This Company Wants to Fill the Void in Plus-Size Fashion

There’s no shortage of companies whose mission is to send a personalized box to your doorstep to fill whatever gaping hole capitalism has convinced you exists in your life. Name your consumerism fancy, and I promise there is a box for you: snacks of varying degrees of healthy, makeup, toys and treats for your doggo, or resources to help you figure out how to be a witch, if that strikes your fancy. With the right keywords, you can find the subscription box to fill a void that could easily be filled by a slightly more thoughtful trip to a store.

Monthly subscription boxes have become one of those weird parts of retail that are just everywhere now, including my own mailbox. (I’m an Ipsy subscriber, if you must know.) But unlike the organic snacks and cheap makeup samples of other boxes, there is an actual gaping hole in retail that this business model could help address: the extreme lack of plus-size women’s fashion.

This is where Dia & Co. comes in. The founders want to give plus-size women — long ignored by highbrow and fast fashion alike — a curated personal experience of stylish clothing and accessories that are actually made for sizes 14 and up.

“Whether you’ve been a [plus-size] women for 30 years or you’ve been a women in this category for 10 years or for five years, the experience hasn’t changed,” co-founder Nadia Boujarwah, a plus-size woman, tells me. “Shopping still sucks.”

There are still a fairly limited amount of plus-size retailers – Lane Bryant, Torrid, Target — but few others have stepped up to claim the dollars of plus-size women.

“Enough already. We can’t keep talking about the same stats, and not have people actually change the way they’re thinking about serving this woman in a fundamental way,” Boujarwah says. “We can individually silently suffer forever, or we could actually build a solution for this. That was the genesis of Dia.”

The deal is rather straightforward. For $20 a month, you get five items delivered, with selections based on your answers to an intense style quiz. You get five days with the clothing. After that, you can return them for free, or the monthly fee can go toward the the cost of purchasing the items.

Since nearly 70 percent of American women wear a size 14 and above, Dia & Co. might have hit the jackpot.

When I meet Boujarwah at the brand’s new offices in Soho, she’s wearing a leather pencil skirt with laser-precision cutouts and a navy button-up with fashionably placed wear-and-tear. She looks the part of someone building a fashion empire. Despite having the precise accessories to complete her look (perfectly coordinated chunky turquoise necklace, standard-issue New Yorker black ankle boots), Boujarwah says she never expected to be in fashion.

She grew up in Kuwait and moved to the States at 18 to attend the University of Pennsylvania. “In high school, they would have us do all these visualization exercises where they would say, ‘Visualize where you want your career to be in 25 years,’” Bourjarwah tells me over coffee. “And the only thing I could visualize was what I wanted to be wearing. The thing I wanted to be wearing was a badass suit.”

Soon after graduation, she found herself working on Wall Street, wearing an okay suit. But six years ago, when she met Lydia Gilbert (a straight-size woman who would become her co-founder) at Harvard Business School, Boujarwah realized her formative fashion experiences — “my inability to wear the prom dress that I wanted” or “that badass suit I had in my head on Wall Street” — weren’t at all unique. In spring 2013, they started to quantify these experiences with a paper about how women’s bodies had become valued and devalued in America.

After grad school, Gilbert and Bourjarwah didn’t quite have a business plan yet, so they took separate jobs. Gilbert, who’s originally from Chicago and worked for the Clinton Global Initiative and in the nonprofit world before Harvard, went west to Google. Bourjawah started working for a jewelry company. But they knew that their customer existed and there was a need to fill. They knew they needed to come back to plus-size fashion.

Initially, they weren’t sure how to adequately serve her. They eventually settled on the idea of replicating a personal shopping experience at home. There wasn’t enough capital for a formal inventory, so Gilbert and Boujarwah laced up their sneakers and went out personally to shop for those boxes. (The company was initially funded using their savings.) The women knew their customers were experiencing friction in the shopping experience (fit and size, location, availability), and they were willing to take on all of those issues. Gilbert, who wears army green skinny jeans and a cozy gray cardigan when I meet her, says she didn’t quite grasp the particular struggles facing plus-size women until she shopped for them herself. She estimates that they spoke with every customer for the first 1,000 or so boxes.

“We literally spent eight hours a day shopping for hundreds of customers before we stopped personally shopping for people,” Boujarwah adds.

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