A Clothing Designer’s Careful Dance

Pittsburgh designer and maker Rona Chang balances family life and running a sustainable clothing brand.

By Shivaun Watchorn
February 19, 2026

Digital Only

Clothing

Fiber & Textiles

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Photo by Jacqueline Johnson

Rona Chang in her studio.

Otto Finn is a global operation.

The Pittsburgh-based sustainable clothing brand’s bread and butter is a line of one-of-a-kind Asian-streetwear-inspired jackets made from kanthas, a type of thin Bengali quilt. The blankets are made by hand-stitching old cotton saris together, and occasional flecks of metallic thread peek through. The jackets are cheery and bold, with an emphasis on exuberantly patterned materials and a loose, comfortable fit.

Founder and designer Rona Chang gets the kanthas from a supplier in Jaipur, India, who sends her blurry cameraphone photos of the quilts on WhatsApp. She has seen enough of his photos to judge whether they will serve her purpose, but the arrival of the kanthas—each one unique and handmade—is still thrilling. “They’re all different. We unpack them, and we all still get excited,” she says. “We’ll see one side as it’s folded, but then you’ll take it out of the packaging and you let it down, you unveil it, and it’s like, ‘Whoa, I didn’t expect that.’”

Photo by Rona Chang

Otto Finn's Anoushka jackets are named after Anoushka Shankar, a British-Indian sitar player.

Otto Finn operates out of a storefront in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood, where Chang and a team of six part-time employees staff the shop and repurpose the kanthas into jackets, belts, mending kits, vests, and small iron-on patches. Chang also has a studio space in the nearby Radiant Hall, and staff move fluidly between the store and the studio. “We have two machines in the back of the shop, but most of the sewing goes on down the street in the studio,” she says. “We intermix things and walk things up and down the street all the time. Literally. I carry a big plastic bag.”

Transit has been a constant in Chang’s life. Born in Taiwan, she emigrated with her mom to Buffalo, New York, at the age of 7, then to New York City a year later, where her grandmother taught her to knit and sew by hand. She regularly traveled to Taiwan throughout her upbringing, spending time with her calligrapher father.

By middle school, Chang was sewing jumpsuits, dresses, and bathing suits from patterns. Her childhood fabric stash follows her to this day. “Fabric just stays with you sometimes, little bits and pieces,” she says. She attended Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts, an elite public high school in Manhattan with rigorous academics and a special arts focus, where she became entranced by the tactility of printmaking and photography. “Those were more physical forms of art,” she says.

Photo by Rona Chang

Otto Finn's storefront is in Pittsburgh's Lawrenceville neighborhood.

“Fabric just stays with you sometimes, little bits and pieces.”

— Rona Chang

After graduating from the Cooper Union, where she also studied printmaking and photography, Chang landed a gig at the New York Public Library digitizing art. She went on to work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she digitized Indian miniature paintings, palm-leaf scriptures, Japanese woodblock prints, and Chinese album leafs. It was a wide-ranging education in Asian art that influences her work to this day.

Marriage and motherhood brought Chang to Pittsburgh, her husband’s hometown. He was making lighting under the name Otto Finn when, in 2014, Chang started making children’s clothing and accessories to pad out the home goods section of his website. In 2018, she opened a store focused on ethically made clothing, accessories, and home goods called Make + Matter with Kelly Simpson-Scupelli of Kelly Lane and Rebekah Joy of Flux Bene. Though it closed in 2020 during the pandemic, it was a launchpad for her business, which she continued to call Otto Finn.

Chang made her first quilted jacket in late 2018, not long after opening Make + Matter. “I started making the quilted jackets because a friend from college gave me a quilt top,” she says. “Then I started looking for more blankets to use, to refine that pattern a little bit more.” Another friend had given her a kantha when her son was a baby, and the comparatively thin Bengali quilts worked better than American quilts in her designs.

Photo by Sarah Clark

Chang reaches for a stack of kanthas.

Photo by Rona Chang

The front of Otto Finn's sweatshirts are cut from kanthas.
Photo by Rona Chang

Every last bit of fabric goes into Otto Finn's product line.

Though varied in color, shape, and pattern, Chang’s jackets are all designed for ease of wear and reflect the challenges of dressing the ever-mutable human body. Her life as a parent informs their design and construction. “When I started, I was nursing, so my chest would change sizes throughout the day,” she says. “I really wanted to be conscious of that and I didn’t want to create clothing that felt restrictive.”

Otto Finn’s small storefront—where visitors are often greeted by Poker, Chang’s German Shepherd—is supported by the sale of mending bundles, which staff make while they mind the shop. “We can basically pay for the shop and the employees through the sale of these little things that we make from our scraps,” she says. Walk-ins rarely result in jacket sales; retailing for a few hundred dollars each, they require a specific type of buyer.

Chang has found an audience at high-end craft shows such as American Craft Made Baltimore, the Smithsonian Craft Show, and the Visual Arts Center of Richmond’s Craft + Design show, but the timing of the markets requires a careful dance to make the business sustainable. “Part of it is the struggle of spending a lot of money in August, September, and October on the cost of goods and labor, because we need everything to be prepped and made for the holidays,” she says. “This past year it was pretty sketchy in terms of finances dipping really low in those months.”

Photo by Rona Chang

Poker, Chang's German Shepherd, greets customers at the Otto Finn storefront.

Photo by Rona Chang

The Pauli sweatshirt, made from a vintage kantha front and organic cotton French terry, is available with a curved hem for ease of movement and comfort.
Photo by Rona Chang

Each Pauli sweatshirt is one of a kind.

Photo by Rona Chang

Mending bundles are assembled from kantha scraps and save fabric from being wasted.
Photo by Rona Chang

Otto Finn's belts are made from scraps generated during the jacket-production process.

And the process of developing new items is slow. “It takes me a long time for ideas to come into fruition and sometimes a lot gets nixed in the way. I feel like I have 50 billion ideas and we can only make some of them become reality,” she explains. “If we put something into production it has to make financial sense. If it costs too much in labor than what the perceived value of the product is, or if it’s something that people don’t value as a well-crafted product, then we just can’t make it work.”

But Chang, who still travels regularly to Asia to visit family, is learning Japanese so she can politely communicate with Japanese kimono dealers, which she plans to repurpose into dresses and tops. And someday she’d like to travel to India to source kanthas directly, though balancing family life and the business makes travel planning challenging.

Besides, when it comes to Otto Finn, she knows her limits. “I’m not under the illusion that I can do everything myself,” she says. “I’m a mom.”

Photo by Sarah Clark

Chang sewing in her studio.

Shivaun Watchorn is an editor at the American Craft Council.

Check out Otto Finn online.

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