Athelia Woolley LeSueur: Mormon Designer
Athelia Kaye Woolley LeSueur (also known as CK) is a fashion designer working out of New York City. Her modest dress company is called Shabby Apple.
As a child, she dreamed of being in fashion, but never mastered the ability to sew. Rather than ruin her GPA in high school with a poor grade in home economics, she opted to take auto shop. Her love for fabrics, clothes, and trends endured. At Stanford, she majored in art history and gained confidence to follow her dream when she took a history of costume class. She also took many dance classes. After she graduated, she moved to London to study modern dance at Trinity Laban Dance Conservatoire, but an autoimmune illness took her to San Francisco for treatment and ended her thoughts of being a professional dancer. In between treatments, she lived in New York where she worked on a graduate degree in social work at Columbia University. After she graduated, she moved to Salt Lake City to her parents’ home to restore her health.
Three years before she started Shabby Apple, she was living in New York City, where the summers are hot and the humidity is 100 percent. She discovered that dresses were not long enough and did not have sleeves, and she thought that “there should be clothing options that make women feel beautiful and allow them to feel spiritual.”[1] While healing in her parents’ home, she bought Fashion for Dummies and learned as she went along. She set up office space in her parents’ home, and her company gradually grew with the help of her friend Emily McCormick. In the beginning, vintage-inspired Shabby Apple operated solely online. Shabby Apple opened its first retail space in Fashion Place Mall in Utah in October 2014.
LeSeuer is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She is married and the mother of one daughter. Her husband is the chief operating officer of the company.
