My Bootstrapped Business Led to $20M for Women Entrepreneurs | Entrepreneur
This as-told-to story is based on a conversation with Audrey McLoghlin, founder and CEO of Frank & Eileen, a women's apparel company committed to providing resources to educational institutions to support women entrepreneurs.
Before I started Frank & Eileen, I had already become a serial entrepreneur. My background was in engineering, so it's a wild mystery as to how I got into the apparel business. But I already had four multi-brand retail stores and another brand focused on knit T-shirts. I learned a lot from owning the four retail stores because I got to dress women all the time, and I also bought or got to go see every brand in the market. So I was familiar with the little holes.
Image Credit: Courtesy of Frank & Eileen
One day, I was working on a tissue-weight cashmere program at a factory in LA because I'm obsessed with sweaters, but I'm always hot. They left me in this conference room for too long, which was a theme in my career back then, so I naturally started snooping. I'm going around the room, pulling things off the bookshelf, and it was relatively boring until I found this book and opened it up — and I just lost my mind. There were beautiful Italian menswear fabrics. Tiny one-inch swatches of the most beautiful fabric I'd ever seen. I fell madly and completely in love immediately.
Of course, I'm like, Why is this menswear? Why are these not womenswear fabrics? These are fantastic. So when the guy finally came back into the room, I basically lost interest in what I had come there for and asked if I could borrow the book. He said it was old and irrelevant, so I was like, "Great, so you don't mind if I take it." I went back to my factory and called the mill in Italy. Now we've been partners for 16 years. I went from being their smallest client to their largest client.
I wanted to reinvent the button-up shirt for women using these unbelievable menswear fabrics. And because the whole thing had started as this immediate love story between me and these fabrics, late one night, I was in my factory thinking about what I would name the company — it had to evoke a love story. It had to be enchanting. I always like to name my businesses after family members, and I thought of my grandparents, Frank and Eileen. They were married in Ireland in 1947, and they lived a beautiful, romantic, old-fashioned life — I don't know if they would describe it that way, but they lived in a little stone cottage, never owned a car, just had a really charming life.
Image Credit: Courtesy of Frank & Eileen
All of this began to come together in the middle of 2008. I put together the sample, and when we went to launch in September, the entire world ended. We had the greatest financial crash in the history of our existence at that time. The economic collapse was devastating to me as an entrepreneur. I was bootstrapped always, and absolutely not in a place that I could withstand an economic crisis like that. Frank & Eileen was born out of the ashes: I lost everything in the process — all of my businesses — and went bankrupt. But I held onto the hope of Frank & Eileen.
I'm a very logical person, and with my background in engineering, I didn't see the logic in an investor buying into a consumer brand. There are so many other ways to finance it, so you don't need to bring on professional investors. I never really considered it. Once you scale a business to a certain size, it becomes very interesting that you own 100% because all of a sudden, you have economies of scale. You've got an incredible team and don't have investors to have a conflict of interest with. You don't have boards; you don't have to spend all of your finance team's time preparing board decks and financial decks. You don't really answer to anybody. You can make decisions that you believe are in the best interest of your stakeholders, team, customers and longevity of the company.
It was very clear to me that nothing like Frank & Eileen's product existed. We put these menswear fabrics into an hourglass silhouette and figured out an exact button placement that really opens up and shows the collarbone and jewelry. Then we did this special crinkle wash that was done by hand. We hand-crinkled every single shirt in the early years. They were basically all one of a kind and very well-received.
Then came the pandemic. In many ways, the pandemic was more acute than the 2008 crisis, but the 2008 crisis prepared me for the 2020 crisis. I'd learned to build a business with no credit and no money. Within 10 days of March 13, 2020, almost 100% of our orders were cancelled. So that was catastrophic to the supply chain, to cash flow, to the team, to everything. We had to do layers of damage control. We locked ourselves in a Zoom room to strategize the brand's next steps. One of the big conversations was shifting from wholesale (80%-90% of our business at the time) to direct to the consumer who was stuck at home. By doing that, we came out of 2020 stronger than we'd gone into it.
Image Credit: Courtesy of Frank & Eileen
I would say that 2020 goes down in history as the hardest year of my life, but because no one was traveling, commuting or working in-office, all of a sudden, I had this resource I'd been short on since the business's launch: time. I started to wonder how we could capitalize on this extra time and landed on the arduous process of becoming B Corp certified. That became a top priority, and we accomplished it. We wanted to memorialize that milestone, and after thinking about it for a while, we decided to establish the Frank & Eileen Giving Pledge. We pledged $10 million over 10 years to help create more women entrepreneurs.
The world would be a completely different place if at least 50% of the entrepreneurs and business owners out there were women. We'd live in a very different place. We'd be raising our daughters in a very different place. It was the right time to start trying to make that impact. We partnered with educational institutions like Babson, Stanford and MIT and set up an accelerator and incubator program.
We ended up giving the money away in four years instead of 10 years, so in January of this year, we announced that we were doubling our pledge — changing it from $10 million to $20 million as we continue on this journey to make a real impact.
Young entrepreneurs who want to start a business have to understand that it's really, really hard. And it's designed to be that way. In talking to young audiences, I've found that many people think that when it's really hard or when they fail and it feels insurmountable, that it's a reflection on them, and they think, I'm just not cut out for this. They always think it's their fault instead of the way it's just set up to be. So they have to understand that entrepreneurship is hard. But it's the resilience, perseverance and absolute determination that will help you get there eventually. It's going to hurt a lot, but that doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong.
This article is part of our ongoing Women Entrepreneur® series highlighting the stories, challenges and triumphs of running a business as a woman.
