“This whole company feels like a joke I took too far,” says Penelope Gazin, founder of Los Angeles-based clothing line Fashion Brand Company. “I was up one night at 4 a.m. and wondered if ‘fashionbrandcompany.com’ was available,” Gazin recalls. “It was $40 on GoDaddy, so I bought it.” Gazin founded the company in her apartment in 2018, and if you type “fashion brand” into Google today, her business is the first search result. “I guess it worked out accidentally.
ADVERTISEMENT Gazin, the sole designer and fabric sourcer, is also a trained dancer and drummer for the band Slut Island. Her familiarity with live performance informs the costume-like creations, which feature few zippers and lots of soft, stretchy fabrics. Gazin then works with a small China-based manufacturing team to realize her visions. All employees work less than 40 hours per week with paid vacations, pensions, and maternity leave.
In L.A., Gazin works with a small operations team; she brought on four full-time employees in 2020 after becoming pregnant with her first child. She adores this “dream team” while still thinking fondly of the two years she spent running the company solo and shipping inventory from her apartment: “It was a nightmare hellscape that I actually felt very comfortable living in...