How this Gen Z founder got the coolest girls in the world to wear her jeans, from Taylor Swift to Hailey Bieber — and built a multi-million dollar denim brand

Some of the first influencers to wear her denim were Danielle Bernstein, founder of blog and brand WeWoreWhat, and Chiara Ferragni, an Italian fashion influencer and blogger. Once celebrities like Beiber and Jenner wore her designs, that’s when retailers like Revolve and Selfridges got interested in carrying her product.

Bonvicini said her interest in influencer and celebrity marketing comes down to who her personal muses are, summing it up as: “I think all these people are so amazing, and it would be a dream for them to wear my product.”

Rather than sending the product far and wide to all kinds of influencers, she said she focuses getting the “coolest people” in it, even if they’re micro influencers, as a way to elevate the brand.

The brand especially took off during the pandemic, when larger brands were having major supply-chain issues that her small, reworked vintage denim brand wasn’t experiencing.

In the past few years, EB Denim has transitioned away from reworking vintage, with 95% of what they sell today being original, new products.

“Reworking vintage isn’t sustainable on a scalability level,” Bonvicini said, noting the variations in supply, color, quanitity, and size made it too difficult to keep up with demand.

However, she said sourcing sustainable denim is still central to the business. While the products are designed in LA, she recently moved production from LA to a facility in Pakistan in hopes of lowering the price points of her jeans.

The Artistic Milliners factory incorporates renewable energy and recycled water and is LEED-certified, which is issued by the nonprofit US Green Building Council for environmental design. As of 2019 it was also one of only 50 factories worldwide that was fair-trade certified, according to the United Nations.

Gen Z founder

There are challenges with being a young founder, especially leading a company she founded while still a teen. Bonvicini said she’s never worked for anyone else as an adult, so there’s been a big learning curve.

Once the brand had grown enough, she brought in people with a bit more experience in the industry and dealing with wholesalers, and she’s inevitably learned a ton along the way. Although she does love being her own boss, she said it can make it easy to second guess yourself.

“Sometimes I do wonder, what should I be doing right now? There’s no one telling me what to do,” she said.

She also struggles sometimes with a very modern challenge facing many founders today, from fashion to tech: to be a founder, you almost have to be an influencer too.

“There’s a lot of pressure on founders to have their own social media presence,” she said, adding she’s tends to question herself about it: “Am I funny or am I really weird? Does anyone relate to this? Do people hate me?”

“I just want to make clothes, not have to do a song and dance, too.”

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