How Marcella NYC went from an Etsy side hustle to one of the US’s fastest-growing fashion brands

For some fashion founders, the journey starts in design school. For others, it’s at a fashion boutique or inside a major apparel company. But for Marcella Co-Founders Siyana and Andy Huszar, it started on Match.com.

“We are crazy, sort of in the same way,” Andy Huszar told Retail Brew. “No marriage counselor, no psychologist, no banker, no fashion person would have ever thought to come to us in 2012 and say, ‘You guys should start a fashion company.’”

The New York-founded womenswear brand known for its minimalist silhouettes and European-made garments has landed on the Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies for four consecutive years. What began as a small Etsy shop has evolved into a multimillion-dollar business selling through its own website as well as marketplaces including Nordstrom, Bloomingdale's, Macy's, and Farfetch.

A step back: The company's origins, however, were considerably humbler, per the Huszars. Siyana Huszar said the idea emerged from her own wardrobe frustrations.

“I lacked the multipurpose, minimalist, utilitarian, designer-quality items,” she said. “I had a small closet, big bills, and I did not have the pieces, or I couldn’t really afford them, even though I was working in finance."

Inspired by her grandmother Marcella, a fashion designer in Bulgaria who helped raise her, Siyana launched the Etsy store Marcella Moda as a side project. Before she knew it, the business grew, prompting the couple to leave their finance careers to pursue it full time.

By 2019, the company had reached roughly $1 million in annual sales on Etsy before launching its own website. Since then, the business has grown about 35 times in terms of revenue, Andy said. The founders attribute much of that growth to a model that differs from traditional fashion retail.

Instead of producing large seasonal collections months in advance, Marcella relies on a production system centered in Bulgaria, where most of its team is based. The company works with ~25 manufacturing partners near Sofia, the capital city, and uses a combination of inventory forecasting and JIT (just-in-time) production to reduce excess inventory.

This model also allows the company to replenish slow-selling or newer products quickly while producing larger quantities of proven bestsellers. According to Andy, the strategy helps Marcella sell more than 90% of what it produces at or near full price.

The approach also helps support another key part of Marcella’s value proposition: price. The Huszars describe the brand as offering what they call “minimalism with an edge,” aka versatile, seasonless pieces that can transition from work to evening wear. But they also emphasize delivering European-made products at prices below many contemporary competitors.

“We have a disruptive price to quality ratio,” Andy said. “We offer European-sourced and European-made clothing, accessories at 25%–75% less than our competition, and at the same time, as we’re less expensive than Aritzia, Reformation, or Vince…we actually are more socially motivated.”

Values added: Marcella also partners with nonprofit Campaign for Female Education (CAMFED), supporting girls’ education through every purchase. Since 2021, Siyana said the brand has funded approximately 1.1 million school days for girls, providing “everything that [a] girl needs to go to school for one day,” from uniforms to supplies to toiletries.

“We’re trying to not just provide a pair of glasses or a pair of shoes,” Siyana said. “We wanted to be much more holistic in our support.”

That mission also appears to resonate with customers; roughly 44% of its shoppers are repeat buyers.

Still, like many in the apparel industry, Marcella spent the last year navigating tariffs, logistics disruptions, and broader geopolitical uncertainty. The company also repeatedly looked at pricing and supply chain models as trade policies shifted.

“We repriced six times last year,” Siyana said, citing the internal analyses required to evaluate changing tariff scenarios.

According to Andy, those disruptions ultimately cost the company about $1 million in profit. Yet, the founders believe the company's “bootstrap” mentality has helped them adapt.

“We were not going to [take on] debt,” Andy said. “We were going to try to be profitable Day One.”

That discipline continues to shape decisions today as Marcella remains focused on strengthening infrastructure and expanding wholesale relationships before pursuing physical retail.

The company is already seeing strong growth through marketplace partners. After launching on Farfetch and Bloomingdale’s, the founders said demand significantly exceeded expectations.

“We think when people actually are able to touch our product for real and try it on, that’s going to be the next unlock for our brand,” Andy said.

For now, though, the founders remain focused on the same principles that helped transform an Etsy experiment into one of the country’s fastest-growing fashion businesses: operational discipline, product quality, and a willingness to do things differently.

Siyana added that not coming from the fashion industry may have been an advantage: “Not knowing how the industry functions and inventing our own rules and our own norms—it’s a privilege.”