Recho Omondi

Recho Omondi (born February 20, 1987) is an American fashion designer and podcaster. After graduating from the Savannah College of Art and Design, she moved to New York City and founded the ready-to-wear fashion label Omondi in the mid-2010s, which she shut down in 2020. She launched the fashion interview podcast The Cutting Room Floor in 2018, which, , is released through Patreon. Several of her interviews on the podcast, including those with stylist Law Roach, blogger Leandra Medine, designer Steve Madden, and actor and businesswoman Gwyneth Paltrow went viral on social media in the 2020s. Through The Cutting Room Floor, Omondi has been credited by critics and industry observers with advancing an independent, listener-supported model of fashion media, distinct from traditional print and digital publications.

In 2026, Omondi announced a multi-year partnership with Patreon to expand The Cutting Room Floor into an independent media company. The deal, which Omondi noted had been passed over by legacy media outlets, will fund new content formats, community events, and expanded editorial programming, with initiatives set to roll out by autumn 2026. Leading up to this landmark announcement, the show had risen to the top 1% of podcasts on Patreon, with paid memberships more than doubling year-over-year. To commemorate this partnership, Omondi interviewed Jack Conte—co-founder of Patreon—on the podcast.

Early life Recho Omondi was born on February 20, 1987 in Tulsa, Oklahoma to Kenyan immigrant parents. Her family frequently moved and she was raised throughout the Midwest in Kansas, Illinois, and Michigan, also briefly living in Georgia. She also spent her childhood summers with family in Nairobi, Mombasa, and Kisumu. She became interested in fashion as a child due to her older sister's affinity for fashion magazines, including Elle, Vogue, and Interview, and the Canadian television series Fashion File. She later transferred to the Savannah College of Art and Design, graduating in 2011 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in fashion design and pattern making, after which she moved to New York City.

Career Design Before starting her own brand, Omondi worked in retail at Barneys, as a freelance pattern designer for Calvin Klein, Gap, Kimberly Ovitz, and Suno, and as a full-time pattern designer for Theory. in around 2013. She has described her brand as being based on her Kenyan heritage. It was the most listened-to arts podcast on Spotify prior to 2021.

In June 2021, during the podcast's third season, Omondi began exclusively releasing The Cutting Room Floor on Patreon. Omondi's comments in the episode about Jewish involvement in American slavery, Medine being a "Jewish-American princess", and Jewish people getting nose jobs and changing their last names in order to assimilate, also received backlash and were criticized online as antisemitic. The episode was later edited to exclude Omondi's comments and she soon issued an apology to the Jewish community, calling her statements "crass and reductive"; she announced the following month that she would not be releasing the episode's second part.

Throughout 2024, Omondi conducted interviews with rapper Yasiin Bey and stylist Law Roach for The Cutting Room Floor, both of which found popularity online. She also started a YouTube channel for the podcast in January 2024. According to Danya Issawi of The Cut, The Cutting Room Floor had become "one of fashion's most popular podcasts" by 2025 due to Omondi's "honest and straightforward" interviewing style. She interviewed fashion designer Steve Madden on a May 2025 episode of the podcast, where he discussed his imprisonment for securities fraud and criticized international tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump. Clips of the interview went viral on both TikTok and YouTube, with commenters widely praising Madden; online searches for Madden and the stock price of his namesake fashion brand rose soon after. She also appeared as the moderator for the first episode of Instagram's Ask It Anyway interview series in June 2025, which featured rapper Tyler, the Creator. She has also interviewed Gwyneth Paltrow.

In August 2025, Omondi posted a job listing on LinkedIn for The Cutting Room Floors full-time office coordinator, which was described as combining the roles of a personal assistant, bookings administrator, and studio coordinator. It prompted social media backlash against her due to its listed yearly salary of $55 thousand before tax with no benefits, which users widely criticized as too low.

Accolades Omondi has been included in the Business of Fashion 500, an annual index recognizing the individuals most influential in shaping the global fashion industry.