As Brittney Turner conducts business over FaceTime, she is framed with hundreds of shipment and merchandise boxes stacked on shelves behind her at the Sorella boutique warehouse in Los Angeles.
She wore one of the clothing company’s “GIRLS TOUR” necklaces and a “YEEZY” inspired, oversized hoodie.
Company co-founder and Long Beach native Turner recently turned 25. She started Sorella four years ago as an Etsy business but never anticipated Sorella was going to be as big as it is today. Turner and her partner, Heather Sanders, officially launched Sorella in 2013, starting with $5,000 and turning it into a $1 million company.
“Before I started Sorella, I actually kind of had an Etsy account selling custom denim – this was right when Instagram was taking off. I found Heather and wanted her to wear a couple of my pieces. She was known through Instagram, so I obviously wanted to get my pieces on her and to get social media credit,” she said.
Turner explained that she wasn’t scared to start a new company, what made her nervous was quitting everything and putting all her time and effort in Sorella.
“It didn’t scare me, but the dedication I put toward it kind of scared everyone around me. We were a new business, so we weren’t making a crazy ton of money. But at the time I was [thinking], ‘I don’t care how much money we make, I’m going to pursue it,’” she said. “I was transitioning into an adult, so my parents were worried [that] I was just going off into doing this random thing without putting any thought into it.”
Turner believes what made Sorella so successful was that both she and Sanders started without any business background, but both learned together on the way.
Turner and Sanders wanted to make their own slang — they wanted a create a catchphrase that customers could recognize as uniquely Sorella, as well as a message women wanted to represent, which was “GIRLS TOUR.”
“We wanted something that strong women could wear and be proud of, what we could stand behind and what we could represent,” she said. “We got it out on a hat first — they sold out like crazy. And then we added more merchandise to the ‘tour.’”
Even three years later, Turner is always learning something new about running a company.
“I knew if we continue to work as hard as we did we could only benefit from it and Sorella would benefit [too],” she said.
Along with being a young business women, Turner has another job —being a mother. She has a 2-year-old son named Brayden, who she is raising in her hometown of Long Beach.
“I was twenty-three when I had Brayden — it wasn’t too scary, I was able to take time off and give him the time he needed. Still to this day, I work a lot but, it’s beneficial to own [my business] because I can walk away for a couple of days and still be okay,” she said.
Sorella started as an online store. There were lists of things Turner and Sanders had to do.
“We started doing them step by step, so first we bought the domain [name], we bought the [web]site, then we went out and bought merchandise. We went out and found a photographer. We shot our product, we probably did this all within a month. Mind you, it was probably only ten items when we started. We were launching our company out of Heather’s apartment,” she said.
Sorella started growing — Sanders had one million followers on Instagram at the time, so they made her one of their main marketing tools. She helped Sorella grow by posting photos of Sanders in Sorella apparel.
Within the first year, Sorella outgrew Sanders’s apartment. They needed someone that could hold and ship their merchandise, which was a learning experience for them both.
“Now, going into our fourth year, when we found out about all these bad things [like merchandise being stolen], we ended up opening our own warehouse, then learned the ins and outs of shipping,” she said.
The warehouse they bought was a place where they would ship to customers and do client makeup and hair to get ready for shoots. Once a week to once a month, at the warehouse, they would do pop-up shops that were very successful. Customers began giving feedback to Turner and Sanders that they wanted a storefront in the community.
“Our followers and our supporters wanted us to open a store. Right before Christmas of last year, actually, we opened it [the warehouse] as a store for the first time. And we did really, really good,” she said. “Fast forward to April, last year, we were so successful at our warehouse, we opened a store on the main Melrose street.”
Turner nor Sanders knew how successful they could be, but never realized how fast it would happen. It took hard work and seeing the results making them confident in knowing they could make even $2 million dollars.