The summer before beginning their undergraduate studies at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business, Susan Gregg and her boyfriend, Eric Koger, launched a Web site, ModCloth.com, to help Gregg sell bargain vintage clothes that she found while thrift shopping. They sold an item with a modest markup their first day online and worked on the site part-time throughout college. Four years later, in 2006, they earned their degrees, and ModCloth became their career path. It has worked out well for the couple, who married. Today, ModCloth averages 300,000 monthly online shoppers, and the couple has been named to Inc. magazine's "30 Under 30: America's Coolest Young Entrepreneurs."
Susan, why did you and Eric start your own site?
Why not sell vintage clothing on eBay?
We knew there would be more value if we created our own brand. Eric also had experience with search engine optimization, so we knew we could attract more customers.
Tepper graduates typically begin careers with established companies.
Were you nervous going it alone?
It was definitely scary to enter the real world without a secure income, especially with loans to pay back! I remember talking to a friend during my senior year. She had a great job with a consulting firm with a good salary, making me think how crazy it was that our lives were so divergent. I felt a little insecure, but I was mostly excited to take ModCloth to the next level and to be done with school. Eric [who earned his MBA at Tepper in 2007] and I were really passionate about our idea and ready for the hard work that we knew it would take to make it happen.
Did a Tepper education help?
Definitely. Tepper's Art Boni [head of the Don Jones Entrepreneurship Center] helped us think about our initial business plan, and Tom Emerson [associate professor] also really helped us along the way by critiquing our first investor pitch. There were some other great professors who told Eric and me that we had a strong customer base and were headed in the right direction.
—Kelly Delaney (HS'09)
