CHARLOTTE, N.C. — It's been an incredible decade for the co-founders of Girl Tribe, a Charlotte-based clothing company that started with a vision among friends.
Girl Tribe started by simply selling T-shirts on Etsy in November of 2014 after two high school friends invested $200.
"We both put $100 in each," Sarah Baucom, one of Girl Tribe's co-founders, said. "That's all we had and that's the only investment we've ever taken."
Girl Tribe has since morphed into a giant pop-up shop and includes three retail stores. The company now owns a facility to manufacture its shirts with plans to have total in-house production by the end of 2023.
"That was the dream, the pie in the sky," Baucom said. "We're going to have a facility filled with women and if graphic T-shirts are where we're going to make our money, we're going to figure out how to do that from the ground up."
Carrie Barker, Girl Tribe's other co-founder, said the decision to produce their own goods made good business sense.
"We did the math last year, and look at what we spent out of house and if we could bring it in-house, that's going to enable us to hire more women," Baker said.
This time, Barker and Baucom put in $200,000 and bought machines for printing and embroidering. They're already looking to buy more equipment.
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"That embroidery machine, I was like 'how are we going to figure this out?'" Barker said. "But now it's given us this feeling like we can do anything, we can produce whatever we want. Day by day, we figured it out and now it feels like the sky is the limit on what we can produce."
Girl Tribe is up to 50 employees — all of them women — and can't wait to add more. Right now, they're producing about 25% of their own products. Barker said the company hopes to be at 100% by the end of the year.
Contact Michelle Boudin at mboudin@wcnc.com and follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
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