Once the No. 2 apparel store on Etsy, Marcella is once again topping lists, recently taking the top spot in Inc.’s ranking of fastest-growing U.S. fashion brands.
A “mission-driven” womenswear label seeking to offer ethically made designer essentials at an affordable price, Marcella also earned the titles of America’s fifth fastest-growing consumer products company and 47th fastest-growing company overall, according to the 2023 Inc. 5000 list. For a third year in a row, it ranked first among the fastest-growing companies in Massachusetts, where it’s headquartered.
The distinctions follow several years of rapid expansion, with Marcella achieving 8,445 percent growth from 2019 to 2022, all while receiving minimal outside capital. The label hopes to surpass $100 million in revenue by 2026, co-founder Andy Huszar said. “We think it’s very realistic with the trajectory we’re on,” he noted.
Marcella’s recent explosion in growth follows many years of slow and steady expansion. Siyana Huszar, the label’s other co-founder and creative director, first registered Marcella—named after her grandmother, a Bulgarian designer who taught her everything she knows about fashion—on Etsy in late 2010.
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Still working in finance at the time—she never formally trained as a fashion designer—Siyana wore very utilitarian, mostly black suits during the week. On the weekend, however, she wanted to transition to a more minimalist, but unique style.
“My problem was that everything I wanted to buy was extremely expensive,” Siyana said. “And I was always wondering, ‘Couldn’t I do this?’ Like, basically, change this for millions of women in the States to help them basically achieve this quality and this designer aesthetic, but not break the bank.”
She began posting product listings in 2011, but these remained limited, only five to 10 at a time, for several years. The idea to turn Marcella—formerly Marcellamoda—into the growing fashion brand it is today came a few years later—on Siyana and Andy’s first date.
“Through the course of that conversation, we came up—probably after a bit too many glasses of wine—we came up with the idea of creating the next big impact fashion brand in America,” Andy said. “A brand inspired by Warby Parker, Patagonia, or many other sorts of brands that really were cause- and mission-driven. And hopefully one that would be oriented towards advancing women and girls across every aspect of what we do.”
Siyana quit her day job and began focusing on Marcella full time in 2014. In the early days, she worked with a “very small team” that basically consisted of her family covering the production and logistics in Bulgaria, while she designed in New York, Andy said. In 2017—the year Marcella became the No. 2 grossing fashion brand on Etsy—he quit his day job and the brand began making its first “meaningful” outside hires.
“We were crazy on some level, looking back, but we took a leap of faith,” Andy said. “We really thought if we were going to do this, it was going to be a kind of a two-person operation. And obviously we have an incredible team we’ve built now, but Siyana and I at the heart of it, thinking about all the different aspects of the brand.”
The ‘Bulgarian advantage’
Since the beginning, Marcella has had a “very core value proposition” around the brand: accessibly priced, but mission-driven fashion, Andy said. Though these two qualities pull against each other, Andy said he and Siyana have found success in part thanks to their status as fashion outsiders.
“Whereas it made the early days definitely more challenging, it has proven to be a huge asset to us as co-founders and entrepreneurs,” Andy said. “One of the realities of our business is that because we never used outside capital, we had the core mission of being profitable from day one.”
These constraints led Marcella to utilize a just-in-time production model that maximizes the brand’s sell-through rate, with 98 percent of what it makes selling at or near full price. The brand has also eschewed trend chasing, choosing instead to cultivate a relatively seasonless, timeless aesthetic and use sustainable materials such as Tencel jersey. The first dress Siyana designed, Andy noted, remains a bestseller 10 years after she conceptualized the Manhattan One Shoulder Midi.
“Because we are so efficient on the production side and because we’re able to be so profitable by not overproducing and not feeling this pressure to liquidate or to do these things that our competitors do, we actually have the profitability in order to invest more meaningfully in making sure that every one of our garment workers has a living wage, paid overtime, free health care, a pension, maternity leave or paternity leave,” Andy said.
At the same time, Marcella can benefit from what Siyana said the brand internally calls the “Bulgarian advantage.” Much of Marcella’s production takes place in Bulgaria, Siyana’s home country. The brand operates its own factory, but also outsources to 30 other factories, all located relatively near one of its main warehouses. This concentration of Marcella’s supply chain has helped cut production time “dramatically,” Andy said, with its products going from conceptualization to arriving in the warehouse within four to six weeks.
Marcella also managed to take advantage of larger brands’ departure from the European Union a decade ago. Since so many left, Bulgaria, traditionally a European textile hub, retained a huge, untapped capacity for textile production, Andy said. Marcella, consequently, was able to hire experts that traditionally worked with well-known luxury fashion houses like Burberry and Chanel.
“It also allowed us to work with incredible factories that suddenly were open to working with what, at the time, was a much smaller company,” Andy said. “And now we’ve grown with them. And when we talk about 30 producers, a lot of those producers, now we’re the exclusive clients of those producers.”
Transitioning from Etsy to beyond
Marcella remained on Etsy exclusively until the fourth quarter of 2019, when the husband-and-wife duo finally launched the brand’s direct-to-consumer website. After an auspicious start, Marcella saw sales evaporate in March 2020 as Covid lockdowns spread around the world. Having kept an eye on the news coming out of Italy, Siyana leapt on the idea of designing a face mask early on, she said.
March that year was a “disaster,” Andy said, but thanks to face masks sales, April ended up the label’s largest sales month up to that point. Then May doubled April. After $1 million in sales in 2019, Marcella raked in $4.5 million in 2020, about half of which came from face masks, Andy said. Though the company sold most of its masks in three to four months, customers who came for PPE stayed for Marcella’s clothing.
“It ended up being a massive brand equity building experience,” Andy said. “And obviously, it was so tragic and not to say that we’re proud of the circumstances, but we are proud of how we were able to pivot and sort of address the crisis, and 2020 began [the] incredible growth that we’ve experienced. And we’ve been drinking through a fire hose basically ever since.”
This year, Marcella expects its DTC site to account for 92 percent of its business. After years of zeroing in on its website, the brand is now looking to expand to new channels. In late February, it launched on Macys.com and has seen “a huge scaling there” in its first six months, Andy said, noting that the brand is also in “advanced talks” with several other marketplaces as well. In June, it opened its first brick-and-mortar store in San Francisco. This month, it attended Coterie New York, where, for the first time, it embraced traditional wholesale and pitched specialty stores, retail stores and majors.
Though Marcella anticipates DTC remaining its core channel, Andy said, its end goal is to shift it to just 75 percent of its business, with marketplace, drop shipping, wholesale and brick-and-mortar comprising the other 25 percent.
“Even as the website growth is the core growth of our brand and we see huge potential, huge ongoing growth on that side, we also want to meet more of our people wherever they are,” Andy said. “So we’re trying to be much more thoughtful and strategic about where Marcela is showing up and selling.”