How rediscovering a childhood passion led to a career pivot and a growing clothing brand.
“I love when someone comes into the store who feels discouraged, and they aren’t sure I am going to have something for them, and they aren’t really happy with their body,” says Lesley Evers C’89, a fashion designer who runs her eponymous clothing brand.
After all, she knows she can change that. “I can help that person feel really good. That is what drives me: making clothing that makes women feel really pretty.”
Despite not starting her company until the age of 40, Evers has found success in the fashion world. In addition to a robust website (LesleyEvers.com), she has brick-and-mortar stores in Oakland, California, and Portland, Oregon, with two more on the way, including one on the East Coast. Her work, which is known for its brightly colored designs, has made appearances on Good Morning America and in the pages of InStyle magazine.
“I feel like I have had a journey to get here,” she says.
Evers has always had a passion for making fun, quirky clothes. She started sewing at the age of 11 and wore self-made designs through high school and college. “I remember I made this black trench coat with zebra lining, and I had different skirts that I made,” she says. “I would sew a lot in the summer when I wasn’t in school.”
She wanted to enter the world of fashion out of high school but her mom, keen for her to get a more general education, insisted she look at Penn instead of a design school. “I went to Penn to visit, and it was beautiful,” she says, “so I wasn’t sad to go there.”
Although Penn didn’t offer classes in fashion, she found a fulfilling major in what was then called “Design of the Environment,” which included painting and drawing classes. With the help of a friend, Evers (who went by Leslie Morgan in college) also sold her own scrunchie designs to classmates.
After college, Evers moved to New York City, where she waited tables and sold paintings, first from her apartment and then in a gallery. She loved making art, but it was lonely. “I was really missing working with other people,” she says. “We didn’t even have social media back then to post your paintings. It was very isolating.”
When she was 29, she met her husband at her grandmother’s 90th birthday party. “Our grandfathers were best friends, but they had died. Our grandmothers had played bridge for 50 years,” she says. “I met him when I was little at Christmas parties, but I didn’t remember him.” She moved to Oakland, where her new husband lived, using it as an opportunity to start over. “I was like, I don’t have to paint anymore,” she says. “I could do whatever I want.”
Evers stumbled into the field of graphic recording, where she went to business meetings and synthesized the key points of what participants were saying with words and pictures. “It was like taking meeting notes on big pieces of mural paper,” she explains. For the next decade she traveled the world working for high-profile clients, including Microsoft, the US State Department, and the CIA. One of her favorite memories was taking notes for Hillary Clinton’s team when she ran for president against Barack Obama.
Yet, as she approached 40, she was exhausted from travel and hungry to follow her true passion: fashion. “An alarm went off, and I was like, If I don’t do this now I never will.” So she pulled out her sewing machine and started selling clothes out of her house. “I bought a lot of different printed fabric, and I cut each design into eight to 10 prints, and I had a trunk show, and all my friends came,” she says. “Then other friends would host trunk shows, and we did it that way.” She then set up booths at trade shows to get wholesale accounts, eventually selling to over 100 boutiques across the country.
But she grew weary of selling wholesale. “We were so tired of having to collect money from all these stores,” she says. “This one store had ordered so much in inventory and then went out of business, and we had already manufactured all the clothing for them.” So in 2013 she decided to open a store “on a really cute street” on College Avenue in Oakland and sell directly to customers—which, she says, “changed everything for me.”
Another game changer was when a mentor started running ads for her on Facebook, which she says helped her business begin to turn a profit. She now has 30 employees, including six designers, each of whom has the personality and energy she wants for her brand. “I try to cultivate a space where people can be positive,” she says. “They are just really excited to make people happy with no judgment.”
While most of her business is now online, she is focusing on opening more brick-and-mortar stores. “A store can do a couple of million a year, so we really need to open more to double our business, which is our goal,” she says. “Also, the store has a very low return rate.” It’s also the way she grows her customer base. “People will come in and say, ‘I’ve seen your clothes online for so long and I wanted to come to the store before I bought something,’” she says. “There is a lot of hesitation to buy new brands.”
Plus, Evers loves meeting her customers in person and hearing their stories. “The other day this lady told me she was at a baseball game wearing one of my dresses, and someone yelled, ‘Lesley Evers!’ and she turned around and yelled it back, and they became friends,” she says. “They became friends because they have me in common.”
—Alyson Krueger C’07
Lesley’s clothes are amazing – Class of ’89 totally supports her and many of us are clients and introduce others to her clothing. I was at the New Orleans Jazzfest and someone walked up to me while I was wearing a Lesley Evers dress, and she was wearing a Lesley Evers skirt at the time. The clothes inspire that kind of loyalty. Love supporting a great Penn alum!