How Jenny Lei built Freja into a $10M bag brand from scratch

Executive overview

Jenny Lei launched Freja on a student visa with no design background, selling work bags into a saturated market right before COVID hit. Eight months of product development, a launch to 2,500 email subscribers that produced zero sales, and a month generating $834 in revenue did not stop her.

The brand now exceeds $10M in annual revenue. The engine: functional product, direct-response paid ads, and a brand that pulls rather than pushes.

Treating customers as a community, not a market, is what separates durable brands from product businesses.

From failure to first bag

• Ran six failed dropshipping stores; the seventh, selling bags from China, worked — she learned what products, colors, and markets convert
• Couldn't find a confident, functional, logo-free work bag for a key job interview; sat in Bryant Park afterward and decided to build it herself
• Spent eight months on product development before launch — no mockups, no A/B tests on product, just relentless back-and-forth with factories
• Launched February 2020 with 300 bags and 2,500 email subscribers; sold zero on day one
• COVID eliminated the "work bag" use case overnight; took a full year to sell out that first run
• August 2020: $834 in sales for the month; kept going by imagining her future self looking back on the decision

Paid ads as the core growth engine

• Knew paid ads from dropshipping; used Facebook ads from day one
• First year: 1–1.5x ROAS — essentially breaking even
• Tried three agencies; the first told her to write blog posts, the second was mediocre, the third clicked
• The breakthrough was not new creatives — it was a new ads manager who understood audience targeting, combined with an ad account that had accumulated enough data
• Core creative format: video of someone packing the bag, showing functionality; this still drives performance today
• Ads consumed 8–10 hours a day — she was running a marketing company, not a bag brand

Product and brand identity

• Seasonless, neutral-color bags by design — partly strategic, partly because she doesn't want to manage seasonality
• Releases one or two new products per year; designs are driven by customer feedback ("can you make it with a zipper?")
• Hired a creative director (someone she'd worked with four years earlier) to co-develop new designs
• Deliberate choice to avoid frequent new SKUs: trains customers to expect permanence, not churn
• The first bag still sells; she's resisted redesigning it because "it's part of our story"

Marketing philosophy: pull, not push

• Runs at most one or two sales per year — framed as rewarding the community, not discounting
• Email list is a primary channel; sends two newsletters per week: one product-focused (Tuesday), one personal narrative — "Chinese journals" (Friday)
• Brand story and founder transparency drive engagement more than product announcements
• Rejected live shopping as misaligned with the brand's "intentional purchase" positioning
• Expanding into influencer and UGC as a hedge against paid-ads dependence — she wants channels built before paid ads slow down

Celebrity moments and PR

• Hired PR in early 2024; strategy was product seeding
• Hailey Bieber wore a Freja bag organically; Jenny found out via FaceTime calls at 6am in Hong Kong
• Ran ads referencing the moment ("the Hailey Bieber bag") — produced a significant sales spike
• Anna Delvey wore a bag to court — entirely unsolicited; not part of any campaign
• Selective about creator partnerships: looks for interesting people with authentic points of view, not just reach

Building toward a legacy brand

• For the first three years, Jenny's name wasn't publicly attached to the brand; PR pushed her to go public-facing
• Conscious of the risk: "If I get canceled, the whole company goes down" — decided the upside of owning her story outweighs the risk
• Recent mindset shift with the team: stop thinking in growth terms, start thinking in legacy terms — filters decisions through "would a legacy brand do this?"
• Launched the Freja Fund: selects seven women building businesses, mentors them every other week — no equity taken
• Plans to expand into men's bags, go global, and maintain accessible pricing while introducing limited-edition higher-priced runs

Advice for early-stage founders

• Saturation is not a reason to avoid a market — "go fishing where there are a lot of fish"
• Don't plan too far ahead; focus only on the next step
• Use the headlamp metaphor (from Alex Hormozi): you can only see what's directly ahead; take the step and the next one illuminates
• Measure inputs, not just outputs — when sales were flat, she committed to eight hours a day on Facebook as her controllable input
• Pick one customer acquisition channel and get very good at it before adding others
• "You'll never be ready. Future you will handle what present you can't imagine."