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Starting a clothing line online is harder than almost any other ecommerce category, and Tsippi Gross built a six-figure business doing it anyway. She started with $500 in market research, validated demand by sewing zippers into dresses she bought from another manufacturer, and now runs HavahTribe.com selling apparel for nursing mothers without touching Amazon.
Tsippi is a student in my Create A Profitable Online Store course. I told her not to sell clothing when she first emailed me, she did it anyway, and after two years she agrees with my original advice.
Below is her validation process, the sourcing disaster that cost $30,000, why 30% return rates make the category brutal, and how her Instagram community became the actual asset.
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Table of Contents
Key takeaways
- Tsippi started with $500 for market research and validated demand before ordering a single unit.
- Her first US production quote came in at $65 to $75 per item, which killed domestic manufacturing as an option.
- Her entire first Chinese production run of 500 to 700 units ran a full size too big, because she and her sister sized it on their post-pregnancy bodies.
- A Mexican manufacturer, personally vetted with a factory visit and 20 to 30 hours of calls, delivered $30,000 of unusable product in month two.
- Clothing carries a roughly 30% return rate as an industry standard, and each season gives you only about three months to sell.
- Her Instagram community of about 12,000 followers, built on giveaways and behind-the-scenes stories, is the durable asset. The clothing is not.
- Facebook ads perform poorly on cold traffic for her product and very well on retargeting.
- She is moving the clothing to a wholesale model so she can build other things for the community.
How Tsippi Gross found her product idea
Tsippi started because she could not find clothing she could breastfeed in. She has hyperemesis gravidarum, so every pregnancy puts her on an IV and shuts her life down, and after her most recent baby she was rebuilding from scratch.
She did not want to work for someone else, so she searched podcasts for something about starting a business and found this show. The first episode she heard was another student who had started an online clothing business.
The gap she saw was specific. Breastfeeding in most clothing means physically removing it, and in a dress it means finding a public bathroom.
Her value proposition became one garment a woman can wear through pregnancy, nursing, and afterward, with discreet zippers and clasps. That replaces buying separate wardrobes for each stage.
How Tsippi validated demand before manufacturing anything
Tsippi surveyed roughly 100 friends before spending real money, then bought dresses from a US manufacturer, sewed zippers in, cut holes in the right places, and sold them off a landing page. People bought.
The landing page was genuinely bad. A stranger messaged her to point out that the product photo showed her phone battery at critically low.
She ran it through Shopify’s cheapest plan connected to Facebook, so purchases happened through Facebook rather than a full site. That was enough to prove the concept.
Her friends were not kind about the idea. They told her honestly that she was not in fashion, had never designed clothing, and would not succeed.
Why manufacturing clothing in the US did not work
US production quoted at $65 to $75 per item, and Tsippi could not sell above that. She did complete a first run domestically and was unhappy enough with the quality that she scrapped the pattern entirely.
The other problem was fragmentation. In the US you order fabric from one place, buttons and zippers from another, get a pattern made by one person, a sample by another, then the factory makes its own sample, and tags come from somewhere else.
Chinese factories do all of it under one roof. Her eventual supplier was eager, experienced, and produced better quality than what she got domestically.
How Tsippi found her Chinese manufacturer
She found the factory on Alibaba following the vetting steps from my course, then verified it on Panjiva. Panjiva shows where companies import goods from, and it revealed her factory also supplies a well-known US brand.
She communicated by WeChat, sending videos of her daughter with tissue paper superglued and stapled onto a shirt to demonstrate the mechanism she wanted. The factory understood it.
She found this supplier almost immediately. A second factory she tried failed inspection, so she stopped working with them.
The sizing mistake that ran through an entire production run
Tsippi’s entire first run of 500 to 700 units came in a full size too big. She and her sister had both just given birth and used their own bodies as fit models, so their sense of what fit a medium was badly off.
Customer complaints revealed the error. There was nothing to do but sell through it.
She now publishes exact measurements and a measuring guide on the site, and still receives enormous volumes of sizing questions. Customers email their top and bottom measurements asking what size to order.
The $30,000 sourcing disaster in Mexico
Tsippi lost about $30,000 in her second month of business on a Mexican manufacturer she had personally vetted. Chinese factories shut down for roughly six weeks around Chinese New Year, and that break fell exactly when she needed to produce her summer line.
She had been consumed launching the winter collection and realized her factory would be closed too long to make the summer season. So she flew her whole family to Mexico to find an alternative.
The manufacturer came highly recommended through a friend’s father who had produced clothing with him. Tsippi visited the factory, spent days there, confirmed he ran his own children’s clothing line, received good samples, and spent 20 to 30 hours on the phone with him on details.
The delivered order was garbage top to bottom. Whether pursuing it legally in Mexico is worth the cost is still unresolved.
Everyone told her afterward never to manufacture in Mexico. Nobody mentioned it beforehand.
She has stayed with her Asian supplier since.
Why the clothing business is so difficult
Two structural problems make apparel harder than most ecommerce categories: a roughly 30% industry-standard return rate and a selling window of about three months per season.
| Problem | Impact |
|---|---|
| ~30% return rate | Every third order comes back, and Tsippi’s team handles returns themselves |
| Size and fit variance | Constant customer service load, plus returns driven purely by fit |
| Three-month seasons | Unsold inventory goes to clearance, then cannot be sold next year |
| Trend turnover | Repeat customers and wholesale buyers refuse to see last year’s styles |
Tsippi’s team writes handwritten notes in every package and packs each order with care. Watching 30% of that come back is demoralizing.
She limits returns to genuinely unworn, unused items she can resell, and makes end-of-season clearance final sale since those are already discounted.
The season constraint is the one people underestimate. You get three months to sell a collection before it goes on sale, and you cannot carry it into the following year because customers track seasonal colors and styles.
Her advice is that if you love fashion, do it. If you are choosing a business purely as a way to make a living, choose something else.
How Tsippi built an Instagram community around a brand, not a product
Tsippi’s growth comes from an Instagram community of about 12,000 followers organized around motherhood rather than around nursing apparel. She posts about five days a week and uses Stories heavily.
Behind-the-scenes content is what created the connection. Followers see that she is a mom going through the same things, and she asks for their feedback and input constantly.
She lets them design product. She asks what they want to see next season, they send pictures and ideas, and she makes the ones she likes.
Her most effective traffic driver is simply asking. She asks community members to share a sale, post about a new collection in their Facebook groups, or forward an email to friends, and they do it.
They would not do it unaddressed. Once she reminds them, they are happy to.
How Tsippi runs Instagram giveaways
Her best-performing giveaways are the small, relevant ones: her own followers, or a partnership with one other brand where entrants follow both accounts. Those gain 100 to 1,000 followers.
The mechanic is deliberately simple with no giveaway platform. Comment below saying why you want the dress, or tag a friend who could use it, and follow both accounts.
Large sweepstakes offering a gift card or a stroller gain more followers, 300 to 3,000, and Tsippi considers them dead weight. Someone entering to win a $3,000 Amazon gift card has no interest in her product.
She cannot track giveaway revenue directly and sees the effect indirectly. New people start engaging, then their names show up on orders, and page views and story views rise.
Giveaways are also wearing out. Her followers have asked her to stop, so she is spacing them out and reserving them for occasions like her business anniversary.
Working with micro-influencers
Most of Tsippi’s influencer relationships started with the influencer approaching her, typically new mothers with 1,000 to 3,000 followers offering a post in exchange for a dress. She counters by proposing a giveaway instead of a post.
A giveaway generates more engagement and pulls people onto her page. A single sponsored post does neither as effectively.
She also invited people to take over her page, which brought their followers with them.
Why Tsippi is moving away from selling clothing directly
Tsippi seriously considered shutting down the business, then decided to shift clothing to a wholesale model and build other things for her community. She postponed this interview from January specifically because she did not know yet whether she wanted to continue.
Her honest assessment is that she does not enjoy clothing. The returns, the sizing, the colors, and the one-to-one customer service are relentless.
She still believes in the service the product provides, so she is not stopping production entirely. Wholesale means selling to stores twice a year and freeing the rest of the year for other work.
The strategic insight is that the community is the asset. Content built around motherhood rather than breastfeeding means the audience does not churn out when a customer stops nursing.
That is a poor strategy for selling nursing apparel specifically, because she is not marketing to her target buyer. It is an excellent strategy for building something that lasts, because mothers make an enormous share of household purchases.
Once you have that community, you can sell almost anything to it. The clothing turns out to have been the stepping stone.
Why Tsippi does not sell on Amazon
Tsippi researched Amazon with Jungle Scout and found little competition and also little sales volume in her category. The economics do not work at her price point.
She cannot compete with the cheapest sellers on price and does not want to. A 30% return rate combined with FBA fees would be punishing.
Competing on price is a losing position for a small niche shop generally. Her product is better served by a brand relationship than by a marketplace listing.
What works and does not work in Facebook ads for apparel
Facebook ads perform poorly on cold traffic for Tsippi and very well on retargeting. She attributes the cold-traffic weakness to the product not being an impulse buy and not being luxury either.
A mid-priced product from an unknown brand gives a cold visitor no reason to commit. Once someone has visited the site, retargeting converts strongly.
Facebook ad costs also rose substantially between 2017 and 2018 as inventory tightened, which compounds the problem for products that need multiple touches.
Tsippi’s advice for anyone starting an ecommerce business
Find a product that solves a real pain point rather than one that is simply attractive. Tsippi talks to founders whose products are not selling, and the common thread is a product that is pretty without improving anyone’s life.
Her second point is persistence over talent. She had no fashion background, no technical skill, and spent roughly a week on the phone with Shopify support building her first site.
The habit she credits most is doing one thing every single day, no matter how small. On exhausted days that means one phone call or one email.
She has that taped above her desk, and a community member recently messaged her to say the same habit got her own website launched.
Her biggest early challenge
The hardest part was having young children while running a business where much of the traditional selling happens in person. Fashion normally means getting out and having people try things on, and she was relying almost entirely on website traffic.
Early on there were days with no visitors at all, which is the reality without advertising. Sitting on inventory while nobody comes to the site is demoralizing.
The technical work is also heavy for one owner, and handing it off is hard because nobody else brings the same care. She would not give any of it up, because the freedom is worth it.
You can find Tsippi at HavahTribe.com and on Instagram at @HavahTribe.
Frequently asked questions
Is selling clothing online a good business?
It is one of the harder ecommerce categories. Roughly 30% of apparel orders come back, sizing generates constant customer service, and each season gives you about three months to sell before the collection becomes unsellable.
How much does it cost to manufacture clothing in the US vs China?
Tsippi Gross was quoted $65 to $75 per item in the US, which she could not sell profitably. Chinese production was dramatically cheaper and handled fabric, trim, patterns, samples, and tags under one roof rather than across separate vendors.
How do you validate a clothing product before manufacturing?
Tsippi bought finished dresses from another manufacturer, modified them herself with zippers and cutouts, and sold them from a basic landing page connected to Facebook. Real purchases from strangers confirmed demand before she committed to a production run.
What is a normal return rate for clothing?
Around 30% is the industry standard. That is why apparel is difficult on marketplaces like Amazon, where FBA fees compound the cost of every returned unit.
How do you find a reliable overseas clothing manufacturer?
Tsippi found hers on Alibaba and verified it using Panjiva, which shows which factories supply which importers, confirming her factory also produced for a known US brand. A personal factory visit did not prevent a $30,000 failure with a different supplier, so verification through import records matters.
Do Instagram giveaways work for ecommerce?
Targeted ones do. Giveaways of your own product, run alone or with one complementary brand, gained Tsippi 100 to 1,000 engaged followers, while large gift-card sweepstakes brought more followers with almost no purchase intent.
Why do Facebook ads fail on cold traffic for mid-priced products?
A mid-priced item that is not an impulse buy gives a cold visitor no reason to commit to an unfamiliar brand. Tsippi’s Facebook ads perform poorly on cold audiences and very well on retargeting people who already visited.
Should you build a community around your product or your customer?
Around your customer. Tsippi’s content centers on motherhood rather than breastfeeding, so her audience stays after they stop nursing, which turned the community into an asset she can build new products for.
