Comfort, Creativity, Community

10/20/2025

Matt Margini, Humanities Department Faculty

Ali (Salaverria) Mejia ’90 follows her fashion dreams and scores with softness

Student fundraisers at Ransom Everglades tend to take a few recognizable forms. Bake sales. Concessions at games. Car washes. When she was senior class president, Ali (Salaverria) Mejia ’90 organized something very different: a fashion show.

Walking by the United Colors of Benetton store that was then in the Mayfair in the Grove building, she wondered how much money she could raise for charity if the items on offer were vibrant, chunky crewnecks and corduroys from a trendy brand instead of aluminum foil-wrapped brownies.

A lot, as it turns out. The store provided clothes, RE students modeled them, and parents bought them.

“It was a pivotal moment for me,” Mejia said. “The excitement it created, the money we raised, and the way it blended creativity and entrepreneurship all lit something in me.”

In some ways, you couldn’t ask for clearer foreshadowing. Less than a decade later, Mejia would go on to co-found Eberjey, a sleepwear and lingerie brand that has become an international name – and for those who have worn Eberjey pajamas (including, full disclosure, yours truly), a synonym for a certain kind of irresistible softness. Since its founding in 1996, Eberjey has earned a host of recognitions, including brand of the year, designer of the year, best pajamas and among “Oprah’s Favorite Things.” But the RE fashion show wasn’t merely a preview of her future in the industry. It was one of the first times she chose to ignore the conventional path and listen to an intuition that told her to try something different.

After emigrating to the United States from El Salvador at age 7, Mejia grew up on Key Biscayne, where she had an outdoorsy and active childhood. Her interest in fashion started to emerge when her mother would “drag her” to the local seamstress to get garments altered – a process that fascinated and inspired her.

“I think it was reimagining something,” Mejia recalled. “Seeing the power of a little tweak to change how the garment looked and felt. It blew my mind.”

Those trips to the seamstress remained a creative outlet throughout middle and high school, to the point that they often felt like collaborations – for Mejia, an early taste of fashion design. But she became intensely focused on sports and academics. At RE she played soccer, volleyball and tennis, and she remembers volleyball boot camp, three weeks before school, as the place where she learned the kind of discipline that would propel her from RE to Princeton. She also remembers the quiet influence of social studies teacher and soccer coach Ken Farshtey, who gave her space to be creative and introspective.

“He was very soft spoken, and very inquisitive, and he challenged me to see things differently,” she recalled.

From the perspective of her classmate and best friend, Vanessa Chartouni-de la Serna ’90, Ali was the “all-rounder”– good at everything and Most Likely to Succeed.

“She was an amazing student, a great soccer player, a great volleyball player,” Chartouni said. “She was very strong in so many different areas.”

Even so, Chartouni saw glimpses of the creativity that simmered at the margins of Mejia’s hustle. “The place I saw it was in her love of fashion and writing,” she said. “I don’t remember if it was 10th or 11th grade, but she told me that, one day, she was going to either design greeting cards or make lingerie.”

After RE, Mejia climbed a traditional yet dauntingly competitive path toward professional success, leveraging her excellent coursework at Princeton – where she majored in politics and Latin American studies – into a financial analyst job at a prominent Wall Street bank. She knew it wasn’t her passion. She also knew she’d worked too hard to get there to do anything else.

“I thought, ‘Why am I not doing something creative? I need to live this life. Florence is where I had my epiphany. That’s when I was quiet. I was listening within.”

Ali Mejia ’90

But then, six months into the job, her entire team of analysts was laid off. She reached a turning point. While her colleagues found themselves scrambling to land a gig at any bank that would have them, she bought a ticket to Florence and wandered the cobblestone streets, drinking in the atmosphere of art, beauty and craftsmanship.

“I thought, ‘Why am I not doing something creative? I need to live this life,’” Mejia said. “Florence is where I had my epiphany. That’s when I was quiet. I was listening within.”

She found herself thinking back to her mother’s elegant European pajamas, which had fascinated her as a kid. Nothing in the American market came close. Victoria’s Secret lingerie was hypersexualized, almost pitched more to men than it was to women. At the other extreme, Calvin Klein was marketing androgynous PJs that draped the body shapelessly.

“I wanted to educate the U.S. consumer that this is something that is really needed,” Mejia said. “I saw it as a feeling, an emotion connected with self-care and honoring the authentic. It was a difficult proposition at first. People didn’t get it. But I knew they would, eventually.”

Mejia returned to Miami, moved back in with her parents, and started incubating a new idea: sleepwear for women, by women. She took a job at the direct marketing agency Wunderman Cato Johnson and spent every free moment designing a new line of prototypes that she brought to a pattern maker in Miami Beach. At lunch, she talked about them nonstop to her coworker Mariela Rovito. They shared similar backstories – Rovito, too, had grown up in Miami after emigrating from Argentina at age 7 – and a similar entrepreneurial itch. They decided to go for it.

They wrangled over what to call their new company, seeking something unique and memorable. One night, the pair attended an African dance recital during which the performers chanted the word ebberrjeyyy. “We looked at each other and instantly knew – that’s the name,” Mejia said last spring. “It sounded French, had a melodic quality, and rhymed with ‘lingerie’ and ‘negligee.’ Later, we discovered that ‘Eberjey’ meant “all-encompassing joy,” which we felt perfectly encapsulated the essence of the brand we envisioned.”

They had a great name, but little else. They knew nothing about the fashion industry, had no connections and had no capital save for $10,000 each from their personal savings. “We were navigating manufacturing, margins, branding, you name it – everything, all of it, on instinct. And the challenges really came in waves,” Rovito said.

They were only 23, but they knew, at least, that they had complementary skillsets: Mejia was the visionary, Rovito the businesswoman.

“It’s one of the truest examples from my life of when I say ‘ignorance is bliss,’” Rovito reflected.

“We were naive.” Mejia added. “But it didn’t set us back.”

Slowly but surely, Mejia and Rovito built the brand. They reinvested their modest profits, traveled to every trade show they could and hired a New York P.R. firm to do Eberjey “desksides” with editors at fashion magazines. By the early 2000s, Eberjey products were on the rack at Anthropologie, itself a growing brand that gave them the ability to sell to even bigger retailers such as Saks and Nordstrom. More opportunities came knocking when, around 2005, another brand pulled out and they were able to secure a full-page ad in Vogue.

Things were going well until Eberjey ran into some of the challenges that any young business runs into. They overdiversified into different product lines: swimwear, maternity, baby clothes. Growth plateaued.

“You can’t be everything to everyone, and being better at some things is probably going to get you further than trying to be okay at a lot of things. That was a hard lesson for all of us to learn,” Rovito said.

But another transformative epiphany came when Mejia went to a show in Paris and found samples of a silky-soft modal – a type of fabric made from beech-tree pulp. She brought a few yards back to the Eberjey sample room.

“I was making camisoles and boyshorts with it, because that made sense,” Mejia recalled. “But I had made a pajama in cotton in beautiful men’s shirting material. They were hanging next to each other, and I thought, ‘Wait a minute, what if I cut that pajama in that fabric? That would make the perfect modern pajama.”

“I remember when she showed me that sample and we both were just standing there in the design room going, ‘My god,’” Rovito recalled.

The pajamas were an instant hit that became Eberjey’s defining product. Mejia and Rovito seized on their appeal and refocused the business. They started releasing pajamas in every permutation: short pajamas, cropped pajamas, tank-top pajamas, kids’ pajamas. They made men’s pajamas. They even, at one point, collaborated with another brand to make pajamas for dogs.

“For me, softness is leaning into what my heart really wanted, letting it guide me toward my passion and, ultimately, my purpose.”

Ali Mejia ’90

The biggest lesson I’ve learned is it’s all about focus,” Mejia said. “That’s how you scale.”

The brand continued to grow throughout the 2010s, in part because it resonated intrinsically with some of the social media-fueled trends – wellness, self-care, sustainability – that other brands were trying to chase. Two significant accolades landed in 2020: Eberjey was named Brand of the Year by an influential industry trade show and was awarded the Designer of the Year Award by Salon International de la Lingerie.

And then, Covid hit. The worldwide shock of the pandemic threatened, at first, to plunge the company into bankruptcy. With department stores closing, Mejia and Rovito had warehouses stocked with product and nowhere to sell it. They were left with one option: ramp up their online business and sell directly to consumers.

The gambit paid off when, come Mother’s Day, people were flocking to the Eberjey website to buy lockdown-ameliorating PJs.

“I think, through Covid, it really became this comfort food,” Chartouni said. From the perspective of Jade Dennis ’27, a fashion editor at the RE student newspaper (The Catalyst), who has interviewed Mejia and written about the brand, the appeal of Eberjeys was also about elevating life at home: feeling comfortable in style.

“Because everybody was at home, people wanted to feel at least a little dressed up. You’re not going to dinner. You’re not putting on heels and a cute outfit, but you’re putting on your Eberjeys and drinking your coffee and feeling a little bit like you have something,” Dennis said.

Today, Eberjey has reached the kind of saturation point that most brands can only dream of. Generations of international consumers and RE community members – parents, students, faculty – are obsessed with it.

“Everybody knows Eberjey. I love my Eberjeys, They’re the softest pajamas ever,” Dennis said. “[Mejia] had an idea, and she executed it very well, and it’s inspiring because it’s somebody I know who went to RE. As a student, that’s pretty cool to see.”

In December 2024, Mejia and Rovito stood in Times Square and watched a digital billboard for the brand splash across a set of towering, 16-story screens. What brought them pride was not just the fact that their brand was in Times Square. The ad was strikingly wholesome: a family in matching red PJs, laughing together on Christmas morning.

“We were up there with a photo of a family connecting and being themselves, not in a Victoria’s Secret-like, catalog-y pose. The ad carried a different energy,” Mejia said.

Now, while serving as creative advisor at Eberjey’s global headquarters in Coral Gables (Eberjey also has a retail store at the Shops at Merrick Park) Mejia has turned her focus to the concept of creativity itself, which she reflects on in Instagram posts and an upcoming children’s book called The Butterfly Studio. To her, creativity is softness, and softness isn’t just a physical sensation; it’s a metaphor for the kind of openness to the inner voice, the creative spark inside, that ended up propelling her unorthodox career path.

For me, softness is leaning into what my heart really wanted,” Mejia said, “letting it guide me toward my passion and, ultimately, my purpose.”

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