Latest news with #customclothing
Entrepreneur
5 days ago
- Business
- Entrepreneur
Her Dorm Room Side Hustle Led to $60,000 in Sales Overnight — Then Over $1 Million.
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. Want to read more stories like this? Subscribe to Money Makers, our free newsletter packed with creative side hustle ideas and successful strategies. Sign up here. " 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." Related: She Quit Corporate Life to Pursue a Side Hustle With Her Sister. They Saw Over $100,000 During Launch Weekend — and Now Have an 8-Figure Brand. 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." Related: Why Big-Name Influencers Are Losing Power — and Micro-Influencers Are Taking Over 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."
CTV News
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CTV News
‘Clothes are meant to fit you, not the other way around': N.S. designer creates inclusive clothing line
Navdeep Parmanand, the founder of Celebrate Your Curves, is pictured with models Jessie Taylor and Jaskirat Singh Pandher. (CTV Atlantic / Brianne Foley) Navdeep Parmanand has created an accessible custom clothing line in honour of her late brother who lived with muscular dystrophy. 'You're going to live on, through the people that I support in my life,' Parmanand told CTV through tears when remembering her brother. 'It's not that a legacy has ended, even though you're not here. I am supporting you and I see you in every person that walks into this world.' Vikas passed away in 2020, inspiring Parmanand to pursue something she always dreamed of. 'It was a lot of grief and a lot of pain for me. After I went through the grief period I was like there is nothing holding me back and I really want to do it,' she said. Navdeep Parmanand Navdeep Parmanand is pictured with her late brother Vikas. With the support from her parents back in India, she began Celebrate Your Curves. 'We create custom clothing for people of all shapes, all sizes and all abilities. So, we have some wool long blazers and we also have custom, made-to-measure full pantsuits as well and then we have introduced our adaptive clothing line last year,' said Parmanand. The clothes are designed to ensure everyone feels good in what they wear and the accessible pieces include Velcro or magnets instead of buttons. 'If I'm going out and I want to stand out and I want to be just my own self and my own body, I need clothing that fits me,' said Parmanand. 'Clothes are meant to fit you, not the other way around. So that's what kind of carried me into the fashion industry.' Parmanand learned to sew on her own at a young age and says creating the custom clothes is a way she is able to give back to the community and also her family. She designs the clothes and takes custom measurements and then sends them back to India where her aunts have a facility set up to sew the pieces. 'Creating meaningful employment for them and their daughters who are going to school. Because the area that I come from, it's still very backward, and there's a lot of focus on boys and girls and differentiation,' she explained. 'So, they create the clothing and I'm very happy to support their employment through this venture.' Parmanand is working to create a system that allows her customers to take their own measurements in the comfort of their homes. 'I'm also working on a third-party, 3D body measurement tool to be integrated into our website, and I recently got a funding for that,' she said. Celebrate Your Curves Celebrate Your Curves is an inclusive clothing line created by Navdeep Parmanand. (CTV Atlantic / Brianne Foley) She is also joining forces with the Dartmouth Adult Services Centre (DASC) to create clothes and inspire a love of fashion. 'The mission and the purpose is to amplify those voices and then work with people with disabilities,' she explained. Parmanand is organizing a fashion show event called 'Beyond the Runway- A Business and fashion Affair.' 'It's not a normal fashion show or average fashion show. You're going to see people of all shapes, sizes, ages and abilities. In partnership with DASC, clients will be our models, wheelchair users as well, and they're going to rock the runway,' she said. She will be shining the spotlight on other women in business as well. 'We're going to have about 20 to 25 women entrepreneurs at the booths to create an opportunity for people to come together and support those local women entrepreneurs and innovators that are right in the heart of Halifax,' said Parmanand. Even with all these things on the go, Parmanand said she's just beginning. 'I want to open a school someday,' she said. 'Vikas Rehabilitation School or Vikas Memorial School, to support children with special needs.' For more Nova Scotia news, visit our dedicated provincial page
