The NextWomen Fashion & Retail Theme.
From my experience as a young female entrepreneur
starting my own business, many questions seem to be asked. Most are due
to my age:
"Was this a school project that you just continued with?"
"Do you wear your product?"
Or how about this one:
"How old are you?"
The answer to these questions are no, yes, and 20.
In July 2012 the idea for my
swim wear
bikini line, Mprint Swimwear, was conceived as I was lounging poolside
in Charleston, South Carolina. I was on a summer vacation visiting my
boyfriend Cody Dragon. Cody was working as a lifeguard for his summer
job. So with that being said of course I would walk down to the pool to
to soak up the rays and lounge, all while staring at my studly
boyfriend on his lifeguard chair.
I was living the life, you could say. My attire to the pool yard was a
women in sexy swimsuits
bikini that had straps across the hips. I thought it was a cute bikini
because it showed some extra skin, but it wasn’t without the
repercussion of a funky tan design that was left behind on my hip area.
After Cody’s shift of life guarding was over I showed
him the odd shaped tan design left on my hip. I was complaining about
the tan to him when he said "Why not make swimsuits with cut-outs in
recognizable shapes so girls get tan lines they actually want?"
BING! The light bulb went on and we both automatically knew we had a great idea at hand.
You see, a trend with young females lately has been
tanning stickers in distinguishable shapes that they place on their
hip/stomach/butt area. Girls will also makes shapes of hearts,stars or
suns, etc. with sunscreen for the purpose of leaving behind a fun tan
design.
The issue with these tanning techniques is that you are
confined to your beach towel or lounge chair once a tanning sticker or
sunscreen design is applied. If you wish to be mobile or go in the
water you must start your whole tanning experience over again. This can
be timely and an annoyance. With our suits girls/women can run, jump,
surf, swim, etc. all while still achieving that fun and flirty tan
design you wish to receive.
We started working on the design of the
women swimwear
bikinis right away. We hopped on the computer and started photo
editing what our bikinis could look like. We were eager, enthusiastic
and had no idea what we were getting ourselves into.
From what started as a "Hey, why not?" idea, has
now turned into a swimwear company that is poised to disrupt the entire
swimwear industry.
We are patent pending in the U.S. and Brazil. If
someone would have told me 11 months ago I would have started my own
bikini company I would have laughed. But here I am working every day
building my bikini empire. I had a good idea for a product so I ran
with it. There were so many obstacles that we had to overcome, but we
never gave up.
Some nights we would come home from Los Angeles feeling
so defeated after wasting money on a prototype that didn’t end up
working. We believed in the idea of our product though. Cody and I
always had this saying of ours that kept us driven during the prototype
stages of our company "If someone can build a rocket ship that goes to
the moon then we can make a cut-out in stretch fabric!"
One thing I’ve learned from starting my business is
that money makes the world go round. It was difficult to raise money for
the prototype phase, Cody and I gathered about $15,000 throughout the
time period of nine months. This $15,000 was purely dedicated to the
start up stages of our business. Prototype testing took up most of the
money earned. The $15,000 didn’t all come at once though since we were
raising money from our families instead of an investor.
It was hard for our families to keep giving money
when over and over again they weren’t being presented with a working
prototype.
Creating a new product requires so much prototype field
testing. You are bound to fail time and time again, but it’s all worth
it when you finally achieve your working prototype. Even though our
families groaned every time they pulled out their wallets to put
towards developing the bikinis, they had faith in our idea and that is
why they continued to pour money into us.
As the months went on we finally had a working
prototype! We were beyond excited to bring our product to market, little
did we know it was a lot more complicated than that. Here we were, two
kids who had never known anything about the fashion industry before-
let alone the swimwear industry. We were wide eyed and thirsty for
growth. What started as an idea we had while tanning poolside, has now
quickly become my life long dream and career.
