It’s not often that a couple of teenaged-girls with a passion for design turn their dorm-room business into a household brand.
But, for Foxy Originals, that’s exactly how things happened.
In 1998, Suzie Chemel and Jennifer Ger had just met in a car ride going from Toronto to London, Ontario where they had both just started their first month at the University of Western Ontario. The pair swapped compliments on each other’s jewelry choices and discussed their passion for jewelry on that very car ride.
“We had both heard of this floating bead necklace that we could make,” recalled Chemel. “It was just a simple necklace that looked like it was floating on the neck. It had a low start-up cost – all we needed was some tiger wire, lobster clasps, and beads. And we thought, hey, we could make these ourselves.”
And so they did, back at their university dorm rooms.
“We made a bunch of samples and sold them to our friends, and others on campus,” Chemel said. And thus, Foxy Originals was born.
Once things got going, Chemel and Ger thought they could take the business to the next level, and they started looking to sell their products in stores in London.
“And we started seeing real business, so we decided to make it a summer business,” Chemel said.
The pair took off during the summer months and sold their lines all over Ontario at craft shows, festivals, and concerts. By this time, their brand was really taking off in Canada.
“What’s interesting about our brand is that our jewelry is so versatile it fits into so many different industries,” Chemel said. “For example, we could sell our line at surf tradeshows, gift tradeshows, craft shows. So that really helped us a lot.”
By 2001, in their third year of university, Chemel and Ger won the Advancing Canadian Entrepreneurship (ACE) Student Entrepreneur Award competition which helped boost their business even further.
“It gave us a lot of press and coverage around Canada,” Chemel said. “And it gave us a lot of confidence to move forward with the business full time after school.”
By 2002, Chemel and Ger put together a full photo catalogue of their jewelry lines and even launched a website for their brand – something not many businesses even attempted to do at the time since the Internet was still so new.
And in January 2003, the duo made their first appearance at the Mode Show with a brand new collection that featured their signature style back then: colourful, multi-faceted jewelry at great prices.
“At that time, we had a lot of two-in-one pieces that were reversible. One side would be super colourful, and another would be very neutral, so our customers got a lot of bang for their buck,” Chemel explained.
Their first Mode Show was a major success.
“We were really ready to go at that first Mode Show with our full catalogue and website,” Chemel said. “And we were swamped with orders. We almost couldn’t handle it all. It was bonanza. But it was a major deciding factor for us because, after that show, we thought we could move into the U.S. a little sooner than we thought we could.”
Fast forward a couple of years to 2005, and Foxy Originals fully took off and was sold in major retailers and boutiques across North America. Chemel and Ger and were doing nearly 20 tradeshows a year.
Their trendy designs got the attention of fashion editors and celebrities alike and were even featured in O Magazine’s Favorite Things Issue.
Today, you can find Foxy Originals designs on their website, and in hundreds of stores around the globe.
According to Chemel, the pair’s success has a lot to do with their ability to evolve and change as their customers do.
“We are always evolving, and trying our best to stay true to what our customers want,” she said. “We have our customers in mind when we are designing.”
Right now, Chemel said, that means especially in these rough, unprecedented times, people are looking for inspiration and jewelry that offers support in things like charms and quotes. This is reflective in their Unstoppable Collection that features quotes like “Be the Change”, “Embrace the Journey”, and “The Best is Yet to Come.”
Today, Chemel said the business is still thriving and both she and Ger are excited to continue to innovate and design jewelry that fulfill their customers’ needs.
“Now more than ever, we are staying in tune with our customer base to help them get through this difficult time,” she said.
Foxy Originals jewelry is designed by Chemel and Ger, the co-founders of the business, and is manufactured in Scarborough, Ontario. You can shop their trendy pieces on www.foxyoriginals.com and www.foxywholesale.com