Maya Caine

Maya Caine is a Master of Environmental Science candidate at the Yale School of the Environment, specializing in Industrial Ecology and Green Chemistry. With a background in corporate strategy and systems thinking, she has spent the past seven years building slow and circular fashion solutions that challenge the industry’s dependence on overproduction and waste.

Maya began her journey as the co-founder of Mive, a made-to-measure slow fashion marketplace that later evolved into Mive Labs — a circular design consultancy advancing the fashion economy in her hometown of Columbus, Ohio. In parallel with her entrepreneurial work, she served as an enterprise strategist at Nike, where she focused on circularity initiatives and textile waste reduction.

Currently, Maya is developing Helix, a city-first fashion marketplace that preserves the human stories woven into pre-owned garments, with the goal of extending the life and value of clothing. She also co-leads Moving the Needle, Yale’s sustainable fashion initiative, where she supports student engagement and interdisciplinary collaboration at the intersection of fashion, justice, and climate.

Her mission is to decouple economic growth from resource extraction by shifting incentives toward longevity, care, and circularity.