Inside Fashion’s LA Entrepreneurship Boom

LOS ANGELES — Like many working in the American fashion industry, Alyssa Wasko started her career in New York.

At the time, it felt like the right place to grow her label, Donni, which began as a side hustle selling scarves, then bandeau tops and knit pants, cotton-cashmere sweaters and jersey shirts. But in seeking out a manufacturer, she landed on Los Angeles, with its speciality in knits.

Once her clothes were being made out west, it made sense to relocate adjacent parts of the business there too, including logistics and operations. Soon, Wasko decided to move the entire business — and herself — to LA full time.

“I was going back upwards two times a month to a point where it was just not sustainable,” said Wasko. “Their production makes sense for us, so I followed that.”

Wasko is part of a new wave of fashion founders that has landed on Los Angeles as the best place to build their business. The city has a history of producing fashion success stories, in particular notable sellers of t-shirts (think Ed Hardy or Michael Stars) and denim (Citizens of Humanity or Seven for All Mankind). Over the past decade, that list has multiplied, and expanded far beyond that historic specialisation. There’s the multi-brand e-tailer Revolve; the sustainability-focused Reformation; grunge-inspired Amiri; streetwear label Fear of God; the Kardashian-backed denim seller Good American and shapewear behemoth Skims; and many more.

As LA-based brands like Doên and Buck Mason, which were both founded in the 2010s, are expanding their retail footprint nationwide, the next generation is gaining traction. Labels founded in the 2020s, including PerfectWhiteTee, which sells T-shirts and sweats, footwear brand Jamie Haller, whose unstructured loafers have become an influencer favourite and accessories company Heaven Mayhem, are growing sales and popularity. At the same time, brands as varied as New York Fashion Week mainstay Simkhai and Dairy Boy, the apparel and homewares line from influencer Paige Lorenze, have moved their headquarters to LA, too.

Many brand founders are, like Wasko, attracted to the city’s unique capacity for both making fashion (its garment factories employ 45,000 workers, more than any other US city), and, as the centre of the global entertainment business, to market it. They see the city’s lack of traditional industry connections as a feature, not a bug — no pressure to stage expensive fashion shows, and it’s easy to find allies in the smaller fashion scene.

“Everybody knows everybody, and it’s a very close community,” said Jen Menchaca, founder of PerfectWhiteTee, which manufactures in Los Angeles. “As an entrepreneur, once you get a taste of what you can do here, you start learning about a fabric or a vendor, about other companies, all within this area, it starts feeling attainable.”

Whether that will remain true under President-elect Donald Trump is the big question. Trump’s campaign vow to slap tariffs on imports from China would significantly boost the appeal of LA factories, and his opposition to a TikTok ban leaves the city’s influencer culture intact.

Tariffs “may help domestic manufacturing … with more nearshoring taking place,” said Jennifer Evans, founder of The Evans Group, a California-based manufacturing company.

Less welcome is his pledge to deport undocumented workers and restrict immigration, which could upend the sector’s workforce.

“Los Angeles has the strongest workforce for the industry, and it is proudly based on an immigrant population that has a work ethic like no other,” she added. “If this is taken away … it will be a rude awakening to the reality of the domestic workforce.”

The Culture of LA

Living in the celebrity capital of the world means that LA founders are more likely to be a friend (or friend of a friend) of someone famous.

Shea Marie, the founder of swim brand Same, for example, said that many of her brand’s earliest high-profile advocates were people she knows personally. “I lived in LA for a long time, I had a lot of amazing connections to begin with,” she said, adding that helped drive enough organic buzz she didn’t have to invest in paid marketing in the brand’s earliest days. Today, Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, Hailey Bieber and Kaia Gerber are all Same customers.

But more than just being surrounded by celebrities, there are also countless examples of people in LA working non-traditional, creative jobs with irregular hours and plenty of rejection — founding a company is a similar experience. Meanwhile, the rise of professional content creators in the city have also exhibited the potential payoff of leveraging social media to build a brand, whether it’s selling your own product or someone else’s.

The fact that so many in the city face these realities in their day-to-day life — or have seen them in the lives of their friends and neighbours — impacts the overall culture.

“You can see people doing things on their own very easily here,” said Jamie Haller, a lifelong Angeleno who founded her eponymous footwear brand in 2020 and expanded ready-to-wear earlier this year. “It’s lots of people doing creative things. I hardly know anyone who has a normal corporate job.”

Being removed from the central hubs for capital-F fashion inevitably makes for less pressure on a growing business. Many young fashion businesses in LA don’t feel they need to put on a runway show — a tremendous expense for an emerging brand with a limited marketing budget. (There is an LA Fashion Week, but it is a relatively small-scale event.) Though they increasingly host events and activations, the circuit isn’t quite as packed as it is in New York. There’s also, frankly, less competition, making it easier to stand out.

“You don’t have to conform to the rules as much as you do in New York,” said Wasko. “Here, we follow our own rulebook, and it changes a lot. It’s fun to have that flexibility.

At the same time, though, Los Angeles offers plenty of access to people with the power to boost their business. Because of the city’s close proximity to Hollywood and more recently, its status as a hub for social media creators and influencers, LA-based brands are oftentimes more quickly noticed by celebrities, who can in turn drive organic growth.

Even without the celebrity connection, there’s a greater understanding that founders in the city have around using social media to grow a burgeoning business. Hopeful founders are surrounded by people who have managed to use Instagram or TikTok to their advantage.

A Manufacturing Hub

In a more practical sense, Los Angeles is also a major apparel manufacturing hub. It represents 83 percent of the nation’s cut-and-sew apparel sales and produces over $15 billion worth of product each year, according to the California Fashion Association. Because many LA brands produce locally, they’re able to develop a closer relationship with their manufacturers.

“The fact that I can drive downtown and find a clothing supplier, a jewellery manufacturer or a leather supplier, all within less than an hour’s drive from my house is crazy,” said Pia Mance, the founder of accessories label Heaven Mayhem. She manufactures belts and lanyards in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles factories are also particularly well suited to working with emerging brands. Production costs are pricier than they would be overseas, but they’re less expensive than they are in New York, where employees are typically unionised. The manufacturers in LA also typically require smaller minimum orders, which means that they often end up spending the same amount of money they would if they produced overseas, but are able to be more directly involved in the manufacturing process.

“It makes more sense to launch where everything’s really tightly controlled, as opposed to this far-off system with bulk goods that you’re oftentimes not even 100 percent approving,” said Evans.

Having manufacturing nearby also allows businesses to make quick changes, said Wasko, and react to customer demand in real time. She’s worked with her manufacturers to perfect the shrinkage in its fabrics, such as the baby rib it uses in its Scallop lounge pant, and is able to get new products to market in six to eight weeks, versus the months it takes with overseas factories.

Founders say there’s a sense that in LA, the industry — from brands to manufacturers — is in it together; if one of them does well, it’s a boost for the city’s entire fashion ecosystem. Margaret Kleveland, co-founder and CEO of Doên, said that she frequently connects with fellow LA brands to share information or advice.

“All of these brands are coming out of LA now,” said Wasko. “It really feels something is happening here.”