A Graduate Student Dropshipped Purses on the Side — It Left Her With $300,000 in Savings

In February 2019, Jenny Lei was a soon-to-be-unemployed Cornell graduate student prepping for a New York job interview when none of her three work bags fit right with her outfit — one too small, another lacking interior organization — leaving her rattled before she'd even walked in. After the interview she sat in Bryant Park and sketched a structured bag with dedicated laptop and portfolio compartments and a strap long enough to fit over a winter coat.

To fund it, she drew on $300,000 in savings built up from a purse dropshipping side hustle she'd run during graduate school, spending $2,000 on a prototype from a Brooklyn sample maker. The first version "looked like a kindergartener's art project," she says, so that summer, while visiting her parents in Guangzhou, China, she toured vegan-leather factories — the same type of material often used in electric vehicles — and chose the one that was most transparent about its working conditions, partly to make a point: "As a Chinese person, I wanted Freja to kind of be my way of showing the world this is what 'Made in China' can look like."

She ordered an initial run of 300 bags, built a website, ran email-capture marketing, and wrote blog posts about the brand's values. It still took a full year to sell through that inventory. Feeling the financial pressure, she doubled down rather than pulling back — ordering a second production run with a second bag design and pushing harder into social media advertising. "It was really, really slow for the first two years," she says.

The turning point came in 2022, when social media ads finally drove enough sales to bring in $1.7 million in annual revenue. Lei reinvested that money, along with two Shopify loans, into a broader range of bag designs aimed at customers beyond just environmentally conscious working women. The results were almost immediate: revenue hit $5.3 million the following year, enough to pay off both Shopify loans and turn the company cash-flow positive, and Freja was on track to close out 2024 with $12 million in annual revenue.

Freja remains a tiny player against the $22.8 billion global luxury handbag market — LVMH alone made $16.85 billion in net profit the prior year — and competes stylistically with brands like Sandy Liang and Alaia. A Deloitte luxury-industry strategist, Katie Weir, notes that simply surviving is the realistic best case for a niche fashion brand in a space that demands constant reinvention to stay relevant. Lei's plan for staying relevant includes hosting customer events, mentoring other young women founders, and expanding her range of bag styles to reach a wider audience. "No one is born a designer," she says, "but I can become one in a couple of years if I give it a go... I think we've hit a stride."