Digital Design
One Woman's Fashion... is Olivia Ongpin's Passion
by: Frankie Clogston
Olivia Ongpin's stepping out and standing out on the Web. The twenty-eight year old is the co-founder and co-owner of a stylish small business on the web, Fabric8.com. Her site is an on-line boutique featuring products from independent clothing designers, record labels, and makers of jewelry, handbags and other accessories.
Recently Ongpin was recognized as one of 25 top women on the Web by San Francisco's WOW, or Women on the Web, organization. This award is for the advancement of women in technology related fields, and also for helping increase the number of women on the Internet to nearly half the total Internet population.
Olivia Ongpin launched the website in the Fall of 1995 with her business partner Anthony Quintal. The website has grown from selling the products of one independent clothing designer, Sui Generis, to selling the products of seventy five independent designers with diverse product lines.
How many hours are there in a week - that minus eight hours of sleep a night.
That's how much Ongpin says she and Quintal work at Fabric8.com. Olivia says she is able to endure the long work days because she incorporates her interests and her passions into her work.
It has been like that from the beginning. Ongpin met her business partner Anthony Quintal in the club scene of San Francisco. They dated for a while in the early days of fabric8. It was a business born out of the sights and sounds of the urban scene around them: the fashion, music and styles they enjoyed and wanted to pass on to others.
Fabric8 was a pioneer in e-commerce, selling goods over the Internet before Amazon and Ebay. While it has grown in size, fabric8 has maintained its niche of offering products from independent designers. (Designers who make their products locally, as opposed to farming them out to cheap labor abroad, says Ongpin.) And of course the rest of the niche is the distinctively hip and urban flavor of the products, which is all about Ongpin and Quintal.
In the work, there is some play.
Ongpin's hobbies and social activities are incorporated into her job. She enjoys her relationships with the two or three people she knows at each of her 75 designer companies. To publicize her company, fabric8 also sponsors the odd party or fashion show: a party at the Gavin music convention in San Francisco, or a fashion show in Chicago for Good Looking magazine for example. In the work, there is some play.
She says she probably would have eventually started her own business, but the Internet helped make it possible. The Internet platform enabled us to a great extent because we saw an open field there. When the web began to explode, there were so many positive abstractions around it.. .
Ongpin worked for the San Francisco Food Bank and wrote for the on-line jazz magazine OnTheOne before starting fabric8. She is a local girl who grew up in San Francisco and San Mateo and stayed in the area to go to school. She graduated from Stanford in 1994 with a degree in American Studies. Anthony Quintal also is local. He graduated from the University of California at Davis and worked as an architect before fabric8.
Between nothing. . .and I.P.O.
Can Fabric8 survive in an environment where new web ventures are increasingly large and backed by large investors?
If the internet is a microcosm of the real economy than there has to be something between nothing and I.P.O, Ongpin says. That something is a small business. It is fabric8's goal to endure and grow as a viable small business on the web. Small businesses, in the brick and mortar sense, have always been called the engine of the economy for their role as innovators and job creators.
Ongpin's business is small by all accounts. She and Quintal are the only full-time employees. Ongpin says she's still making less than one million in sales per year - and notes that technically small businesses are those which make less than fifteen million annually. To date, Ongpin and her partner do not have any investors, with the exception of Visa and MasterCard, she jokes.
The two started their business with a combined savings of less than ten thousand dollars. In the beginning, they did some outside web design projects to bring in income; and Ongpin stayed at her day job for the first six months. Like most e-commerce companies, including the biggest ones, Ongpin says she's investing more money than earning.
Ongpin says Internet startups face more complex technology and higher entry costs, not to mention more competition today. The founders were able to learn the technology - just a few languages then - on the job when they started. In order to put up a dynamic and competitive website with complex infrastructure on the web now, you need to have more skills and you may need outside investment, Ongpin says.
Get Rich Quick
But the lure is there. Millionaires permeate the Valley and a get-rich-quick climate prevails. The signs are everywhere from the SUV's in the Haight neighborhood of San Francisco to the pervasiveness of cell phones, palm pilots, DVDs and other adult electronic toys. The fairy tale is about the smart, sometimes nerdy kids who end up getting rich before the clock turns midnight -before they turn thirty?
As for Ongpin and Quintal, they aren't there yet. Not yet millionaires, and in her case anyhow, not yet 30. She's 28. He's 32. They haven't ruled out the possibility of going public - the I.P.O., or the yellow brick road to getting rich.
There are so many companies starting up with the main idea that they're going to get rich . . . start up a company. . .get x million dollars in investment, go IPO and leave. There aren't ideas to create a business that lasts.
Ongpin emphasizes she is most concerned with creating a business that endures. She can envision herself with fabric8 three years from now. . . and while that may not seem like a long time that would be eight years from the inception of the business. In Silicon Valley, average job turnover for those under 30 is well under 2 years.
Future Fashion and Fortune
Ongpin's focus will be on continuing to expand with new designers, while maintaining an emphasis on quality products, quality web design and quality service. She also hopes to capture a growing international market of customers as well as offer products from designers abroad.
Maybe she will become a millionaire along the way. What kind of millionaire would she be like? Turning around some of the other things she said, I'd venture the following. She will be a philanthropist in the style of some of the millionaires at the turn of the century. She will give money and establish arts, music and other scholarship funds. She will receive the tax shelter and the good P.R. but will not be solely motivated by it. Like her business now, she will be motivated by sharing her interests and passions with others.
