How I turned an Instagram page into a $30 Million Dollar Business

No rich parents, no investors, no hand outs, we did this ourselves DUH

I remember putting two photos up beside my desk when I worked at Complex. One was of Michael Jordan and one was of a Celine (Phoebe era) campaign. To me, the combination of the two photos was the perfect juxtaposition and had the feeling of exactly what I wanted to create— a merger of sport and luxury. I guess this was the birth of Sporty & Rich and the very first unofficial “mood board” for the brand. Let’s rewind a sec to how I got to Complex, it was 2014 and I was living in Vancouver working as a sales person at Holt Renfrew (they now carry Sporty & Rich— ayyy) and I somehow landed a full-time job working at Complex Magazine in NYC as an on-camera host and editor making $55,000 a year (at the time, this was more money that I had ever seen and I thought I was a fucking baller). I guess part of the reason why I got the job was because I had built up a relatively size-able Instagram following by posting a lot of streetwear and sneaker outfit photos. I wouldn’t say I was the first female who was into that world but I was definitely early on the trend. I spent my teenage years looking up to women like Vashtie, Leah and Tabatha from Married to the Mob, Jayne Min and random tumblr photos of girls wearing sneakers and Supreme. My job at Complex was to cover sneaker drops, album releases, all star weekend, brand launches and everything in between. I also hosted a video series where I worked out with celebrities— mostly rappers (DJ Khaled’s episode is still one of my favorite things I’ve ever done). Given the fact that I had been obsessed with streetwear blogs for years and cared about nothing else, I was living the fucking dream. On top of having the coolest job that any 20-year-old could imagine, I got to meet and work with people who I now call some of my best friends. I had the time of my life and I miss it everyday. But ultimately, it’s not what I really wanted to do or felt super passionate about. I always saw myself working behind the scenes or building my own thing. Complex was a means to get to where I eventually wanted to go. I’m forever grateful for the opportunity and without it, I absolutely would not be where I am now. I learned so much and was able to build an audience and following which I then leveraged when I launched S&R. Though I never considered myself an “influencer”, having a Instagram following and existing community certainly helped the brand in a big way and gave me a leg up.

The very first S&R pieces.

S&R initially began as an Instagram page. I was always a blogspot/tumblr kid and when Instagram started to replace blogging, I moved everything over and used the S&R Instagram account to post and archive all of the images I found and wanted to reference someday. I then began the print magazine, and published four issues in total. I really enjoyed it, and the main reason I started S&R was because I wanted to have something outside of my day job that I did just for me. In New York, there’s this feeling like you’re never doing enough. Time is an incredibly valuable thing, and I’ve always been intentional not to waste it. So I tried to do as many things as I could. I had my day job, I DJ’d on the weekends, and I did S&R at night and in my free time. Even though the magazine was somewhat profitable, it became too time consuming. I never got to the point of getting advertisers, and it was a completely self-funded project. After issue number four, I decided to give it a rest.

Sporty & Rich Magazine at Colette in Paris.

I then began selling some apparel, but on a very small scale. I would go to Modell’s in TriBeca and buy blank Russell Athletic t-shirts and crewnecks. I’d then bring them to this very sketchy place in Chinatown where an unfriendly older man would embroider them for me. I’d lug them back up to midtown (where the Complex office was) and ship them out from my desk. I remember going into the office at 7am so no one would see me (if they did I probably would’ve gotten in trouble.) I’d print the shipping labels, bring them to Fedex and do it all over again. I wasn’t consistent with it, but I did sell out of the 20 or so pieces I would make at a time. At this point I had been at Complex for a little over two years and was starting to feel like it was time to move on and leave media. That’s when the opportunity at Kith came up. I had met Ronnie a few times over the years— covering Kith product launches and store openings, and we had built a good relationship. I remember telling him that I was thinking about leaving Complex, and wanted to work on the brand side of things, as an art or brand director, something where I could work behind the scenes and create. We had a few meetings and eventually he offered me the job of creative lead of Kith Women’s. At the time, it was truly my dream job and I felt like I was on cloud nine. Although it was heartbreaking to leave Complex and the people who had become my family, I was thrilled to work for a brand as big as Kith, and finally do what I had always wanted to.

Prepping for the Kith NYFW show.

When I started at both Complex and Kith, I had no idea what I was doing. I remember my first few months at Complex were huge learning curves and pretty stressful. I enjoyed writing, but I didn’t have experience as a real writer and I had never been on camera before— that was a trip and I was terrible when I first started, those first videos of mine are probably so fucking cringe. Up until then my only jobs were working retail and working at my grandma’s bakery in Calgary. I struggled a lot and I knew that if I didn’t figure it out quickly, my ass would be on the first plane back to Canada. Moving back wasn’t an option for me, so I figured it out and turned a corner. From then on it was so much fun and I became kind of good at it. I found my groove and gave it my all. Kith was the same— I didn’t know anything about designing a collection or building a real brand. I was so green and really didn’t know shit about shit. I think what got me through was my sensibility, taste and ability to adapt and learn. If I’ve learned anything about myself it’s that if I want something, I’ll make it happen no matter what. Kith was really such an incredible experience and I learned so much. I got to see what running a real brand was like, how to work with a team of 30+ people, choose fabrics and trims, oversee an ecomm shoot, collaborate with other brands, work on a fashion show and so many other things.

Backstage at the Kith NYFW show.

Ultimately though, I realized I didn’t want to build someone else’s dream, and I wanted to build my own. I put S&R on the back burner when I was at Kith, because I really had no time or energy to focus on anything else. But after a while, I felt like I needed to get back to it. I went through a bit of a dark phase, and felt pretty depressed toward the end of my time in NYC. I had what I thought was my dream job, but I felt so unhappy and lost. I really missed my Complex family and I questioned if I had made the right decision. At this point I had been living in New York for 4 years. I think I got burnt out, and I felt so guilty for not feeling happy. From the outside, I had everything— so I should’ve been happy, but I felt completely alone and confused. I decided that I needed a break from NY so I went to LA to visit my friend Neek (yes, that Neek) for a few days. I had been to LA for work before, but this was the first time I really got to see LA. I remember driving around with our friends Alan, Faso, Ian and Justin. The Weeknd’s “Starboy” album had just dropped, and we listened to it on repeat while speeding through the hills and Mulholland drive. I truly fell in love with LA on that trip, and whenever I listen to that album I remember that week so fondly. That was when I decided I needed to make a drastic change and leave New York and essentially start over. I quit my dream job and didn’t know what was next, but I knew I had to take a leap of faith. I moved to Laurel Canyon with my friend Liz and got a 1992 two door G wagon (my dream car since forever). I consulted for a bit, doing art direction and campaigns for brands and some paid Instagram stuff here and there. I was able to dedicate more time to S&R, though it still wasn’t a fully fledged brand. But most importantly, I found happiness again. I felt like I could breathe and I felt at home in LA.

Me and my dream car when I first moved to LA.

It was 2018 and shortly after I moved to LA, I met my now ex-boyfriend turned CEO, David. He lived in Paris and had a brand called Harmony that I was a fan of. I remember writing about it for Complex when it first launched, years prior to us meeting (talk about full circle). Long story short, I began consulting for Harmony, helping with campaigns and art direction and we started dating not long after that. Though we weren’t a good match as a couple, we made the perfect team for building a brand. He knew about everything that I didn’t— production, wholesale, product and design. And I had the image/visual/marketing expertise. He pushed me to do Sporty & Rich in a real way, and he believed in the brand’s potential. For the first year or so, we did everything with just the two of us. I found a factory in LA and used their blanks and hired a guy to ship everything out. I did a few photo shoots for super cheap, handling everything except the photography. We launched the brand on a pre-order basis because we didn’t have money to buy inventory ahead of time. This is the best way to start if you don’t have any money, but you can only do it for so long. You also need to make sure there are no delays with the factory, otherwise it can quickly turn into a customer service nightmare— and it did for us.

The first Sporty & Rich office/showroom in Paris.

We eventually had to move away from the pre-order model because we were getting too many orders and the factory we were using at the time was constantly late and customers would complain about delayed shipments. I remember at the very beginning of Covid we got around $600,000 worth of orders in one day— this was like 20 times more volume than we had been doing prior to that. I was both shocked and excited, but I quickly realized we were not at all set up to take on that many orders. We didn’t want to cancel them, so we said fuck it and begged our factory to deliver the goods in the 3-4 week period we had promised our customers. While we were able to deliver most of the orders, nearly half of them got lost in the mail (this was when USPS had major delays and issues because of Covid). Some people got their orders, but there was also a huge fuck up on the production side, and the guy we were working with at the time printed our inside labels rather than having them woven (which is how they were always made from the beginning). We only found out about this because when customers would wash their item, the tag (which was printed in red ink) would bleed onto the rest of their clothes in the wash. Talk about a fucking nightmare. Not only did we sell them a product with a shitty label, we ruined their other clothes as well. I felt terrible and have never been so stressed out in my entire life. I was also doing all of the customer service by myself at this point, and we were bombarded with hundreds of DM’s and comments of people complaining (rightfully so) about their orders everyday. A lot of people were understanding of the situation but some were total assholes about it and I did say some crazy shit that I probably shouldn’t have. Pro-tip, don’t do your own customer service when you’re also in charge of every other aspect of your company and also have a bit of a temper (oops ^.^). This is when I realized we needed change how we did things and stop the pre-order model, change factories, hire a customer service person, and set up the back end of the company properly. Another learning curve, but goddamn this one hurt.

One of our early collection maps, now it’s almost 3 times as big.

There was a specific moment where I just knew that if we didn’t get our shit together, we wouldn’t survive. And it happens more than you’d think, brands grow at an unexpected rapid pace and can’t keep up with their growth. There were so many things we had to do in order for us to keep the brand afloat. Setting up the back bone of the company was one of the first steps. We decided to work with Netsuite which is essentially a business management software that organizes inventory, expenses, sales orders, online orders etc. I didn’t know the first thing about it and I remember doing daily calls that went on for hours with their team about how to implement it and set it up. It literally felt like they were speaking Chinese and I would just sit there and wonder what the fuck was going on. But we set it up, and they told us they had never seen a company implement the software as fast as we had. It’s crazy what you’re capable of when you’re desperate and overly ambitious.

BTS photo from the very first Sporty & Rich campaign.

After many more mistakes and hiccups, we slowly but surely got the hang of things. The brand grew and we produced more and more products, hired a few more people and started selling to wholesalers. For a while, we used a lot of Harmony’s team and resources to run the brand. We shared a showroom in Paris and because Harmony had already been wholesaling for years, a lot of their clients became our clients and bought into both brands. I continued handling everything to do with image, campaigns, marketing, product, strategy, design and social and it started to become a real business. I remember having so many pinch-me moments, and still do. I never thought S&R would turn into what it is today and it still surprises me that it’s come this far. Not because I didn’t believe in the brand or myself, but I guess because it seems surreal that there’s enough people out there who want to support what we’ve built and created. What started as a few images pinned to my desk is now a profitable, global brand with over 120 wholesale accounts, a flagship store in SoHo, 40+ employees, an office on Avenue Montaigne in Paris, and collaborations with some of the biggest brands in the world. I can obviously recognize how privileged I am and that I’ve been Incredibly lucky for the opportunities I’ve been given. But I also attribute a lot of our success to right time, right place, a bit of luck, hard work and authenticity. I feel what I’ve done well is had a clear vision of what this brand is and what I wanted it to be. I think it’s much easier to pursue a dream when you know exactly what that dream looks and feels like. When you’re clear about this, you’re able to execute on a more efficient level. Often times, people lose their way because they don’t know what it is that they want or what they’re looking for. And while the brand has evolved, the goal has always remained the same- to create something that feels true to who I am and to make products I want to own, to create images that excite and inspire me, to build a world/identity that is aligned with my personal interests and values and above all else, to maintain an unbridled state of happiness by doing what I love. Because chances are if you love what you do, you’ll do it well. I don’t know what the secret to success is, or if there even is one, but if you can wake up everyday, do what you love and make a living off of it, then I’d say you’ve found it.

Our flagship store in SoHo shortly after I signed the lease.