Building a Fashion E-commerce Business and Surviving Covid: Go Dash Dot CEO Hannah Fastov (Part 1)

Excellent story of a fashion e-commerce entrepreneur bringing to market a range of new bags.
Positioning, customer acquisition, business development, partnerships – many topics are dealt with in great detail in this conversation. Enjoy!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

Hannah Fastov: I’m from the US. I always had an entrepreneurial spirit. I’ve always enjoyed making things and thinking outside the box. When I was in college, I started making beaded jewelry. Next thing I know, I’m selling them to my friends. I started selling them wholesale. Then I made a GoDaddy account and had a website.

Then I started drifting away from that, but I always knew that I liked that idea of creating something. When I graduated, I worked for a luxury fashion brand. While I was working there, I was waking up at 6AM every day to go to the gym and then go straight to work. From work, I’s be going out whether it was a networking event or meet up with friends and family. I couldn’t find one bag that could hold all of my stuff, keep it all organized, and look professional and fashionable. That was important to me.

I started asking around my coworkers and women in the gym locker rooms. What bag do they use? From there, I realized that such a product doesn’t exist and I’m going to make it. I formalized my research and took a survey of over 150 women from all demographics. That’s how we started designing our first bag. Originally, I had no idea if it was going to be a one-hit-wonder type of thing or if it was going to evolve into a bigger company.

I ended up naming our first bag the Infinity Bag. With the bag, the possibilities were infinite. Then I ended up deciding that it was going to be one piece of a larger company. My company was called Go Dash Dot. The full name is Dash Dash Dot Dash Dash Dash. It means go in morse code. That resonated with me. I love the idea that it meant go. This is your Go bag. I also loved that it’s Morse code because Morse code is universal.

Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking?

Hannah Fastov: I graduated from college in 2012. 2014 was when I started to have this idea. I had done a bunch of work in product development for my previous employers. I knew how to contact manufacturers. I was interested in making it in America, New York in particular. I had done a bunch of research on New York manufacturers.

There was one handbag manufacturer in New York. I had met with him for other projects. He was around my age. I probably should mention that, while I was in product development, I was not a designer. I didn’t know how to actually make the tech packs or the sketches.

I bought a huge black bag from a random store. I took tapes, paper, scissors and I glued it together to put all the pockets where I wanted them to be. I took my bag and brought it to this manufacturer. I was like, “This is what we’re going to create.” He was like, “No. I don’t know what this is. What materials are we going to be working with here?”

There’re a lot of handbag designers out there. For a bag that was going to be polyester, nylon, or man-made material, the cost was going to be very high especially if you’re going to make it in America. After that, I took a break.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Building a Fashion E-commerce Business and Surviving Covid: Go Dash Dot CEO Hannah Fastov
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