Anna Bagozzi: A Tribe Of Her Own

Anna Bagozzi says the hardest part of starting up her own online fashion business was simply getting people to take her seriously.

 

"It's been so hard," Bagozzi says. "I'm, like, 27. I have a piercing. I'm kind of random. I think the business world is super-professional, super-conservative. And so many young people are like, 'Oh yeah, designer website, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do that,' and they don't take it seriously."

 

Bagozzi shows no such lack of genuine commitment to her own Web boutique, Tribehaus Clothing Co., which she founded last summer. The store's merchandise is cultivated from a selection of 16 different designers, emphasizing high-quality but affordable fashion that Bagozzi describes as "young and fresh and new." Those basic values in apparel also play into Bagozzi's fundamental business strategy: creating a full-fledged online "Tribe" tied together by her store.

 

"I wanted it to have more of a community aspect than to just be some store, like Nordstrom's or whatever," she says. "So that's where 'Tribe' came from. I wanted it to be inspiring. I wanted it to be more in-depth than just buying and selling."

 

A lifestyle inspired by fashion is only natural for Bagozzi, who says she's been fascinated with clothing and style "since I was born, basically." She recalls presenting a drawing of a pair of shoes she wanted to her mother at age four. The designing (and the shopping) continued through high school, and after attaining a printmaking degree from Vermont's Johnson State College she enrolled in a four-month fashion design program at the Istituto Marangoni in Milan. Bagozzi says her Italian sojourn was intimidating at first, but ultimately invaluable.

 

"It was really eye-opening," she says. "I met the greatest people of my life and I'm still in contact with them."  

 

However, upon returning to the states, Bagozzi says she felt a sense of disillusionment with the idea of a career in fashion. "When I got back I was like, 'I don't even know if I want to be in the fashion world,'" she says. "It's so fake and it's so cutthroat sometimes. So I took some time out for a while."

 

And that time out brought an experience that would give her the inspiration, and the crucial hands-on experience, to become a fashion entrepreneur. She moved to live with a friend in Tahoe, where she got a job working at a store called Angelo's Bootery. Bagozzi had worked in retail before, but the new gig gave her a fresh level of responsibility that she enjoyed.

 

"I basically ran the store for my boss and it was awesome," she says. "So I was like, okay, my next mission in life will be to run my own store. It's something I've always wanted to do."

 

After spending just over a year in Tahoe, Bagozzi returned to her hometown, Ann Arbor, to realize that dream. She took two jobs to fund the endeavor, enrolled in business and design classes at Washtenaw Community College, and began contacting sales reps at labels she wanted to add to Tribehaus' collection.

 

And before Tribehaus even properly existed as a store, Bagozzi got a running start with that crucial element for any modern business: the Facebook page. With over 21,000 likes, Tribehaus' Facebook community is large and surprisingly active for a new business. Bagozzi chalks that up to early crossover activity from her personal page on Lookbook, a fashion-oriented social network. As she was building the Tribehaus Facebook last summer, she encouraged her Lookbook followers to "like" the business.

 

"Everyone from Lookbook is from all over the world," she says. "So from the beginning it had this crazy international following and it just kind of snowballed from there."

 

One of the newer members of that international following is Bianca Muresan, a Romanian customer who discovered Tribehaus through Facebook.

 

"A friend sent me a link and said, 'Look, a shop that sells clothes that fit perfectly with your style,'" Muresan says. "I fell in love with this company, even if I'm from Romania."

 

Other international sales have come in from Singapore, Hong Kong, and Italy, and Bagozzi largely attributes the business' success so far to Facebook.

 

"It's my greatest asset," she says. "Eighty percent of the people who come to my site are from Facebook. There's a small percentage from Twitter, from Tumblr, from Pinterest, but Facebook dominates. I think I'd have, like, 30 people visiting my site if not for Facebook."

 

Bagozzi's also gotten vital assistance with the more old-fashioned business practices of accounting and finance management from her mom, Beverly Bagozzi, without whom Anna says it "wouldn't even be possible" to run Tribehaus.

 

The elder Bagozzi is more modest on the subject, though."I've helped her organize," Beverly Bagozzi says. "I've helped her stay on top of the finance end in terms of making sure she has all the accounting done correctly. It was a risk and a gamble, but I think this really makes sense for her."

 

For now, Tribehaus is a work-from-home business for Anna Bagozzi. But given the success she's seen so far, she's making big plans for the future, like designing her own "really cool street wear" for Tribehaus, and eying a small office or retail shop, perhaps in L.A. These days, the disenchantment she felt with the fashion world after returning from Milan is long gone.

 

"I've got that balance now," Bagozzi says. "I've created my own tribe and my own thing."

 

And that's an achievement that deserves being taken seriously.