You don’t often hear a CEO boast about how her Web site crashed. Yet, with pleasure, Andrea Marron ’08 will tell you about the day that her Internet service provider shut her down. For two years, beginning in her junior year at Rochester, the optics major from Pittsford, N.Y., has been offering customers the chance to order dresses that they design themselves on her site, Studio 28 Couture (www.studio28couture.com). On the day when Daily Candy, a fashion newsletter and blog, ran a story on her business, more than 15,000 people visited her site. In a panic, her ISP pulled the plug on her.
SUCCESSFUL DRESS: BusinessWeek named Marron one of the nation’s top entrepreneurs under the age of 25 for the success of her Internet clothing company, Studio 28 Couture (Photo: Courtesy of Andrea Marron).“The response was so intense, my hosting company thought it was a virus attacking their server,” she says. “Things really changed when that story ran. Daily Candy has a lot of readers in my target market, living in major cities: New York, Boston, D.C. Since then, a few other articles have come out, and orders have been pretty steady.”
This summer, BusinessWeek named Marron one of the nation’s top 25 entrepreneurs under the age of 25—she’s 23—in the 2008 edition of the magazine’s annual “America’s Best Young Entrepreneurs” competition. The 25 finalists are selected from a nationwide pool of nominees. It’s the kind of attention that might go to a young businessperson’s head and prompt all sorts of irrational exuberance, such as, say, quitting a day job. But Marron has no intention of devoting herself entirely to Studio 28. She lives in Middlefield, Conn., in order to work full-time as an applications engineer at Zygo Corp., a high-end optics maker cofounded by the late Paul Forman ’56. On weekends, she spends almost all her waking hours improving her site and projecting when she’ll make a profit: at this point, she’s hoping to be in the black by January.
“We could definitely do more than we do now,” Marron says. “We’re going to launch a whole new Web site soon, and that’s been taking up a lot of my time. I decided I wanted to hand draw everything on the Web site and scan it in.”
At the moment, Studio 28 isn’t suffering growing pains, partly because much of the process is automated. Customers look at drawings of suggested designs and then use the site’s interactive features to customize the dress templates. Once the order is placed, one of Marron’s two seamstresses logs in, downloads the design, and begins sewing. None of the process requires any attention from Marron. Turnaround has been fast enough to keep customers satisfied.
“I want to keep things with Studio 28 pretty much the way they are, but as automated as possible, so I have to spend as little time as possible on the daily functions,” Marron says. “Right now my plan is to keep doing what I’m doing. I’m learning a lot about business from Zygo: manufacturing, marketing, customer service.”
It’s still a low-overhead operation. She contracts with only her two seamstresses and, to redesign her site, a webmaster whom she discovered while researching other design-your-own-clothing Web sites.
“There’s a whole world of people who sew their own clothes, and I feel like I’m making that impulse available to more people: to have something handmade even though they don’t sew,” she says. “People want to be unique. They don’t want to walk in the same dress. They want people to say that dress is so cool, where did you get that?”
David Dorsey ’75 is a Rochester-based freelance writer.
