Behind Her Empire: Fashionphile Founder Sarah Davis Talks Luxury Handbags and Divvying Up Tasks

On this episode of Behind Her Empire, Fashionphile Founder and President Sarah Davis shares her journey from turning a means of survival into her primary source of income.

Needing some extra cash to pay for her law school tuition, Davis started selling random items she had around her house on eBay. She was blown away by how much she earned.

“I started buying things to resell and I started with clothing, accessories and shopping at consignment stores,” Davis said. “Trying to look for high end things at consignment stores and also Neiman Marcus, Last Call, Saks Off Fifth — where there's a screaming deal that I could flip on eBay. I realized right off the bat clothes are really hard…. handbags really keep their value.”

She quickly learned that luxury handbags and accessories sold faster and maintained their value on the secondary market.

“And they're really challenging because eBay at the time — 95% of them were counterfeit,” she said. “In the early 90s, eBay was not what it is today. It was very wild west. There was no authentication.”

With her eBay business booming, Davis took the bar exam and passed. While most law graduates would opt for a stable job after passing, Davis enjoyed the work and relationship she had with her resell clients. She started to explore the opportunity of expanding. A friend of a friend who “knew about money” suggested that she read EMyth, which taught her that to run a successful business she should allocate smaller tasks like packaging to someone else, so that her efforts could be focused on networking and growth.

“You can teach someone to package nicely, you can teach someone how to photograph,” she said. “But there's parts of you that you can't teach somebody yet. And so I hired a couple of part time college girls and literally started making money.”

Davis founded Fashionphile, a resale platform for pre-owned ultra luxury accessories back in 1999.

Today, Fashionphile has a 30,000 square foot headquarters in Carlsbad, California, and brick and mortar showrooms all around the country. In 2006, she partnered with her brother in law with a business background to help her continue to grow the company.

“I wanted to have someone who was equally invested,” Davis expressed. “And had the same passion and enthusiasm, who was going to grow with me with those weaknesses…He really brought those essential elements to help me to kind of professionalize it and to grow it.”

A year later, the company opened up an office in Beverly Hills which allowed customers to bring in their unwanted luxury bags in person versus the traditional online route. Still, 97% of Fashionphile’s inventory sells online, with the rest selling out of their physical locations.

Despite being self funded for almost 20 years, Davis realized that they needed to upgrade in order to stay in the game, because there were so many competitors entering the resale market space. But that required more money, so she and her team agreed to finally fundraise.

“We went out with a traditional fundraising round looking for a private equity partner and ended up with Neiman Marcus as our first investor,” Davis exclaimed. “Can you imagine?! It was like a Cinderella moment.”

From such a young age, Davis was always hustling and making money on the side and it’s a lesson she has carried on with her and ultimately gave her the confidence to start her business.

“People who reach out to me and they'll say I've got an idea or you know I've been thinking about this thing and there's so much angst about making it perfect before they launch something,” Davis said. “We've been talking about this now for years. If you would have just got started back then and just iterated along the way, you've actually had something at this point. I think sometimes we glamorize a more thought out business plan.”

dot.LA Reporter Decerry Donato contributed to this post.

This podcast is produced by Behind Her Empire. The views and opinions expressed in the show are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect those of dot.LA or its newsroom.

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