Her Dorm Room Side Hustle Led to $60,000 in Sales Overnight — Then Over $1 Million.

Entrepreneur

5 days ago

When Ali Grace was in high school, she loved thrift shopping for vintage denim with her mom. She'd cut up old jeans and repurpose or tailor them to fit her. And when she went off to college at UMass Amherst, she studied math and computer science. But by her senior year, in 2018, she'd gotten a little bored with her STEM studies and started looking for a creative outlet.
She and her roommate started prowling thrift shops for vintage Levis and customizing them to fit the girls who lived in their dorm. Word got around, with more girls requesting their own custom jeans, and soon it became a side hustle, with Grace selling five to ten pairs a month for about $150 each.
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" I had this thing on my website where you'd do a deposit and you'd fill out a form with all your measurements, inspo photos, what you want, and then I would individually text every single customer and talk to them about their order one-on-one before I Venmo requested them," she says.
Around that time, Grace made her first wholesale connection. "I met this guy in front of a wall of Levi's at a thrift store, and he was like, 'Oh my mom has a barn of these.' It's crazy that the lady had the same birthday as me, drove the same car. She was essentially me but 55! Her name was Karen."
During that period, Grace also took a class called Creative Entrepreneurship, which she credits for changing the trajectory of her life. The professor introduced her to a local business accelerator, which she decided to apply for, and got in. From the top 300 businesses, she made it through multiple rounds of elimination to the top 12, and won a few thousand dollars. "It wasn't about the money," she says. "It was about proving that this small business had the potential to be something big and that we were on the cusp of it. Once I saw the momentum, I moved forward with aligrace at full force."
Image credit: Lauren Alexandra
The first couple of years after graduating, her business, which she called aligrace, was a one-woman show. She opened a little boutique in Cape Cod, and then moved to California. "I will say I was extremely profitable then, and our jeans were probably 30% to 50% cheaper than they are now because I didn't have rent. All I had was the cost of inventory, the labor cost of me working on the jeans, and the seamstress cost."
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Profitable or not, those years were a grind because Grace wanted to maintain personal connections with her customers. She texted each buyer in a kind of one-on-one consultation. "I remember I would stay at my office until midnight because I had to text everybody," she says. "Like, there are 75 people that I have to get through before I can start their orders! But it was really impactful and because when they would get their jeans, they would personally text me like, 'Oh my God, I've never had a pair that fit like this before!'
When the pandemic hit, Grace shut down for a couple of months to cope with the chaos. But when she was ready to take orders again, she opened her website around midnight and went to bed.
" I woke up and we had like $60,000 in sales in like 12 hours," she says. "At this time, I'm operating out of a shed in my yard. I have hundreds of Levi's, but I don't have a setup to accommodate like 300 orders in a day. So I got a warehouse. I expanded, I bought more inventory. I hired my first employee. I started hiring more teams of seamstresses. Things just really snowballed from there."
To the uninitiated, building an entire business on customizing vintage Levi's might sound like an impossible sourcing dilemma. But, as Grace explains, there's actually a vast Levi's wholesale market, with sellers all over the world. After all, Levi's has been making jeans since 1873, and their jeans last a long time. "All of the denim we have is 20 to 30 years old," Grace says. "We have some jeans that are even older than 30 years old and they really hold up."
In many ways, it's the most sustainable possible model for a fashion brand: recycling used materials, paying for local labor. But, unsurprisingly, everything about the business — from sourcing to the actual alterations — is labor-intensive. "One of our main wholesalers is in San Jose and he ships us like a thousand jeans at a time," Grace says. "We'll go up there on buying trips, which can be upwards of a 10 to 12-hour day. We drive up there with a U-Haul, dig through pallets trying to find grade A or B vintage denim. Then we size it, grade it and organize it by waist, butt and length, so when orders come in, it's really easy to find the sizes we need. Then we alter it to the desired style, with all the little extras — tilted pockets, split seam, unfolded hem, whatever it may be. It goes to the seamstress, and then there's a whole stain treatment process to clean the denim, since it's vintage. It's very hands-on and it's definitely been a grind to figure out how to scale this."
It was in 2020, after ramping up production, that Grace also started reaching out to influencers. "To this day, we haven't paid a dollar in influencer marketing," she says. "Everything is just pure gifting. I don't ask anything in return."
Image credit: Lauren Alexandra
And though it took a little while, those no-strings-attached influencer relationships paid off in a big way. Revolve, the online fashion retailer, had long been a dream partner for Grace. "I tried all my avenues of getting in touch with Revolve and everything was a dead end," she says. "Then one day, I think it was in October 2023, I had a DM from Casey, the denim buyer. She had found us on TikTok through Kelsey DiPrima, one of our OG influencers."
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Still, even if it was the dream, selling to a retailer like Revolve meant finally developing standard sizing — a departure from Grace's foundational concept of vintage denim customized to each woman's body. "That was kind of hard for me because I loved that we were fully custom for so long," Grace says. "But it's just not scalable, you know? So I developed our 23 through 35 standard sizing based on all of our customers' measurements over the previous seven years, and then we crafted these standard size guides. But you still have the option to buy custom on our website."
Since starting their partnership with Revolve, aligrace has also started selling at FWRD, the showroom Place, and recently launched with Anthropology. Last year, the company hit $1 million in sales, and Grace says, "I believe we can do $2 million this year with our website and wholesale connections."
For Grace, one of the most rewarding parts of her journey has been staying connected to the "ride or die" aligrace customers she was texting into the wee hours, six years ago. "Some have like 15 pairs of our jeans in their closets now," she says. "They're my friends. It's not possible for me to be that hands-on anymore, but if I didn't do it like that back then, I don't think we would be where we are today. It really developed a community of people who wanted to support us."