StyleSaint Spins New Yarn for Fashion’s Future: Will consumer inspired clothes unravel the apparel industry?

“We have an army jacket, because people are joining the SaintSociety Army, as either Sinners or Saints,” StyleSaint cofounder Allison Beal says gleefully. “After the jacket’s fabric is patterned, marked and cut at the company’s downtown LA factory, we send it out to a wash-house in the Valley to get enzyme washed. That creates the distressed look we’re going for.” Then we send it through to a rock and a golf ball wash.” She’s effusive, almost giddy, as she describes the intricacies of production: “I find it so fascinating,” she says, “everything that happens to create your dress.” She points to the roll of fabric leaning against the door in her office that will emerge as a maxi-dress in StyleSaint’s debut, 12-piece collection August 1st.

Beal in StyleSaint’s Venice office.

Consumers assume that if production is done in L.A. the prices will be too high. That’s not the case with StyleSaint: knowing what its consumers want allows the company to spend next to nothing on marketing, avoid wasting money on sampling and skip the wholesale to retail markup. “We’re able to pass on all the value that we’re saving by cutting out all those middle steps and middlemen to our end consumer,” says Beal. With those costs cut, Beal and her team can produce a lined, silk maxi dress with French stitching for less than $140 retail, which is about what you’d pay for one at Zara.

Zara’s an international retail power player that produces dresses in mass—by the thousands, if not tens of thousands. StyleSaint will limit its production of each piece to fewer than 1,000. Beal says the debut collection will showcase a $137 maxi dress that is unique in addition to its limited numbers, it’s made of Italian fabric with one of a kind mosaic design—printed on silk from a digitized image of an original painting.

“It’s totally defensible,” says Beal: “This isn’t something you can get better or cheaper somewhere else. We make it once in this fabulous mosaic print and that’s it. When we run out, it’s done. You can never get it again.”

Launchpad to Success: Tradesy’s Startup Story

Turning women’s closets into “cash cows,” was DiNunzio’s goal for Tradesy from the start, but launching the site and managing it post-launch hasn’t been all unicorns and photo shoots.

DiNunzio applied to Launchpad LA as a successful entrepreneur: actively running the profitable wedding resale site Recycled Bride. But running a successful company, even in the same market, didn’t make her a shoo-in. She wanted the $50K Launchpad would invest in if she got into the startup program. “I thought I needed exactly $50k to build Tradesy,” says DiNuzio.

She pitched Sam Teller, one of Launchpad’s managing directors “I told him all about how I had grown Recycled Bride to profitability with no funding, all via organic and viral acquisition,” recalls DiNunzio. “After the meeting,” DiNunzio says, “I felt pretty sure that I wouldn’t get in because I was a team of one, and Launchpad generally requires that you have a technical co-founder.”

“I had a strong feeling that I just had to get in,” says DiNunzio: she couldn’t face another “no.”

Tradesy Takes on Resale-Retail and Wins Favor With LA Investors

What do most entertainment industry professionals and startup founders have in common? They’re use to hearing no.

“I can’t count how many times I heard no after I’d given a pitch that felt like it went well,” says Tracy DiNunzio, founder and CEO of Tradesy.com and Recycled Bride. Trained as a painter, she funded Recycled Bride by selling her wares: working, as an artist DiNunzio got accustomed to hearing no. But, she says, even though she’d heard no many times before, she still wasn’t prepared for the knockdowns she faced when she sought funding for Tradesy.

“It’s unbelievable how crushed you get each time,” DiNunzio says.

Tradesy founder Tracy DiNunzio

She’s learned that getting turned down isn’t the end of the world, but a motivation to fight harder for her idea, to make it a reality for consumers—buyers and sellers alike. Hearing “no,” to a pitch was a challenge: it forced her to refine her concept for Tradesy, its market position and value proposition in a way that investors could get behind.

Tradesy Takes on Resale-Retail

Tradesy, based in Santa Monica, launched in October 2012 to fill what DiNunzio saw as a gaping hole in the resale-retail market: the clothes in your closet you’re not wearing, and aren’t likely to wear any time soon, present a potential cash cow. DiNunzio figured that if she could make an ecommerce retail-resale site that made it easy to list clothes for sale—simply use the Tradesy app to snap pics with your smartphone and list your item—and buy clothes from other people’s closets she could create a peer-to-peer marketplace where buyers and sellers would decide the “true market value, not obscured by the middleman.”