International Women’s Day is a time that has more recently come to be known for championing causes, protests and rallies rather than a day to celebrate womanhood in all its forms. More so due to recent politically driven campaigns and high-profile scandals, a holiday once earmarked as a celebration of women’s suffrage has turned to cries of women suffering. However, in some industries, like fashion, women have a large and powerful voice, both in what is said and what is created.
Rather than evangelize the well-documented and unjust impositions that still plague far too many mothers, sisters and daughters, we are taking this opportunity to highlight ten inspiring female entrepreneurs who are building their own fashion empire. Some of these names will leap out, although we excluded the well-knowns, and others may be a pleasant surprise, but here are ten women who are utilizing fashion as their way of showing what women are truly capable of.
Jessie Zheng, CEO of Choosy
Jessie Zheng is one of those young women who has always been a “fashionista” with propensity to covet the styles that celebrities elect to wear. Thus, Choosy had to be a little more, well, choosy in how it interpreted fashion. Indeed, there is a social / viral component to how Jessie’s brand operates. In addition to customer shout outs (tagging @choosy) of designs they love in the comments of other designs on Instagram, the brand closely monitors popular / trending styles as seen on celebrities like Zendaya, Gigi Hadid or Kylie Jenner. Due to existing familial relationships with factories in China (likely the same ones producing the original garments), Jessie and her team can turn around “trending” styles in as little as one week. It’s the digital equivalent of the famous Inditex model that made Zara a champion in the fast fashion space.
Prior to launching Choosy, Jessie worked as a trader at Citi before returning to China to help with her family business; one of China’s largest textile manufacturing firms. Evidently, Jessie’s interest in fashion (she had a fashion blog centered on footwear) and experience with AI lead to the creation of this on-demand trend-driven shopping platform. Notably, the Choosy team looks at celebrity-sourced styles as more of an inspiration for their fashion, rather than a direct model, as that can lead to complications. In fashion, there’s a saying: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”. If so, Jessie’s fashion empire is a true homage to designers from all walks of life.
Learn a bit more about Jessie Zheng and Choosy in this recent Racked article or this Fashionista article.
Amanda Curtis and Gemma Sole, CEO & COO of Nineteenth Amendment
One of our favorite young entrepreneurs is Amanda Curtis, Co-Founder (along with COO Gemma Sole) and CEO of Nineteenth Amendment, a true end to end product lifecycle management platform that is paving the way for a more sustainable future for emerging designers. Nineteenth Amendment, launched in 2014, has been home to over 1,000 designers from over 30 countries, helping them to launch pre-sale collections, gather market data and build an audience without any limitations or minimum order quantities. Along the way, they are resuscitating American manufacturing and partnering with institutions such as the CFDA. No big deal!
While we’ve often confused Amanda and Gemma for being related (they will tell you they are not), this is actually their first joint venture. Amanda has worked for multiple brands such as Alistair Archer and Diane von Furstenberg, developing a tacit understanding of what advantages were required for a successful fashion designer before meeting Gemma through the Harvard Innovation Lab (a tech incubator out of Harvard University). We’ve had the pleasure of meeting some of the amazing and creative designer talent that uses Nineteenth Amendment’s software and they commonly utilize words such as “community”, “family” and “partners” when referring to Amanda and Gemma. For an organization that essentially empowers hundreds of female entrepreneurs, this can only be considered a good thing.
Julia Lam, CEO of Tara & Co
Fun fact, Julia Lam is an ex-product marketer from Facebook turned fashion entrepreneur and that’s probably the first thing she would tell you as well. At first glance, Tara & Co may seem like “another” functional handbag company, helping women collate, segment and simply organize their necessities. These handbags, or rather bags, as they offer bookbags as well, also have the versatility to function as day to night transitionary accessories, with either a zipping or snapping capability for each daypart. Need more storage for a laptop and reading material? Zip the Tara bag together and you’re good to go. Quick cocktails function after work? That same bag can become a cute clutch. Stylish right?
Women in high profile roles often have to juggle multiple responsibilities, managing and executing roles that typically require interdepartmental coordination; flying from boardroom to conference room to social events and back, traditionally in heels and with the expectation that they look immaculate doing so. Women also tend to have to carry items men usually don’t such as feminine hygiene, makeup, extra pairs of shoes, etc. while still packaging business essentials such as a phone, laptop, tablet, notepad, charging cords and more. Julia sought to solve all these problems in a single go and has had two amazing IndieGogo campaigns and over $150,000 raised to date.
What if we also told you that Tara & Co fights for women’s rights and gender equality in the workplace, particularly in the “boys club” industries of tech and finance? Yeah, we find Julia super inspiring as well.
Audrey Gelman and Lauren Kassan, Co-CEOs of The Wing
This might be a little stretch here as those who know of The Wing know that it isn’t a fashion company. However, the female only co-working space is the foundation for many a fashion entrepreneur and thus gets fair billing. At a time when Adam Neumann and Amol Sarva were (and still are) dominating headlines in the co-working industry, Gelman and Kassan’s female-focused coworking spaces grew a cult following for allowing the ladies to exist on level footing. But The Wing has evolved into so much more.
Presently, the 32-year-old women oversee a network of interconnected event, co-working and social spaces for women in New York, Washington D.C. and San Francisco. Their vision of creating of space for women not only to work, but to gather and cultivate unique relationships has been achieved, as the venue now boasts close to 6,000 members. For many of its female tenants, The Wing indeed feels like a home away from home and the passion of Gelman and Kassan in sustaining this sentiment is evident in everything they do.
Michelle Cordeiro Grant, CEO of Lively
Victoria Secret is the definition of a household name. In most households, the brand is likely well known by anyone with a pulse, worn by the women with a pulse and flaunts ambassadors followed by men with a pulse. Surprisingly, the forty-two-year-old brand has been conspicuously devoid of scandal, which is likely the only reason it still exists today. In contemporary setting, Victoria Secret is known as body shaming, tone deaf, antiquated and male focused, allowing for brands like Lively (and ThirdLove and Negative Underwear and True & Co) to thrive. In fact, despite being a Victoria Secret alumnus, Michelle Cordeiro Grant learned more about building a lingerie brand as the VP of Merchandising at media startup Thrillist. This experience acted as a springboard to launch Lively, although if you hear her say it, she had no idea what she was doing.
Grant, cognizant of her inexperience running a business, created a network of colleagues she could quickly turn to whenever there were business dilemmas. She also focused on creating a brand that customers turned to due the community and feeling the brand created, rather than the sale or discount Lively offered. Judging by the growth Lively has experienced in the past three years, Grant’s gamble has paid off. It also doesn’t hurt that the brand doesn’t do any sort of discount or sales, maximizing the return that Michelle and her investors will see in the future. Definitely the makings of a fashion empire!
Learn a bit more about Michelle Cordeiro Grant in this recent PopSugar article.
Melissa Mash, Deepa Gandhi, and Jessy Dover, CEO, COO & Creative Director of Dagne Dover
So technically, Melissa, Deepa and Jessy make three fashion entrepreneurs but the end product of their brain trust is charming Dagne Dover. We had the fortune of meeting these incredible young women during one of their very early brand events at a Chelsea WeWork space and they’ve done nothing short of more amazing work since then. With education from schools such as Wharton and Parsons and experience at Coach and Club Monaco among others, these ladies certainly possess the pedigree to design luxury grade women’s handbags and are doing just so.
Their startingly accessible handbags, totes, crossbodies and other leather accessories retail from $40 – $400, with most priced in the sub-200 range. This makes Dagne Dover perfect for the working women on the go who appreciates the style and function of a Coach handbag without the cost. While the brand started in 2012, Dagne Dover has grown, as has the leadership, confidence and capability of this exciting trio. Once an e-commerce only brand, Dagne Dover was able to expand to Bandier, Equinox and more recently a large number of Nordstrom stores all across the nation. If good things come in pairs, then Mash, Gandhi and Dover are the epitome of greatness.
Learn a bit more about Melissa Mash, Deepa Gandhi, and Jessy Dove in this recent Forbes article.
Kevwe Mowarin, CEO of Koviem
University of Texas alum Kevwe Mowarin will shock you at first. Not for her calm and collected demeanor. Not for her strategic and methodological approach to developing her label or for the fun story behind Koviem. Not even for her surprisingly consistent understanding of what it takes to grow a startup. No, Kevwe will shock you because at her age, all these things are unexpected, particularly in such a stylish package. At only 24, Kevwe has already had a career pivot, going from finance to fashion in a story better told by Teen Vogue or CNBC (among others). The less shocking bit was Kevwe buying her first custom suit at the tender age of 19, which planted the seed for her fashion empire.
Part of Kevwe’s natural confidence comes from have reviewed practices of luxury fashion houses while studying abroad in Milan for almost a year. Inevitably, it was her transition from Credit Suisse to the startup world (Etsy) that truly allowed for Kevwe to grow the brand to the heights it enjoys now. Koviem has expanded bit by bit over the past three years, launching with two custom suits for women, the Millennial and the Manhattan to expand to now seven styles including the Cape Cod, Monrovia, Milano, Silk and Windowpane Suit. One thing’s for sure, if this rate of growth can be sustained, Koviem will surely become a force in the women’s custom suiting industry; perfectly timed with womankind’s continued ascent to more visible positions of power in politics, technology and other traditionally male-dominated fields.
Melanie Elturk, Haute Hijab
One of the oldest companies on our list (at the wizened age of nine years old), Haute Hijab has no doubt been an inspiration to millions of Muslim women residing in America, even if they have not heard of the brand. The label is extremely popular with those who are looking to express themselves fashionably but modestly. In a world where the option is often basic or monochrome, Melanie has been active in driving conversations to combat the stigma of the hijab. Over the years Melanie’s hijabs have become the unofficial dress code of powerful Muslim women all over the US, alongside validation from Elle, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue to name a few.
Even more amazing, Melanie and her husband, Ahmed Zehman, recently secured a round of funding to fuel growth at the company. While this isn’t unheard of, non-technology related fashion brands typically don’t receive venture capital and we’re fairly confident the barrier is even higher for fashion brands specific to the Muslim community. None of this has stopped Melanie from playing with silks, chiffons and satins in her quest to launch the next stylish luxury hijabs. Fashion empire indeed!
So, while we may have went a little overboard and shared twelve inspiring female entrepreneurs who are building their fashion empires, we hope you don’t mind. Instead, we hope you take advantage of International Women’s Day and even Women’s History Month to share the stories of other women doing amazing things. You can even start with the comments below!
Featured Image: Tara & Co
