Eleven years after its launch, the brand is growing quickly, with 20 retail stores and more than 350 wholesale accounts. In a Series A funding round in 2018, Bing sold an undisclosed amount of her business for $US15 million ($22.4 million) to investors including Index Ventures (its portfolio includes Dropbox and Farfetch), Greycroft Partners (a Goop investor) and Felix Capital (Oatly, SellerX). A second round, just a year later, pulled in an extra $US13 million. Retail expansion is high on her agenda.
Bing was always that kid playing dress-ups. The second youngest of five children, she was perpetually in hand-me-downs, a source of consternation that led to resourceful solutions. “I was always interested in fashion,” she says. As a kid growing up in Denmark and Sweden, and without a lot of disposable family income, she cut up jeans to try to fashion them into the style the cool kids were wearing.
“And I would invite friends over and get them to bring clothes they didn’t want any more, and we’d swap. I was always in my grandmother’s closet playing dress-ups, playing with her jewellery.”
Bing became a model and a singer, and moved to Los Angeles in her early 20s. On Sundays she’d visit the Rose Bowl flea markets, scouring the stalls for rock T-shirts and old Levi’s. A look was born.
“It was very organic,” she says now of starting her own brand. “People were always asking me about my wardrobe; they wanted to know where I found things. So I thought, ‘let’s make this ourselves.’” The business has grown in the same way, she explains. She added a children’s line when she wanted to clothe her own children, and activewear when she couldn’t find sportswear she liked. Bags, shoes, jewellery and fragrance followed.
What also helps is having an extremely marketable identity: beauty, of course, as well as a healthy dose of rock ’n’ roll insouciance. Bing is the cool girl at the table who invites you to take a seat and try on a blazer while you’re here. Celebrity fans include Meghan Markle, Kendall Jenner and Selena Gomez. But the biggest celebrity is Bing herself. She rarely gives interviews but is prolific on social media, posting images of her office, notes from her daughter, new jewellery from her collection.
“But,” cautions Bing, “it’s important that I don’t just design for myself.” Her own style is oft-copied but she is aware that not everyone wants to dress like her. “We need dresses, we need skirts,” she says. “When we first opened retail I could see that we had gaps and that there were customers who were not being served.”
Marketing oneself as merchandise is a slippery exercise; it doesn’t always work in the long run. Bing doesn’t appear in campaigns but her personal social media channels are flooded with images of her in the brand. She tells me that she will soon announce a new face. “I have always been front and centre,” she says, “And I make no apologies that it’s the only brand I wear. But it’s a fine line. You want to be a founder but [the brand] also needs to stand alone, on its own feet.” It is part of the business’s longevity plan, says Bing, to pivot away from, well, Bing herself.
The most successful influencer brands operate in a similar way: fashion editor favourite Envelope 1976 is helmed by the Norwegian influencer Celine Aagaard, but it’s not a fact that’s advertised. Australian Brooke Testoni, a former influencer, has an accessories brand called Rylan Studio that she runs quietly, without her own face or fanfare.
There have been moments of doubt, she says. Early on, the bootstrapped business had nearly run out of cash. “We had to decide whether we would buy more leather jackets or feed our kids, basically,” says Bing matter-of-factly. They bought the jackets, and somehow managed to feed the kids, too. “There is a lot of risk involved in having your own company. It paid off for us but it just as easily might not have, if we hadn’t then sold those jackets.” The risks only become greater as the business grows, she says. “Now we have 200 employees, which is a different kind of risk.“
A decade on, Bing is still excited to see the brand living outside the confines of her home. “I remember seeing the first store and thinking, ‘I can’t believe we’re not in the garage any more,’” she says. “And now I’ll see women on the street, and give them a little nod if they’re wearing the T-shirt or the boots.” Do they recognise you? I wonder.
“Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I like it when they don’t actually,” she says. “Because that means they really love the clothes, not just me.”
The winter issue of Fin Magazine is out on Friday, May 12 inside The Australian Financial Review.
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