Meet Delilah Designs, the Creator of Free People’s Knit Swan Sweater

Just a few years ago, Delilah Eby never would have guessed that her knitwear design brand Delilah Designs would be available to shop online at Free People.

Growing up in Charlotte, North Carolina and New Jersey, Eby grew up always being drawn to creative hobbies. What started as a spontaneous attempt at knitting during the COVID-19 pandemic soon blossomed into making custom orders for friends—and eventually developed into a full-fledged brand. Today, Delilah Designs is a vintage-inspired knitwear brand featuring whimsical, coquette sweaters designed in New York City and hand-knit in Lima, Peru. Each piece is a true labor of love, combining Eby’s artistic vision with her commitment to ethical production.

We sat down with Eby to talk about how she turned a hobby into a thriving business, her focus on sustainability, her exciting partnership with Free People, and what’s on the horizon for her growing brand.

Teen Vogue: How did you get into knitting?

Delilah Eby: I never went to school for design or anything like that, but I’ve always been someone who needs my hands on something creative—I’m a big arts and crafts girl, going through every hobby that there is. I was inspired to take on knitting sort of on a whim, just digging through YouTube to try to figure it out and learn. And I just quickly fell in love with it. It’s such a meditative practice, and it’s so fulfilling to create a whole garment from scratch. I think something else that made me just fall in love with it is how it combines artistry with design and fashion, which is another thing I’ve always been really interested in. I think realizing that these two things could merge was super exciting, and it became an obsession.

TV: And what led you to start your brand, Delilah Designs?

DE: I wanted to create an Instagram account to share the pieces I was working on and follow other knitwear designers to get inspiration, [as well as] dive into this community that exists online. I was posting projects I was working on initially, and then I started to experiment with creating my own designs, patterns, and pieces, and then sharing them. I ended up getting feedback from this small community that I had grown that people were interested in buying my designs and buying the things that I was making, which was mind-blowing. I started dabbling in selling and doing one-off pieces and custom orders and things like that, and it just snowballed into what it is today, where I became really interested in creating this brand and creating this whole world for these designs to live in.

Courtesy of Delilah Designs.

TV: Were there any challenges that defined your brand when you first started out? What was that whole process like?

DE: I really have no business background at all, so there was definitely a big, big learning curve. The first challenge was figuring out my brand identity and what I wanted my style to look like, and sort of the feeling I wanted to portray in my brand and in this thing that I was creating, which was a fun challenge. The next challenges were like, “How do I do taxes and the logistical, like, logistical stuff do I need to figure out? How do I make an LLC, and how can I make a grant proposal? How can I better market myself?” And that was a lot to learn. I was in school for PR and advertising, so I was able to use what I was learning to, first off, market myself on social media, which is really how the brand originated—but then I had a lot to learn logistically. When I was still living in Charlotte, I got into this business incubator program called Creative Entrepreneurs Initiative. It’s basically a grant program where small artists and business owners go through all these business courses, and then at the end they receive a grant for their business. Doing that program was a moment [where I was like,] “Okay, this is something that I could really fulfill.” It began as a hobby, but it really motivated me to put more into it and keep going after I graduated.

TV: Your designs are so whimsical and fun. Can you talk a bit more about where your inspiration stems from?

DE: It’s hard to pinpoint where it stems from. When I began creating my own designs, it felt very much like a direct expression of femininity, in a sense. I was still coming into myself and figuring out the world around me and where I fit into it, and having an outlet to safely express fun, whimsical designs, just for the sake of it, was really important to me. I love creating these sort of dream worlds for these sweaters to be placed in—I have a lot of fun with that. In my design process, I like to create a world surrounding each design. Like my most recent set of collections, I was really inspired by these old, antique paper feeders that were a popular craft in the 19th century, and I had some friends help me create this paper set. We did it all by hand, and that was probably the most literal interpretation of where this world forms around a design. That was a really cool thing to see come to life. I also really like to dive into Pinterest and consume other forms of art. I love any sort of antiquity. I’ve always loved beautiful, old things. I love going through a vintage market and looking at little trinkets and getting inspired by designs. Another one of my designs is this bunny crest—sort of like an old-timey-looking crest—but it was inspired by these vintage cameo brooches that I collect.