Ashlyn Greer
Fashivly – SEED Spring 2024
Published August 14, 2024
As part of our ‘Meet Our Founders’ series today, we introduce Ashlyn Greer, Founder and CEO of Fashivly based in Charlotte, NC. Fashivly is an online personal styling platform that’s building the future of personalized shopping.
Q: What problem are you trying to solve and what influenced you to start your company?
A: Shopping online, and in general, is often like looking for a needle in a haystack. Even if you do know exactly what you’re looking for, you can spend hours going from store to store or scrolling endlessly online looking for the piece that’s in your size, budget, and desired style. Add in things like, “OK, now what shoes go with this new wide leg pant?” and suddenly shopping and getting dressed everyday can feel more like a chore instead of a fun, creative self-expression. The thing I’ve always been the most passionate about is the confidence you can unlock just by putting on an outfit you feel great in. My background is in the fashion industry and I knew I wanted to start a company, so when a friend reached out for a styling session during Covid everything just clicked.
Q: How will your NC IDEA grant funds advance your company?
A: As a bootstrapped company for the previous 3.5 years, we’d really been operating with an MVP, and using 10-12 platform solutions and a lot of manual, time-consuming processes to deliver our product. From a growth perspective, we’d been growing faster than we could keep up with in the last 12 months. We built some of the first features of our technology this spring on debt, but we needed funding in order to continue to build on what our customers love. The NC IDEA Funds are going towards further increasing our weekly revenue capacity through more automations and integrations, and building the infrastructure and backend operations of our platform in order to support our growth.
Q: What is one thing you wish you understood about entrepreneurship before you ever got started?
A: So many things! I’ve intentionally been very publicly transparent during this journey so far, because I wish I’d seen more examples from other entrepreneurs about what the early years are really like. Everyone makes the blanket statements about it being really hard, but what does really hard actually mean? The first time I “ran out of money” I had a lot of shame and guilt around that. I thought that was failure. What I realized later, was that’s a very normal experience for entrepreneurs, especially first-time bootstrapped ones in the earliest years when things are just getting started. On the other side of it, I now view it just as another hurdle to jump over, and an opportunity to learn for the next time.
While visiting Charlotte, Ashlyn recommends:
- Camp North End is a great place to walk around and check out locally owned shops, restaurants, coffee and there are tons of events always happening there. Optimist is a food hall where you can get everything from dumplings to gourmet grilled cheese, and we always take visitors there. My personal favorite spot is a natural wine bar in my neighborhood of NoDa called Bar a Vins that has the best snacks – if you’ve never tried caviar on a lays potato chip you have to go!
Support Fashivly and Ashlyn by:
- Spread the word about Fashivly! If you know someone who’s looking for a wardrobe refresh, has an event coming up, or just loves fashion and shopping in general send them our way. Our style guides start at just $99, but our social channels are full of tips, trends, and lots of recommendations.
