Jenny Lei looked at the towering stack of cardboard boxes in her Hoboken, New Jersey, apartment. She'd spent $30,000 on handbags and needed a new strategy to sell them.
The 2025-26 FAFSA is open ahead of schedule — here's why it's important to file for college aid earlyHere's how Lei turned hundreds of unsold bags into a profitable luxury handbag company, despite her lack of fashion experience.In February 2019, Lei was a soon-to-be-unemployed graduate student at Cornell University preparing for a job interview in New York. She tried pairing three different work bags with her outfit, and none of them worked. One was too small.
The result"looked like a kindergartener's art project," says Lei. So when she visited her parents in Guangzhou, China, that summer, she toured factories that specialized in vegan leather. She chose the factory that was the most communicative and transparent about its working conditions, she says. Feeling financially pressured, Lei doubled down — ordering a second run of inventory, which featured a second bag design, and investing more into a harder social media advertising push.In 2022, Lei finally sold enough bags — largely through social media ads — to bring in $1.7 million in annual revenue. She spent that money, along with two loans from Shopify, on a broader array of bag designs, hoping to expand her target audience beyond environmentally conscious working women.