Overall bio

Hi! I am Alexa (you can also call me Lex) founder and Creative Director of Rethread, a Cape Town based clothing brand. I started the brand in 2020 after finishing my Masters at Amsterdam Fashion Institure. Before Rethread, I ran a small social media/ads agency (SENSE) to pay the bills, self-taught myself Meta ads from a course bought off Instagram. Six years in now, still running the brand hands-on, while also building a second lane teaching other product-based business owners everything I have learnt about building a fashion brand.

I am a big-picture thinker who moves fast. My brain is almost always jumping between design, marketing, finance, content, team management, personal brand, collabs, courses all at once. I get most excited by creating, problem-solving, and dreaming up ambitious ideas, and can lose energy fast when stuck in repetitive admin or operational detail.

I cares deeply about doing meaningful work. Decisions are rarely made purely for profit, they're usually filtered through: does this feel aligned, is this solving a real problem, will this genuinely help people. I value honesty, creativity, consideration, community, growth and building things that last.

I genuinely want the people around me to succeed. Work should feel collaborative, kind, and fun. In the past I used to avoid giving dofficult feedback, but I now lean into it! I prefer regular honest check ins and feedback to avoid built up frustration.

Current Goals

Rethread: build a team, systems, and process so the brand can run without me 80% of the time.

Personal brand: right now the main income streams here are consulting, courses, and brand deals, and the goal is a consistent flow of income through all three, not sporadic. Still building the infrastructure. Once the Meta Ads course is recorded, the plan is to stop 1:1 consulting and run passive courses (and potentially group programs) instead.

Content: post 3-5 times a week on my personal Instagram, and build out a YouTube channel for longer-form content, starting at 2 videos a month. The point of growing a following isn't the following itself, it's driving sales to the digital products and landing aligned brand deals.

Things to know & how to work with me

• ADHD I have really bad ADHD... Although I believe it is my superpower... In practice this can look like: fast-moving, idea-generating, occasionally overwhelmed by too many open loops at once. The most valuable thing anyone can do for me is help capture loose ideas, organise priorities, and gently narrow focus, as well as remind me of my commitments or things I may forget. Anxiety I have diagnised Anxirty and OCD Disorder, I have a perscription of 50 mg Sertreline for this. Currently stable and in a good place.
• Appreciates people who think one step ahead. Rather than waiting for instructions, notice gaps, anticipate what's needed next, and bring solutions rather than problems.
• Detail orientated — I am very detail orientated, and I love people who notice things others may miss. Whether you pick up details about my routine etc and help make my life easier or connect the dots on meetins, deck layouts, spot possible opportunities etc - I would love someone who is always OP IT.

My Routine

Food Meal Prep: Dwayne and I meal prep our lunches for the week on Sundays. Mostly easy to prep high protein clean meals. Breakfast: Usually have breakfast at home - toast/bagel with eggs or wheatbix and banana with Xylitol, or a smoothie after gym. Dinner: Dwayne and I alternate cooking dinner (but her is more of the chef), I would like to show up better in this area though - try new easy but delicious recipes. Training I train 3 - 5 times a week. 3 - 4 strength sessions on Dwaynes program at The Virgin ACtive in Foreshore and then 1 One Flow Sculpt Lit or Sculpt class and 1 Spinning class at Hustle and Heart. Work Week I have 3 dedicated office days at Rethread (usually Monday, Wednesday, Friday), and then 2 'personal brand' and WFH days, where I take consulting clients, create content and work on my personal brand. House Management Jackie, our cleaner works on Mondays at Rethread showroom, and then Tuesdays and Fridays at our Apartment. Address Our home address is 14 Monteflora Apartments, Brunswick Road, Tamboerskloof 8001

Random Things To Know About Me

Things I Love: Uber Eats order is Specual No 4 from Best of Asia in Green Point, I also love a Chicken Sando from NY Bagel. Sneaky Treats: Ice lollies, a nougat and Coke Zero from the Mill and Press. Cocktail prefrenecs: Extra dirty martini/spicy margarita/Aperol Spritz/white Chenin Blanc. Date Night: Public Wine Bar on Wednesdays with Dwayne for steak tartare. Dwayne and I would love to explore trying new things together including clay cafe, cooking classes etc. Would love help with this. Outside of work I love: dancing/partying/festivals, vintage shopping, travel, painting, reading (thrillers), hosting dinner parties for our friends, discovering and supporting local brands, and being endlessly curious.. I am always busy with some kind of online course. Random facts: I love cats (although I dont have one), I dont want kids but love babies. I was born in Pretoria, grew up in Knysna, moved to CT when I was 15 and then lives in Amsterdam for 2 years before moving back to knysna during Covid and then back to Cape Town in 2023.

Things I Don't love: Grocery shopping or going to the shops in general, repetitive admin/operational tasks eg. taking my car in for a service/get washed, cooking, orginising.

Important Family updates: My sister Maricia just had a baby boy, Felix. My cousin Lara (who is also my best friend) has a daughter Monroe who I love and look after often. The rest of my family lives mostly in Knysna. I famously forget birthdays OFTEN so real help remembering birthdays and making sure people I loves get something, even a small gesture like flowers, matters a lot.

My biggest worry/insecurity rn This sounds crazy but forgetting people I meat. Since I apear on Rethreads social media and ads a lot and have a more puclic personal persona people will recognise me and approach me. I worry that we have met before and I dont remember or that I dont know enough about them to engage in conversation. This makes me feel uneasy and triggers social anxiety for me.

My chart

Born 17 November 1995, 09:05, in Pretoria.

• Sun in Scorpio — intense, driven, and deeper than the confident exterior lets on.
• Moon in Virgo — emotional need for order and detail in everything.
• Capricorn Rising — disciplined, ambitious, and built to execute.
• Mercury in Scorpio — a sharp, probing mind that thinks fast and reads what's beneath the surface, not just what's said out loud.
• Venus, Mars, and Jupiter all in Sagittarius — a real cluster, not a coincidence. Big-vision, freedom-loving, optimistic, genuinely loves people and connection, and doesn't like being boxed in.
• Midheaven in Libra — a public-facing career built around beauty, balance, and fairness, which is exactly the aesthetic sensitivity that shows up in everything from an email's wording to a shoot's styling.

• Direct but warm You can be direct but be kind.
• Confirm tasks back, don't just nod. If something's unclear, ask, rather than guessing and getting it wrong.
• Detail matters. I notice when something's been done properly versus rushed, precision is genuinely appreciated here.
• Show the reasoning, not just the result, if a decision was made along the way, say why, not just what.
• Fast-paced, values initiative. Alexa would rather someone try and be corrected than wait to be told every step.
• No em-dashes, ever, in anything written on Alexa's behalf (emails, captions, anything customer or partner-facing).
• Sign-offs, if writing on her behalf: casual and warm generally ("Alexa x"), plain "Alexa" for neutral business correspondence, "xx" for internal team Slack, never "Best," or "With Love" never "Regards."

Family

Friends

Rethread team

Open items to confirm

• Contact details for Salome and Annika
• Any other recurring personal providers not yet captured

All actual passwords live in the shared password manager, never written into this document directly.

The essence of the personal brand

Founder of Rethread, teaching other product-based business owners the fundamentals learned bootstrapping a real business from zero to seven figures, no funding, no industry experience. Not a polished guru persona, real numbers, real mistakes, real fear included on purpose. Visually: elevated, editorial, minimal, not bright or trend-driven, a neutral, grounded palette of cream, chocolate, and warm burnt orange. Black-and-white imagery shows up often for emotive or founder-facing content. Two visual modes run side by side on purpose: polished, styled shots (product on body, fittings, studio moments) for fashion credibility, and raw, textured behind-the-scenes shots (cutting tables, fabric rolls, factory floor) that keep the brand feeling honest and self-made rather than corporate.

Content pillars

1. Founder journey and business lessons, delivered as numbered, scroll-stopping listicles.
2. Financial transparency and education, profit vs. revenue, monthly costs, tax, margins.
3. Rethread behind-the-scenes, manufacturing, sourcing, fittings, showroom life.
4. Personal life and lifestyle moments, motherhood, style, day-to-day, humanises the brand and builds parasocial connection.
5. Course/offer promotion, leans on credibility markers (real revenue, celebrity-worn product) rather than hype.

Tone of voice, in practice

• Confident, direct, teacher-like, never distant or corporate. Leads with real numbers (revenue, margin, tax paid) rather than vague claims, builds credibility through radical transparency about money, mistakes, and how hard the work actually is.
• Casual and conversational with light slang ("no drama," "on it," "vibes"), first-person and vulnerable when it counts (admitting fear, underpricing, missed seasons). Speaks to the audience like peers, not students, calls them "queen," thanks them for tuning in, replies in comments.
• Captions typically open with a hook or confession, back it with a real figure or lesson, and close with a direct call to action.
• Short paragraphs, high contraction rate, real "!!" when genuinely excited. Never an em-dash, in anything, on any platform, ever.
• On Instagram specifically: 🧡 is a genuine signature (matches the live bio pull below), used deliberately, especially as a caption closer. Emoji elsewhere is sparing and purposeful, never decorative.
• Signature phrases: "And honestly?" / "But honestly?" as the pivot into something vulnerable, "so much" as an intensifier, "right?"/"okay?" as a spoken check-in.
• No corporate jargon, no AI-sounding filler ("delve," "leverage," "elevate," "let's dive in," etc.).

Best-performing content / what I'm known for

Pulled from real Instagram data via Windsor.ai on 4 August 2026, personal account @alexaschempers:

• 10,508 followers, 2,727 following, 901 total posts.
• Current bio: "🧡 MOTHER of @rethread_ / 🍸Teaching founders what I wish someone told me / 👇🏽Meta Ads Course Waitlist / 💌 [email protected]"
• Reels are the dominant format by far: 86 of the last 111 posts (roughly 3 in 4), vs. 22 carousels and only 3 static images. Default to Reels when scheduling.
• One massive outlier: a "Comment PLAN to get access to the exact system I used to build my business to a 7-figure month" Reel pulled 29,834 total interactions and 194K reach, roughly 55x the typical post (average engagement across the sample is ~546 interactions). Comment-to-DM lead-magnet CTAs clearly have serious upside when they land, this lines up exactly with the social strategy above.
• Below that outlier, the next tier of consistently strong posts clusters around two themes: pricing/positioning teaching ("Episode 3: Pricing for profitability") and Rethread founder-story/anniversary content ("started Rethread from my bedroom, no fashion design degree, no experience..." / "my baby turns five").
• Older reference point, from a screenshot dated July 2026: roughly 10K followers and 480.3K views in the prior 30 days, consistent with the numbers above.
• Still open, worth adding once available: YouTube numbers (this pull only covers Instagram), and what people actually say/DM in person, no analytics tool surfaces that.

Brand kit

• Current wordmark & mark: lowercase "alexa" wordmark, soft rounded bubble-style font, sky blue on cream. Brand mark: a single abstract blob shape, sky blue on burnt orange. Built in Canva off a coffee-brand template ("Rimberio Coffee"), that placeholder body copy is still sitting in the Canva master file under section 04 and needs deleting there.
• Honest read on the current logo: reads younger/softer than the rest of the system (documentary photography, bold Haas Grotesk headlines, financially-transparent-founder tone), worth treating as temporary and eventually redoing in the actual Haas Grotesk system so the wordmark and everything else feel like one brand.
• Handle: @alexaschempers
• Typeface: Haas Grot Disp R Trial, three weights in active use, Bold (headlines, cover hook words, section titles), Roman (subtitles, body copy, captions), Light (eyebrows, section tags, fine print).
• Color usage, not just a swatch list: #F4F1E8 cream is the universal base, used everywhere. #A8C0DE sky blue is the YouTube cover accent (one hook word per cover) and the current logo color. #C15621 burnt orange and #593D38 choc are for course templates and PDF materials only, never on YouTube covers. Sky blue and burnt orange/choc never appear together on the same asset. This is already the exact palette this Hub site itself is built in.
• YouTube cover system: bold Haas Grotesk Display Bold headline, all lowercase except acronyms, one accent phrase in sky blue, rest white; smaller Roman eyebrow/subtitle below (e.g. "FOUNDER DIARIES"); text block bottom-anchored and left-aligned directly over the photo, no solid color block behind it; documentary/behind-the-scenes imagery, desaturated warm-neutral tones, never posed-influencer style.

Flagging directly: the brand guide PDF's descriptive paragraph ("Rimberio Coffee is a modern Filipino coffee brand...") is leftover template copy from whatever tool generated the PDF, not real content about Alexa or Rethread, matches the same placeholder copy already flagged above in the Canva master file. The logo, brand mark, fonts, and colors are real and extracted faithfully, but that paragraph needs deleting or replacing before this PDF goes anywhere near a client, press kit, or brand deal.

Live docs

Everything above is the overview, live edits happen in the actual documents, not here.

• Brand Kit (Canva): https://canva.link/wvnx90pgscgxeg1
• Rate Card (Canva): https://canva.link/74ozenmdti38123

Content & editing

• Batch-edit last week's Rethread B-roll into 3 Reels
• Edit the two YouTube videos already filmed and sitting unedited
• Cut the next raw ads-course lesson recording into clean segments
• Film fresh B-roll/filler content for Alexa's personal feed
• Set up ads in Ad Manager for Alexa's personal account
• Repurpose a top-performing organic hook into a paid ad (add text overlay, adjust for ads)
• Build a static export of the current course session's slides for handoff
• Batch: pick 1 product/topic, 2 formats, 2 hooks, and produce the set

Personal & hands-on

• Meal prep: recipe → groceries → prep for Alexa + Dwayne
• Grocery run / pantry restock
• Pick up/drop off dry cleaning or other errands
• Organize a specific space (closet, office — confirm which one each time)
• Coordinate an upcoming personal appointment once the directory (see below) has the provider's details
• Source/purchase a gift for an upcoming birthday, once the people directory has real dates

Brand & admin

• Triage the [email protected] inbox
• Draft the next PPP student check-in email
• Update the content calendar as new ideas come in
• (this category is intentionally light for now — expand once real day-to-day gaps show up after the PA is actually in seat)

Time-sensitive, don't lose track of this one

• September: request an updated prescription script from Dr. Layla Farker (2 repeats left at Clicks as of early August)

Nothing here yet.