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

Alright, Emily thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Do you manage your own social media?

Hired a team to manage

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?

My journey of entrepreneurship began at the age of 9, buying things from the dollar general and reselling to my cousins. This is when I knew I had a passion in sales, and entrepreneurship. As I got older I joined business clubs, marketing courses in high school and the passion continue to grow. Fast forward I got my first taste of business when I began working for Vector Marketing/Cutco selling kitchen cutlery. Within the first few months I sold about 10k in kitchen tools.

While doing this I was working a part time and going to Ga State for business administration. With the entrepreneur mindset I dabbled in anything I could to learn, and network. After quite a few setbacks, I entered into the world of Ecommerce.

Following a failed marriage and a 2 year old I turned something that gave me confidence after birth to the world. Thus began EmShapewear. A modern online shopping experience for fajas. Fajas is the Spanish word for “wrap”.
Fajas are used for post op care, and to help shape and mold the body. Prodominetly used in latino culture, but has been taking the industry over in the US. For the last 10 years surgery is becoming normalized, and with this the rise of Fajas. Fajas give you an instant hourglass body without the cost or pain of surgery. Think of it as shapewear but on steroids.

My mom was in the faja industry when I was in my teens, and I saw the potential it had. I took her resources, cut out the middle man, and worked independently with one of the top faja manufacturers in Colombia.

What sets EmShapewear apart is the transparency. Showing real women, stretch marks, fat, rolls, all that good stuff. And education our audience on fajas. At the rise of EmShapewear (2020) No one wanted big corpa business, they wanted see sally your neighbor. The real no more fake BS. And that’s we did. We created an environment where women could feel confident in their own skin, and dealing with a real team of humans not robots/corpa.

I am so proud of how quickly EmShapewear has grown in the little 3 years since we started. We recently hit our 1million in sales, and looking to continue scaling god willing. We started with about 100 followers on TikTok to now 180k, Might be 200k soon.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

I started with $3k. Everything I profited I put it right back into the business. My first mistake was I thought I that I had to pay taxes because of me making a 20k profit but in reality, since I reinvested everything I wouldn’t have to pay a dime back. However because of this it held me back in getting funding from banks because I had no real documentations claiming these claims. Now being in business I’ve learned to be able to continue growing, getting funding or even investors you have to have up to date finances. Hiring a CPA from the get go is SO worth it, if you’re looking to scale your business to the 6figures.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

The biggest listen to unlearn is NOT EVERYTHING IS A TAX WRITE OFF. I fed off social media, and even accountants who only mange but not scale businesses. If you write everything off you don’t show a true profit, yeah you’ll avoid paying taxes but no one, and I mean NO ONE will want to fund your business. Big corps, and banks want to see, hey you can make money, but can you keep it?

Contact Info:

• Website: www.emilyblacc.co
• Instagram: Emily.blacc
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emily-moreno-5b3796a6