PC: CNBC
In 2011, Tori and Chris Gerbig were not setting out to build a large fashion retailer. They were a young Kentucky couple with an interest in affordable women’s clothing and about $300 to put into a small online venture. Writing for CNBC in 2022, Tori revealed that she was still working in insurance, at that time while the clothing business ran alongside their jobs and family life. Ten years after that first investment, the business reported $141 million in gross sales for the year, illustrating how a modest online shop had grown into a sizeable retail operation. The Gerbigs launched their eBay shop in 2011 after noticing that finding fashionable women’s clothes at relatively low prices was not always straightforward. They put roughly $300 into their first batch of clothing and accessories, buying stock through a wholesale website.
What began with listings on eBay gradually developed into Pink Lily, an online fashion company based in Bowling Green, Kentucky. At that stage, the operation was deliberately small. Tori continued working her insurance job while she and Chris handled orders from their living room. There was little in the way of fixed business overhead, although shipping costs had to be covered.
During the first few years, monthly profits generally ranged between $300 and $1,000. In 2013, Tori also created a Facebook group to promote the clothing to potential customers. The Gerbigs had accumulated about $20,000 from the business, which they used to build an official website for Pink Lily. By May 2014, Pink Lily was generating more than $100,000 in monthly revenue. After three years of running the business alongside her employment, Tori left her insurance sales job of earning $35,000 per year and began working on Pink Lily full-time. Pink Lily finished 2014 with more than $4 million in revenue. The figures were a long way from the $300 monthly investment that had started the venture just a few years earlier. By 2019, Pink Lily had recorded $70 million in total sales and brought in a minority investment to help support its expansion. PC: CNBC By the time Gerbig described the company’s progress in 2022, Pink Lily was selling more than 11,000 products on its website and had also opened a physical shop. The business employed about 250 full-time workers in Bowling Green, where it had become one of the larger employers in the area. In 2021, Pink Lily generated $141 million in gross sales, according to Gerbig’s account published by CNBC in February 2022. Little did I know, 10 years later, my husband Chris and I would be running Pink Lily full-time. Last year, our online clothing business generated $141 million in gross sales. And today, our social media audience has grown to 3.6 million followers. Participants received a 10% commission on sales generated through their promotion of the brand. Gerbig said the ambassador programme generated about $7.5 million in sales in 2021. The distance between Pink Lily’s first year and its reported 2021 sales is substantial. The company began with about $300 worth of inventory, a living-room workspace and two people managing the operation around existing commitments. By 2021, Pink Lily had reached $141 million in gross sales, employed around 250 people and sold thousands of products through its website and physical shop.
Tori Gerbig said, “At first, it was just a fun hobby. Their approach to pricing was fairly simple at first. Tori had no previous experience in retail pricing, so she based prices on what she would have been willing to pay as a customer. The business was not producing anything close to the figures it would later report, but it was generating enough to keep the experiment going. Rather than treating that money as household income, the couple used it to pay down student loans and buy more stock. The business began to take on a different shape as Tori spent more time building relationships with suppliers. She travelled to Los Angeles to meet vendors and began attending trade shows, giving the couple access to a wider selection of products. The group helped create a direct line between the business and shoppers, particularly around Bowling Green, Kentucky. That year proved important for the company. The move took the operation beyond its original eBay model and gave the couple a dedicated place to sell their growing range. The change was followed by a sharp increase in revenue. Chris followed several months later. His role centred on the company’s finances and operations, while the business continued expanding its product range and customer base. The company continued to grow over the following years. The Gerbigs still attended trade shows, but Pink Lily had developed a core group of vendor relationships and was working with partners on custom designs. That represented a considerable shift from the couple’s original model of buying clothing wholesale and listing individual items on eBay. The company had developed its own retail identity and a much larger supply operation. Then came the sales figure that put the scale of that expansion into perspective. Pink Lily’s growth was also tied to how the company used social media. Rather than treating platforms such as Instagram simply as advertising channels, the business used its audience to gather feedback about products and potential brands. Customers were asked what they wanted to see on the website and in the shop. The company could then use those responses when deciding which products to stock. The strategy extended to customers sharing photographs of their purchases. Pink Lily sent orders in branded bags and encouraged shoppers to post their outfits using the company’s hashtag. Some of that customer content was then featured on the Pink Lily website. Pink Lily developed a paid ambassador programme around some of its longstanding customers. It was not a small part of the company’s marketing activity. The model gave Pink Lily another way of reaching shoppers through people who already bought its products. Instead of relying entirely on conventional advertising, the company incorporated existing customers into its sales and promotional system. As Pink Lily became larger, the Gerbigs also looked for ways to make some of its merchandise less interchangeable with products available from other retailers. In certain cases, the company would purchase a vendor’s entire inventory of a particular item. That meant the same product could not simply appear elsewhere through another retailer using the same supplier. This approach helped Pink Lily assemble collections that were specific to its own store rather than relying exclusively on products that shoppers could find across multiple online retailers. Three years later, Tori had left her insurance career after the side business began generating six-figure monthly revenue. Chris then joined her full-time, and the company moved from a small eBay seller into its own online retail operation. The business had also taken outside minority investment and developed a network of suppliers and customer ambassadors. You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.
