We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ellie Staver a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Ellie, appreciate you joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

EMLE was born in college after I went vegetarian for environmental reasons except at the time I didn’t know EMLE would become EMLE. It was just an idea I had as I began my journey with sustainable fashion. I had a hard time finding one place to shop from multiple brands I trusted in their values. I would be shopping, finding a piece I like, searching up the brand to see if I believe in their values, then purchasing if it felt right. The process was long just to find pieces that fit my style and my values. It felt impossible to find both. I first came up with the idea of an app – all the sustainable brands put into one place, easy to shop from their website. In college, this just was an idea. The idea turned into a business plan during 2020 and what was once an idea now is an online conscious marketplace for multiple responsible fashion brands.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am Ellie, founder of EMLE, an online conscious marketplace for responsible fashion brands. EMLE makes it easy to shop from multiple brands without sacrificing your style or values!

I created EMLE a few months into the pandemic when I was working in sports marketing in California. I was at a point in my life shortly after college graduation from University of Kansas where I wanted something different. I had an idea of what EMLE could be, but decided to jump into it full force November of 2020, eventually launching EMLE in August of 2021.

As a business owner, it is so fulfilling seeing other people learning a new way to shop responsible fashion. Fashion is such personal choice and you use it to represent who you are. It should be possible to still maintain your personal style and give a sh!t about the planet. You can mix the two with EMLE.

Do you sell on your site, or do you use a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc?

We use the platform Shopify. This platform has allowed us to utilize their tools, advice and structure to grow. We are able to properly manage our inventory, customer information, finance analytics and more all in one place. We have the support of Shopify to easily adapt when we face challenges on the website and use their extensive knowledge to continue to learn to grow.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

While I was working on EMLE for the year prior to launching in August of 2021, I had the vision I would launch EMLE and everything would be perfect. Not only did I think when we launched it would all be perfect without any flaws, I thought that was how you launched any new material, products, etc. in business. I quickly realized it wasn’t about the perfection that mattered but rather the process of you doing it. You can’t let perfection hold you back from starting.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.shopemle.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shopemle/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shopemle
• Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@shopemle