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The New Class: It was a breakout year for these founders, designers and TikTokers.
Emily Oberg’s women’s sportswear brand Sporty & Rich expanded in more ways than one this year. In addition to launching beauty in September, the brand also opened its first flagship store in NYC’s SoHo neighborhood in July.
For Oberg, who started her brand when she was just 20 years old, the experience of growing Sporty & Rich into what the New York Times called the “next Goop” has been mostly seamless. Oberg owed that to her and her team’s decisiveness.
“The beauty launch was put together mostly by just me and a product developer we brought on as a consultant,” Oberg said. “It was my own project, and I just brought it to the team after I had done a lot of work on it. It’s easier when you know what you want from the beginning, rather than spending a lot of time trying to find it. That’s how you end up wasting time and money.”
As a business with multiple product categories in production, Sporty & Rich has grown far beyond the humble Instagram account it started as in 2015 without any outside investment. The account now has more than 500,000 followers, and the brand is projected to pull in around $30 million this year. And Oberg said now is the time for Sporty & Rich to keep expanding.
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“The New York store has been so surprisingly successful. I’m a bit of a pessimistic optimist, so I opened it without expecting too much and just hoping for the best,” she said. “But now that we’ve done it, expanding retail, doing bigger collaborations and going global are what I want to do next.”
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