This week, a breakdown of the big NRF conversation about the technologies empowering entrepreneurs and, as a result, transforming fashion.
There’s a new path to fashion brand leadership.
That theme played out across discussions with brand founders, technology vendors and industry consultants at the NRF’s Big Show conference this week in New York City. Rather than working their way up a corporate ladder, more people are becoming entrepreneurs, leveraging digital tools and platforms to chart their own career trajectories. Increasingly, this is creating big competition for established companies stuck in old ways.
“Today, more people feel like they can be founders and entrepreneurs. It used to be unattainable or something only men did,” said Sara Foster, who co-founded the contemporary fashion brand Favorite Daughter with her sister, Erin Foster, and Centric Brands in 2020. “I never thought I could be the founder of a fashion company. Erin and I are actors — we’re not fashion girls.”
The Foster sisters, who have 1.4 million Instagram followers between them, have multi-faceted careers with roots in entertainment. They produced and starred in the VH1 reality show parody “Barely Famous” starting in 2015 and had acting roles in “90210,” among other TV and movie projects. Along with Favorite Daughter, their current focuses include Oversubscribed Ventures, their venture capital firm launched in 2023; “Nobody Wants This,” their co-produced Netflix show heading into its second season; and The World’s First Podcast, their weekly audio show.
For its part, Favorite Daughter did around $50 million in sales in 2024, marking year-over-year growth of 55%. Also last year, the brand launched in 350 specialty stores, expanding its wholesale channel which also includes Nordstrom, Shopbop and Saks. And it entered new product categories, including belts and fragrance. Expansions to the menswear, kidswear, beauty, undergarments and home goods categories are among plans for the future, as is opening a flagship store in Beverly Hills, set for early this year. The store is replacing the brand’s smaller Beverly Hills store — Favorite Daughter also has a store in L.A.’s Pacific Palisades.
“We feel pressure because our growth has [been rapid] from the beginning; that’s what we’re used to,” Foster told Glossy. “Coming into year five, we know we’ve got to keep innovating because we want to double or triple our customers. It’s daunting, but you can’t get too comfortable.”
Favorite Daughter’s growth is impressive, but it’s not unheard of in the current landscape.
“If you look at Shopify’s top 10 stores, most of them did not exist 10 years ago,” Harley Finkelstein, president of Shopify, told Glossy. “These are modern brands that got big in a way that [the industry had] never seen before, and they’ve stayed relevant. And most of them are founder-led.”
Launched 19 years ago, Shopify quickly earned a reputation as the go-to e-commerce platform for direct-to-consumer brands. In 2024, it facilitated more than $200 billion in sales, or 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S., second only to Amazon. Favorite Daughter is a client.
“The founder-led change in business is incredible,” Finkelstein said. “It used to be that founders were removed and adult supervision was brought in. Those days are over because no one is going to care more or learn how to get good at their job faster than founders. We’re self-aware enough to know what our deficiencies are, and we’ll hire people who are smarter than us to supplement those deficiencies.”
Favorite Daughter is a 50-50 joint venture between the Foster sisters and Centric Brands, which has an extensive portfolio of owned and licensed brands including Hudson and Hervé Léger. As described by Sara, the Fosters have operated as successful founders often do, taking a multi-faceted, hands-on approach to driving the business forward.
“When we’re seeing a slow day, I’m going to get on my social and [try-on] some pieces, or I’m going to ask someone else to post, or I’m going to call the store and tell them, ‘When customers come in, show them this,’” Foster said. “It’s strategic, but it’s also about making the customer happy and keeping the customer.”
These aren’t tactics that would show up in a large corporation’s growth plan, but they’re proving successful. That’s largely thanks to the Fosters’ large, engaged community across multiple channels.
“Favorite daughter is the quintessential example of modern retail: Sara and Erin started something from nothing and are clobbering the big, emotionless companies out there,” Finkelstein said. “While Macy’s is lamenting that their social media doesn’t convert and their brands are not selling, they’re trying to emulate what Sara and Erin are doing, but you can’t. The playbook is: Be real.”
Other modern retail success stories Finkelstein mentioned included YouTube sensation MrBeast’s Feastables chocolate company, inspired by his Crohn’s disease. Finkelstein predicted the company will one day be the size of Hershey’s.
“We get to arm the rebels,” Finkelstein said. “We get to give these people who shouldn’t necessarily be there the tools to get really big, really quickly — and allow the insurgents to become the incumbents.”
Roblox is also offering industry outsiders the opportunity to build flourishing retail businesses, through a Shopify integration it launched in beta in December. In addition to digital products, which Roblox creators have sold on the platform for years, the integration allows them to sell physical products to their communities. The functionality will be open to all Roblox users in the second quarter of this year.
The functionality has big potential for creators like “Gigi,” the now 17-year-old who started the fashion-focused game Dress to Impress in October 2023. It has since seen 5.6 billion visits and become a household name, regularly referenced in pop culture.
Of course, established brands also stand to benefit.
“Right now, we’re good at operating at the top of the funnel, [offering] brand awareness and affinity,” said Winnie Burke, global group director of fashion and retail at Roblox, told Glossy. “But being able to pull [Roblox users] down the funnel and offer that transaction pathway is going to be really instrumental for brands and allow us to showcase that ROI.”
There are benefits to fashion retail’s future being driven by folks less versed in its status quo. With the growth of subcategories including luxury slowing, it could use a shakeup.
“This is a very inward-looking, autoreference industry — historically, it has been the same pool of people cycling through the same brands,” said Gemma D’Auria, global leader of apparel, fashion and luxury at McKinsey, while referencing the company’s new State of Luxury report “But there’s a lot the industry can learn from [people with] other experiences. That includes creatives, and also [experts] in data and analytics, customer experience and engagement, and hospitality. Our hope is that, maybe because of the challenging times these companies are facing, they will be willing to do things differently and break some of these behaviors that have defined them in the past.”
More from NRF
Week in Review: NRF report, Proenza Schouler designers depart, the TikTok ban looms
Inside Fabletics’ plan to become a $1 billion brand in 2 years
How Pacsun is leveraging music, sports, art and fashion to fuel growth