This week’s Campus Celebrities are Wharton Sophomores Adina Luo and Molly Liu, the masterminds behind Black Box Denim. They spoke with us about how they met, their journey to developing a one of a kind jean product for the masses, and where they plan to take Black Box Denim in the future.
Adina and Molly met freshman year and they said their mutual interests allowed them to team up and explore multiple startup ideas. They ultimately decided on custom jeans. In the summer of 2013, they both traveled to Guangzhou, China to build up the Black Box Denim supply chain, and they have stayed close ever since.
Adina, a California native, spent a gap year in Beijing, China before attending Penn to work at Piech Asia Enterprises where she gained experience in marketing and operations strategy. She then became a summer analyst in New York City at a private equity firm working with companies in fashion and finance industries. Adina currently studies Operations and Information and Management and Marketing. She is the Executive Vice President of the Marketing Undergraduate Student Establishment and Director of Marketing for Penn IAA.
Molly, from Ohio, studies Finance and Entrepreneurship with a minor in Mathematics and has interned in the past as a Financial Analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. With an eye and talent for fashion, Molly has designed her own clothes and created portfolios of her collections over the years. A few of her key pieces have even completed the “design-to-sew” process. She is the Chair for Penn Fashion Week, a brother of the Delta Sigma Pi business fraternity, and a founding member of Penn’s 180 Degrees Consulting.
What made you both what to start Black Box Denim? Was there a specific incidence, or story, that made you decide something needed to be done about jeans that don’t fit?
We’ve both had times when the jeans don’t really fit. I think everyone has felt that sort of frustration before, so organically the idea grew from there. But from the beginning, Molly and I knew we wanted to work on a start-up together – something fashion oriented. After a couple of iterations, we landed on custom jeans, and we started the supply chain and sourcing so quickly that we were well on our way by the end of last summer.
You had a Kickstarter campaign back in the fall. What made you decide that Kickstarter was the way to go, and since you’ve reached your goal, what do you plan on doing next?
We knew from the beginning that we wanted to bootstrap Black Box Denim. We did the financials and ran the numbers, and bringing in additional funding at this stage did not actually seem necessary. So from there we figured out how much money we needed to secure the supply chain and launch and decided that Kickstarter was the way to go. Kickstarter also served as a preliminary selling platform where we could test our idea, our brand, our messaging, and ultimately, validate our market.
The next step is really to launch our company this summer. We’ll really be diving into customer acquisition and building the brand. We’ll be working on Black Box Denim this summer, so keep an eye out!
What do you want everyone to know about Black Box Denim?
Black Box Denim – we do custom jeans.
Black Box Denim is taking on the great American issue: finding jeans that fit. Black Box Denim offers handcrafted, bespoke jeans made to your precise measurements, specifications, and requests. We are taking a traditionally luxury product and bringing it to what could be mass retail.
What do you two do in your free time when you’re not stressing over BBD?
Cook and watch The Mindy Project.
Make sure to like Black Box Denim on FaceBook and follow them on Twitter @BlackBoxDenim