MODCLOTH GOES FROM COLLEGE DORM TO EARNING $100 MILLION A YEAR ECOMMERCE BUSINESS

MODCLOTH

ModCloth founder Susan Gregg Koger has had a long love affair with thrifting and vintage clothing. In 2002, with the help of her then-boyfriend (and now husband) Eric Koger, she launched ModCloth, a simple online shop where she sold the finds she could no longer fit in her closet. She made a sale on her first day.
Today, ModCloth is one of the fastest-growing fashion and home ecommerce ventures to emerge in the past decade. The company did more than $100 million in sales last year, and is growing at a rate of 40% annually, according to a ModCloth spokesperson. (The same spokesperson declined to say whether the company is profitable.)


SUSAN GREGG KOGER

The business has expanded from the Kogers' college house basement at Carnegie Mellon, where they employed a student part-time to help with packaging and shipping, to 450 full-time employees across offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh.

Growing ModCloth in such a short span has been no easy feat. Earlier this month Eric and Susan talked about the company's early days and the challenges of scaling the business — not just in terms of new offices and employee additions, but also scaling ModCloth's technical infrastructure and improving its supply chain.