How this Gen Z founder got the coolest girls in the world to wear her jeans, from Taylor Swift to Hailey Bieber — and built a multi-million dollar denim brand

• Emily Bonvicini started selling vintage Levi cutoffs in 2016 while still in high school.
• Her brand, EB Denim, has since been worn by Kylie Jenner, Gigi Hadid, and Emily Ratajkowski.

Emily Bonvicini, the 25-year-old founder of EB Denim, was at a New York Fashion Week after-party last September, drunk, at 4 a.m., when she got a tip from Taylor Swift's stylist that the pop star was planning to wear one of her pieces.

"Oh, that's cool," Bonvicini told Business Insider she thought to herself at the time. "And then I wake up in the morning, and it's like, cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching."

The surge in sales was immediate, increasing EB Denim sales for the entire month fourfold, all because Swift was photographed in their Polka dress: a $495 patchwork mini dress made from upcycled vintage denim. The dress sold out the same day, including at the retailers who also carried it.

"It was insane. I just have never seen the power of celebrity like that," Bonvicini said.

Days later Swift stepped out in EB Denim yet again while hanging out with "Game of Thrones" star Sophie Turner, this time wearing the brand's full-length denim trench, which also sold out.

EB Denim is on track to do $3 million in revenue this year, Bonvicini told BI during a visit to her sun-soaked showroom in downtown Los Angeles this week. Located in LA's garment district, the bright, white space has tall ceilings, huge windows, and denim everywhere — on the racks displaying their products, in the rugs made of repurposed denim, and in the coffee table base that was filled with scrap denim and resin.

Bonvicini, who founded the brand while still in high school in Newport Beach, now has a small team of about six people working with her. Her designs have been worn by some of the most popular it-girls in the world: Hailey Bieber, Kylie Jenner, Emily Ratakowski, Gigi Hadid, Selena Gomez, etc. Her goal for EB Denim is to be the "go-to denim brand for this generation in a premium, cool way."

EB Denim's vintage roots, sustainability focus, and ability to get famously cool girls to wear their products could help her get there. A 2023 report by ThredUp found sustainability was among the top five factors Gen Z considers when spending on apparel, while the $21-billion influencer-marketing industry shows no signs of slowing down.

High-school hustle to million-dollar business

Bonvicini founded EB Denim in 2016 while still in high school after she had bought a pair of vintage jeans, cut them into shorts, and her peers kept asking where they were from. She started making some for friends and it was a domino effect from there.

"I've always loved wearing what no one else had. I would always rip up my brother's clothes and make them my own," she said.

She'd visit her grandparents in Wisconsin and go to thrift stores, where she could sometimes get a trash bag full of vintage jeans for only $8. She'd wash, rework, and sell the resulting cut-off shorts for $30 a pop, often in her high school locker room, and eventually attracted buyers from other schools, too.

After graduating high school in 2017, Bonvicini continued to grow her business while attending the University of Southern California. She was still reworking vintage denim, often doing trunk shows to sell to the sororities on campus.

In addition to making cut-off shorts, she started adding details like chains to the vintage jeans, or sewing and combining scrap denim pieces to create something new — like the patchwork dress, which is made from old leg panels.

But instead of pocketing her profits, she reinvested the cash into hiring PR experts who had the connections she didn't. That when things really started to pick up, after they started sending her products out to influencers and celebrities.

"You can't expect PR to work unless you have a great product," Bonvicini said. "Otherwise you're just wasting money."

Some of the first influencers to wear her denim were Danielle Bernstein, founder of blog and brand WeWoreWhat, and Chiara Ferragni, an Italian fashion influencer and blogger. Once celebrities like Beiber and Jenner wore her designs, that's when retailers like Revolve and Selfridges got interested in carrying her product.

Bonvicini said her interest in influencer and celebrity marketing comes down to who her personal muses are, summing it up as: "I think all these people are so amazing, and it would be a dream for them to wear my product."

Rather than sending the product far and wide to all kinds of influencers, she said she focuses getting the "coolest people" in it, even if they're micro influencers, as a way to elevate the brand.

The brand especially took off during the pandemic, when larger brands were having major supply-chain issues that her small, reworked vintage denim brand wasn't experiencing.

In the past few years, EB Denim has transitioned away from reworking vintage, with 95% of what they sell today being original, new products.

"Reworking vintage isn't sustainable on a scalability level," Bonvicini said, noting the variations in supply, color, quanitity, and size made it too difficult to keep up with demand.

However, she said sourcing sustainable denim is still central to the business. While the products are designed in LA, she recently moved production from LA to a facility in Pakistan in hopes of lowering the price points of her jeans.

The Artistic Milliners factory incorporates renewable energy and recycled water and is LEED-certified, which is issued by the nonprofit US Green Building Council for environmental design. As of 2019 it was also one of only 50 factories worldwide that was fair-trade certified, according to the United Nations.

Gen Z founder

There are challenges with being a young founder, especially leading a company she founded while still a teen. Bonvicini said she's never worked for anyone else as an adult, so there's been a big learning curve.

Once the brand had grown enough, she brought in people with a bit more experience in the industry and dealing with wholesalers, and she's inevitably learned a ton along the way. Although she does love being her own boss, she said it can make it easy to second guess yourself.

"Sometimes I do wonder, what should I be doing right now? There's no one telling me what to do," she said.

She also struggles sometimes with a very modern challenge facing many founders today, from fashion to tech: to be a founder, you almost have to be an influencer too.

"There's a lot of pressure on founders to have their own social media presence," she said, adding she's tends to question herself about it: "Am I funny or am I really weird? Does anyone relate to this? Do people hate me?"

"I just want to make clothes, not have to do a song and dance, too."

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