Meet Melisa Minca, the designer giving Athens' flea market finds a second life
Slovak-born, Berlin-raised designer Melisa Minca turns second-hand finds from Athens' Eleonas flea market into high-end garments. We spoke to her about circularity, greenwashing and why buying less matters more.
Meet Melisa. She buys clothes at the second-hand flea market and turns them into something fresh, contemporary, and entirely her own.
Melisa Minca is a Slovak-born, Berlin-raised designer who relocated to Athens about a year ago, armed with a background in sustainability, sewing machines, and a very clear philosophy: the fashion industry needs to change, and she's not going to pretend otherwise.
Fashion is responsible for up to 10% of global carbon emissions, more than aviation and shipping combined. It is the second largest consumer of water worldwide. And yet the dominant industry model still depends on essentially slave labour in Southeast Asian factories, disposable trends, and the illusion of “green” take-back schemes. Melisa is building a small but deliberate alternative to all of that.
She sources secondhand pieces from local flea markets, transforms them by hand into high-end garments, and sells them through her own e-shop. She's been doing this for eight years for the love of her craft, and the belief that it is part of a necessary change to the fashion industry.
We sat down with Melisa at the reused items market in Eleonas (Agias Annis Street), one of the city's hidden circular economy gems, right where she sources some of her materials.
“A circular economy would require a completely different economic system. Something you take out of the earth, you should be able to put back. We'd have to rethink the whole thing from the ground up.”
She's clear-eyed about greenwashing too: “It's not going to be some corporation doing a little secondhand project, like H&M saying ‘return your clothes and we'll give you a voucher to buy new ones.’ That's not circularity at all.”
She's worked with the big names. H&M. Zalando. Nike. Project-based, upcycling workshops, tutorials. Her verdict? “Every time I did that, I felt like a piece of me died.”
On consumption, she's equally direct: “I don't quite agree with this narrative that people could change the world with their wallets. It's more about what you're doing that doesn't include buying anything at all.”
Finding her market in Athens hasn't been simple. Her work sits at, as she puts it, “a funny intersection between people who care about such things and people who have the money for it.” In a city where disposable income flows more towards ‘Gucci’ than upcycled clothes, she's carving out her space anyway, because the Eleonas market gives her something Berlin never could: affordable, local sourcing that lets her keep prices fair.
This is the first story in our new Human Interest Stories series, where we put real people at the centre of the climate and sustainability conversation. People, making choices, building sustainable alternatives, living the contradiction.