I can’t think of a more surreal experience than being in class at a fashion school, finding out your designs are on the cover of WWD, leaving class to go get a copy and coming back to your professor yelling at you. Exactly one year ago today, this happened to Alan Eckstein, one half of Timo Weiland. If that’s not an indicator of good things to come for a brand new designer, I don’t know what is. It seems like overnight, Timo Weiland and Alan Eckstein–two very young self-proclaimed “fashion geeks” with no technical training–grew a small line of neckwear into a successful full-fledged men’s and women’s clothing line that will show at Lincoln Center on Sunday.

Also an integral part of the team, Donna Kang, the only one with a technical fashion background, is behind the scenes helping to make beautiful things happen. Together, they are unstoppable. We sat down with them in their tiny garment district office/studio to try to figure out how they came together and made all this happen in such a short a mount of time.

How did the line come about?

Timo: We met through our old businesses: a consulting business that I was doing and a manufacturing business that Alan was doing with Donna.

Alan: I launched a luxury street wear company called Epic Firm and through that company I met Donna. I was at school and Donna was incredible and pretty much the best student to come out of FIT in a really long time. Then, when we were looking for a consultant for the company, I met Timo. Timo and I shared very similar views and we have a very similar taste level and we just decided it would be best to join forces.

Timo had this great idea for neckwear from the start and my grandfather was a man who wore a lot of ascots, so we decided to put our ideas of neckwear together and I naturally thought Donna would be amazing for us as well, so we launched the line about two years ago.

Timo: …and very quickly realized that accessories were not the end game for us. We definitely wanted to do clothes just because it was really hard to pair other people’s clothes with it. We even went to the extent of having a shoot where a girl was topless and we realized that wasn’t us either and we were like, there needs to be clothes and they need to be amazing clothes and everything needs to be flowing and just really impeccable. So, after the first season of accessories we moved right into ready to wear.

Alan: We just found ourselves always saying things like, if we designed the shirt it would look like this and if we designed a suit it could look like this. There were always these what ifs during the design process in neckwear. It wasn’t even a business model; it was just like we are doing clothing.

How did you raise the money?