global. The New York edition runs Thursday 10 September.
The people who produce Miami swim week just brought it to New York, and they are not toning it down for the occasion. Pageant queens and international models. New York's best working artists, painting live. Financial influencers and family office capital. Eleven designers on a runway. Shawn Kaplan built a format where the runway is the smallest thing on the invoice, and this week is the first time it runs on 42nd Street.
BEFORE THE PROFILE, TWO THINGS WITH A DATE ON THEM
Wednesday: dinner at Cipriani. Thursday: the runway.
Shawn's New York edition runs Thursday 10 September at Matriarch, 512 West 42nd Street. Seven rooms in one building, all of them open at once. The night before it, Wednesday 9 September at 7:00 PM, I am running twenty covers at Cipriani for the capital side of this network, and nightlife follows for anyone who wants to keep going.
$1,500 A seat at the table. | $5,000 VIP. Head of the table, and your introductions made before the first course. | $15,000 Sponsor the night. All twenty covers, your brand on the table. |
Seats are given, not sold. Request one, say what you are working on and who should be sitting next to you, and your card is held, not charged, until I approve it. I read every request myself, the same day.
Rather talk before you put a card down? Reply with the word CIPRIANI and I will call you.
Then read the rest, because the reason he is worth an evening is below, and it is a better business story than a fashion one.
The twelve minute product with the twelve hour cost
A runway show lasts about twelve minutes.
Around those twelve minutes sits a year of a designer's life and a bill that reads like a small production company: casting, styling, hair, makeup, lighting, sound, venue, crew, photography, video. For an independent label, showing at fashion week has historically meant paying for all of it, on the promise that the right buyer and the right editor will be in the seats. If they are not, the designer has bought twelve minutes of nothing.
That is a strange product. The cost is enormous, the duration is tiny, and the value depends entirely on an audience the designer has no control over and no way to verify beforehand.
The industry has mostly solved this for the twenty houses that do not need it solved. For everybody else, the economics do not work, which is why so many good collections are only ever seen on a phone.
Fifteen years, two cities, and a partner who is not here
Kaplan did not come out of fashion. He came out of rooms.
Before any of this he owned hospitality brands, award winning ones by his own account, running from artistic sushi restaurants to burlesque music venues. Those two businesses have almost nothing in common except the thing he was actually selling in both, which was an evening people describe to someone else afterwards.
In 2010, in Washington DC, he partnered with Moh Uzair Ducis. Both were former DJs, and that is the detail that explains everything downstream, because a DJ's entire job is reading a room in real time and deciding what happens next. Together they built what their own account calls the number one green sustainability driven company in DC, and produced art and fashion events across Washington and New York.
In 2020, with DC locked down, the two of them moved to Miami, where Moh's team went on to dominate the swim fashion industry. There they conceived a second brand that merged fashion with wellness and activewear. That became World of Wellness.
Then, in late 2025, Moh Uzair Ducis died unexpectedly. Kaplan's own words for him are on the company's story page: a creative genius, a visionary producer, and above all, a best friend. The line that follows it is that the whole thing was born from dreams the two of them shared.
FIFTEEN YEARS, TWO CITIES
2010 | 2020 | 2026 |
The New York edition arrives less than a year after he lost the man he built it with, and he is producing it as sole founder. I am putting that in a business feature because it is the part that makes the rest of it legible. What follows is not a clever pricing trick somebody reverse engineered from a spreadsheet. It is fifteen years of two people learning how to hold a room, turned into a rate card.
What Kaplan actually did
Shawn Kaplan is the founder of all four of his companies, and the list is the strategy: World of Wellness New York Fashion Week, World of Wellness Events, Miami Swim & Active Fashion Week, and S.A.F.E. Sports Active Fashion Entertainment Global. That last name is the thesis written out in full. Sports, active, fashion, entertainment. Fashion is one of four things happening in the building, not the only thing. His own word for the category is fashion entertainment, and the bet is that the entertainment is what makes the commerce work.
The premiere edition of World of Wellness Swim and Active Fashion Week ran 28 to 31 May at the National Hotel in Miami, alongside the ninth annual Sustainable Swimwear Week International, with the Dorchester and the Surfcomber and partners including Into the Light Lounge, Planet Fashion TV and Media Ingenious. His own line on why it exists is blunt.
“WOW is the place to decamp from the frenzy of the Miami Beach Convention and Visitors Center.”
SHAWN KAPLAN, FOUNDER
That sentence is a positioning statement disguised as a complaint. The convention centre is where fashion week became a trade show. Kaplan's answer was not to build a better trade show. It was to stop selling the twelve minutes and start selling the twelve hours around them.
THE UNBUNDLE, IN NUMBERS
8 production formats sold separately, from runway to recovery lounge to private dinner | 7 sponsor tiers, $2,500 to $500,000, with the counts published | 20% paid to anyone outside the company who closes a sponsor |
Look at what that does to the designer's problem. The show is no longer carrying the whole cost of the evening, because seven other revenue lines are carrying it too: the market, the beauty lounge, the recovery activations, the dinners, the panels, the after party, the brand installations. A gifting sponsor at $2,500 is paying for part of the room a designer is walking in. The runway stops being the product and becomes the reason everything else can be sold.
The venue choice is the tell. Matriarch has seven rooms, from a 35 seat lounge to a black box that holds eight hundred, plus a rooftop garden. You do not book a building like that to run one runway. You book it because you have eight things to sell and you need somewhere to put them all at once.
And the affiliate layer is the part almost nobody copies. Kaplan pays up to twenty percent to anyone who brings a sponsor, with no inventory and no employment. He turned his sales team into an open network, which is the same trick Propel runs on introductions, and it is why this feature is in this newsletter rather than a trade magazine.
FOUR BRANDS, ONE OPERATOR
The clearest picture of the strategy is the bottom of his own email signature. Four properties, four websites, one man, and each one sells a different slice of the same night.
World of Wellness New York Fashion Week™ Miami Swim & Active Fashion Week™ | World of Wellness Events™ S.A.F.E. Sports Active Fashion Entertainment Global™ |
Most people in his position would have run one brand and added product lines under it. He built four front doors instead, because a sponsor buying wellness activations and a designer buying a runway slot are not the same buyer and should not land on the same page.
New York is the test of whether it travels
Miami is a swim market. Warm water, warm weather, and a category that has always sold there. New York is not that, and this week is the first evidence of whether the format is a Miami thing or a real thing.
The New York edition holds all eight formats inside one building on 42nd Street across twelve and a half hours: an atelier market at half past two, a hosted happy hour at five with the Capital Circle and the Miami Chamber of Commerce Dubai, twenty artists painting live with a charity auction, TED style founder pitches at 6:30, six runway categories at eight, then three DJ sets and a headliner nobody will name until two in the morning. Eleven designers are confirmed and the site says more land daily.
Shawn co-hosts the five o'clock room with Richie Hosein, who was Feature #1 in this newsletter. That is not a coincidence and I am not pretending it is. These two rooms are connected, and the people worth meeting in one are usually worth meeting in the other.
WHERE EVERY FACT IN THIS PIECE CAME FROM
The career, the 2010 partnership, the move to Miami and the quotes about Moh come from the company's own story page. The premiere edition ran 28 to 31 May at the National Hotel in Miami alongside the ninth annual Sustainable Swimwear Week International, with the Dorchester and the Surfcomber and partners including Into the Light Lounge, Planet Fashion TV and Media Ingenious, per the announcement. The rate card, the eight formats and the affiliate terms come from the sponsorship page.
What has not been published anywhere I can read is an audience figure that belongs to World of Wellness itself rather than to Miami Swim Week as a whole. So this piece does not print one. If you have seen me quote a number in this newsletter it is because I could source it, and that rule does not relax when the number would flatter a friend.
The part you can actually use
Forget fashion for a second, because the transferable move here has nothing to do with clothes.
Kaplan looked at a product that sold once, to a small number of buyers, at a price most of them could not pay, and asked a different question: what else is in the room while that product is being delivered, and who would pay for it.
The answer was eight things. Same building, same night, same audience, eight invoices instead of one, and the cheapest of them costs $2,500 instead of $50,000.
So run the small version this week. Write down everything you currently give away as part of your main offer. The onboarding call. The audit you do before the proposal. The report at the end. The introductions you make for clients. The community they get access to.
Now price one of them separately and put it in front of somebody who cannot afford the main thing. You are not discounting. You are discovering that you have been bundling a product that could have been sold on its own, to people who were never going to buy the big one.
Most businesses do not have a pricing problem. They have a packaging problem, and the packaging is the cheapest thing on the list to change.
Wednesday and Thursday
WEDNESDAY 9 SEPTEMBER · 7:00 PM · CIPRIANI · FAMILY OFFICES AND UHNW
The Family Office Dinner at Cipriani
Twenty covers, the private capital side of New York Fashion Week. Family office principals, UHNW investors and the people who allocate for them, seated with Shawn, the brands underwriting Thursday and a few of the designers walking it. You tell me what you need before you arrive and I put you next to the person who has it. Nightlife follows. $1,500 a seat, $5,000 VIP, $15,000 to sponsor the night. Every seat is approved by hand and your card is held, not charged, until it is.
THURSDAY 10 SEPTEMBER · MATRIARCH, 512 W 42ND STREET
Matriarch is a seven room building in Hell's Kitchen: a double height atrium under a glass roof, a black box that holds eight hundred, a speakeasy, a club room, a deck, a lounge and a secret garden on the roof. On Thursday every one of them is running at once, which is the entire point of what Shawn built. Eleven designers confirmed, twenty artists painting live, six runway categories, and a headliner nobody will name until two in the morning.
The full run of show, the confirmed designers, the sponsor rate card and the affiliate programme are all in Friday's edition. If you only do one thing all week, the free spa day on Friday afternoon is the easiest room of the whole thing to hold a conversation in.
If you are a brand rather than a guest, the rate card runs $1,500 to $500,000 and the sponsor form is four questions. If you want the 6:30 stage, the speaker application is two minutes and the only question that matters is the last one.
Want to be featured in the next one?
This is what a founder feature looks like. Researched properly, written properly, published, and yours to use anywhere you like.
If you want the next one to be about you, email me at stephen@propel.earth with one line on what you are building and what you need. I read every one of these myself.
New here? This is Propel Earth.
A network of founders, investors and operators, most of them in New York. We run rooms every week, we place engineers, and we match people to what they need by hand. Aurora Wenters told us what she needed when she registered for Demo Day, we matched her before the doors opened, and she closed $100,000 a month later. That is the whole thesis: most of what makes a company work is who you happen to be standing next to, so we stop leaving it to chance.
Best,
Stephen Michael, Chief Executive Officer, Propel Earth
516-307-6380 | stephen@propel.earth
IF YOU MISSED THE LAST FEW
Miami swim week came north to bring the heat. Seven rooms on 42nd Street, eleven designers, and the family office table at Cipriani.
How to get inside New York Fashion Week without an invitation. Times Square on the 15th, and the code that takes 20% off.
The Propel Card. Four minutes, read by a person, and nobody takes without giving.
 | THE PRIVATE NETWORK Three introductions a month, to someone who can pay you, hire you, or move your company forward. Made by hand, from what you told me on your card. Free entry to every room I run. $200 a month, and the first 25 members hold that rate for as long as they stay. |
Not sure yet? Take fifteen minutes with me and tell me what you need. If I do not think I can route it, I will say so rather than take the money.
KNOW SOMEONE WHO SHOULD BE IN HERE
Forward this to them, or send them the front door, where the card, the map and the Private Network all sit one click apart.