From Student Entrepreneur to a $15 Million Revenue Ultralight Business: Stephanie Madesh, CEO of Kalon Clothing (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Was the age group you were trying to go after your own age group?

Stephanie Madesh: Yes. I was going after the 20- to 30-year-old market back then. As it evolved, my customers base were more in the 20- to 60-year old category.

Sramana Mitra: How did you acquire the customers?

Stephanie Madesh: All customers were acquired through SEO. I was written up in the Wall Street Journal online and Boston Globe Online. 

Sramana Mitra: How did you get that?

Stephanie Madesh: Babson College has an amazing PR team. They help do the initial outreach. I was doing a lot of guerilla marketing on Myspace at that time. I had a lot of articles written about social media marketing and how new that was. This was before Facebook was available to everyone. I got a lot of write up about what I was doing with social media marketing.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. You were a case study of how a young entrepreneur was using social media marketing to market her company. That’s what got you those stories.

Stephanie Madesh: Yes. The website was also very search engine optimized. We dominated Google search from 2005 to 2007. We could attribute 50% of our sales from Google.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of things were people looking for that were coming to you in organic search result format?

Stephanie Madesh: It was mostly detailed descriptions of summer dresses. It’s more like search engine terms that we used on the inventory. We didn’t have any tools back then. Now you can see what people are searching and carry what people want. Back then, we were just guessing. Once we got a hit on spring dresses, then we brought in more dresses and called them summer dresses. In the fall, we’ll call them fall dresses.

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to get from zero to a million in revenue?

Stephanie Madesh: I would say it took about seven years.

Sramana Mitra: You finished college in the meantime?

Stephanie Madesh: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Great. Did you do this alone while you were going through college?

Stephanie Madesh: I was by myself all through college. It wasn’t until I moved to San Francisco that I got a full-time business. 

Sramana Mitra: Graduating from Babson, you moved to San Francisco?

Stephanie Madesh: I moved back to Oregon for a year. I hiked the Pacific crest trail for three months after college. Then I ended up meeting some great people from San Francisco, so I moved to San Francisco in 2009. 

Sramana Mitra: 2009 is four years into your startup. You finished Babson. You’re in San Francisco. What level was the business at?

Stephanie Madesh: We were only at $150,000.

Sramana Mitra: Were you growing completely organically?

Stephanie Madesh: Yes. At that point, I paid back my bestfriends. I didn’t have any loans. It was just taking every cent of profit in to reinvest.

This segment is part 2 in the series : From Student Entrepreneur to a $15 Million Revenue Ultralight Business: Stephanie Madesh, CEO of Kalon Clothing
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