When Molyan Dery unleashed her creative vision, a brand and a spirit was born, turning heads across Texas and gaining momentum nationwide.
Story by Cara Clark
hen you speak to Molyan Dery, her warmth, precision, and spark of creativity make immediate sense. The Texas-based designer has built something rare with her clothing business, Molyan — a brand that fuses craftsmanship, storytelling, and individuality into every seam. And winter is the busiest time for her fast-growing brand, which combines free-spirited style with carefully controlled stitching, a combination that speaks to Molly’s own background growing up in El Paso.
Before founding her business, Molly’s world looked very different, given her background in anesthesia. She began her education at the University of Texas, earning a Bachelor of Science degree with a focus on nursing. She then worked in intensive care in Austin, Texas, before earning a master’s degree in anesthesia from Duke. For more than a decade, she worked in medicine — a field demanding calm, dexterity, and deep focus. Yet, something inside her kept calling.
“Throughout that process of going to school, I sort of felt like something was missing in my career path,” she says. “And yeah, I think I’ve always been creative. I just never had the time or space or energy to tap into it.”
Eventually, she listened to that inner pull and set free the designs circling through her creative consciousness.
“After doing anesthesia for over 13 years, I decided that I was going to create this image that I had been thinking about,” she recalls. “I had spoken to a friend about chain stitch, and really wanted the image to lie inside the fabric of whatever I was going to create, where you could see it from the inside and the outside without it feeling like a machine, like traditional embroidery.”
That idea became the foundation for her now-signature jackets — pieces that feel both grounded and luminous.
“About three years ago, I sketched out the design that I had been thinking about and all the color combinations that are always running through my head,” she says. “I sat down, sketched it out, and then had it stitched on a jacket for my husband and myself. And so that was my Beta study to see if people were going to like it in Austin.”
Austin, ever a haven for artistic spirits, did like it — a lot.
“We wore the jackets around town, and we had a positive response. And so that’s when I decided that I was going to create my own blazer.”
