We recently connected with Skye Lingenfelter and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Skye thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
One of the most compelling reasons for the birth of Smells Like Crime, Co. (“SLC”) can be summarized as follows: we are our own target audience. Let me explain:
Kinley and I are sisters, and we are as similar as we are different. We’re seven years apart in age, but we look alike. We’re both creators, visionaries, and artists, but I’m a lawyer and she’s a designer. We both have poodle-mix dogs, but mine is black and hers is blonde. We’re both enneagram 3s, but I’m an ISTJ and she’s an ENFP. We’re both passionate about arguing, being right, and fashion. It’s a match parent-made in heaven.
SLC was born at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. In March of 2020, when Kinley was a junior in college, her school shut down and sent all the students “home.” Unfortunately for college students, most of them don’t have a home outside their dorm rooms and campus apartments, and given the option, no twenty-something wants to move in with their parents. Kinley was no exception, so she opted out of moving in with our parents, and she moved in with me. At the time, I was living in Indianapolis, Indiana, finishing my last year of law school. Moving in together was awesome. Instead of seeing each other every couple of months, we were able to hang out every day. Like most people, we finished our semesters from home, and we coped with the extraneous boredom by binging Tiger King and taking the World’s Longest Walks™ (for legal reasons, the ™ is a joke). When summer rolled around, Kinley got a job in Indianapolis so she could save money for her senior year of college, and I went full-time at the law firm where I clerked during the school year. In sum, the jobs were great, but the clothes were not.
Even though I had significantly more work-appropriate “adult” clothing options than Kinley (given our age gap and career choices), we were scraping the bottom of the barrel to find enough work outfits to last us a summer (especially ones that looked cool AND were dressy enough for a professional setting), and this was nothing new. Long before Kinley and I were sharing a closet of professional clothes and lamenting the lack of options, I’d realized that I had to get creative with professional clothes to dress in a fashion-forward, self-expressive way. My saving grace (and secret hack) was my accessories collection. During my twenties I’d discovered that accessories like bowties, suspenders, colorful belts, hats, and obviously shoes could make any “normal” looking professional outfit a little spicier, but my most secret weapon were my numerous pairs of large, colorful, weird earrings, and over the years I’d collected quite a few of those items. I shared this knowledge with Kinley, and we used every last accessory and pair of earrings to style those outfits into something bearable (and dare I say, fun?).
At the end of the summer, Kinley moved back to Philadelphia to resume her normal life. While I like to think she missed me the most, I think she was mostly worried about leaving behind my earring and accessory collection. When she asked me where I got all my pieces (so she could start her own collection and carry on the tradition), I honestly couldn’t tell her. “Big Weird Earrings” or “creative work clothes” isn’t exactly an internet keyword or helpful search term. It had taken me years to collect the pieces I did have, and it was sheer happenstance that I had stumbled upon most of them. We tried searching for unique earrings online, and almost every pair of earrings we found were either too small to be fashion-forward, or too boring to be avant-garde. Searching for clothes was even worse. Almost everything in women’s workwear is blush, black, navy, and beige, or if you really feel like being bold, *gasp* red. It was a fruitless endeavor. We axed the internet search.
It was at approximately that moment when Kinley said, “We could make our own, you know. It can’t be that hard,” and roughly 12 weeks later, we launched Smells Like Crime, Co.
Born from the needs of its target audience (ourselves at first, and now so many others we represent), SLC brings unique colors, prints, cuts, and styles to young professionals so they can express who they are, and look and feel their very best at work. Day in and day out for the last two years, we’ve brought our ideas to life so we can wear what *we* want to wear to work. From giant butterfly earrings on client calls, to orange floral suits on NYC shopping trips, people never fail to notice and want to be a part of it, and this is just the beginning.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
As you probably gathered in our introduction, Kinley and I (Skye) are sisters. I’m a 29-year-old business lawyer, and Kinley is a 23-year-old fashion designer (and soon-to-be textile technologist). While our careers may seem very different on paper, the reasons we chose them are actually very similar. Kinley and I are both obsessive problem solvers, and we don’t shy away from a challenge. In fact, one of our worst fears and deepest discomforts is boredom.
One of the biggest reasons we chose our respective careers is the unique combination of problem-solving and endless learning. Never, at any point in a lawyer’s or designer’s career, are they done solving problems or learning new things. As a lawyer, every client is different, every case has unique facts, and every law has a loophole to be argued. As a designer, each day is an opportunity to create something new; abstract ideas must be translated into something physical and material, and every roadblock is an opportunity to forge a new path. We’re nearly identical in what drives us, but we have entirely different skillsets.
Everything necessary to start, run, and maintain a successful company we do ourselves. Literally. While we do hope to one day delegate a good portion of the work and enjoy more of the design and decision-making side of things, for now, we are the dawn and dusk, start and finish, and beginning and end of SLC. Our backgrounds have allowed us to handle every single aspect of running a clothing label. Primarily, I design accessories and manage the business and legal side of things, and Kinley designs our garments and collections, and creates our fabric prints. Together, we develop our logos, manage social media, content creation, website, and other branding decisions, and we tag-team the modeling (and procuring of models), and photography.
Kinley and I co-founded SLC from completely different positions and angles in life, but together, we’re a force to be reckoned with. Everything we create and design for SLC is personal because it’s stuff we want to wear, but can’t find on the market. We started our clothing label because we saw a massive gap in the market for young professionals. Workwear is boring, I’ll just say it, but the Millennial and Gen-Z generations are some of the most diverse, progressive, and expressive generations to enter the workforce. We have colorful hair, visible piercings, and tattoos, and we’re just not trying to blend in. How can we reconcile those traits and habits with workplace tradition? How can we establish our place in the world and grow in our fields when we can’t even find an outfit to wear to work that feels like *us*?
As former college athletes, Kinley and I both strongly adhere to the belief that one who looks good, feels good, and one who feels good, plays really freaking well. We’ve expounded that mantra into our adult work-lives, and we founded SLC to help answer the questions stated above. Basically, we’re creating and designing like mad-women so the modern professional can feel like a stand-out (both in their career-field AND in their outfit).
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
Social media is a doozy, and it’s been a huge learning curve for us. Essentially, we’ve found that consistency is crucial, and content should be more than just product information and marketing. Think about it. Why do you follow people on social media? Personally, I follow people because they give me interesting content that makes me want to (1) try something new, or (2) laugh and share it with friends.
Kinley and I already incorporate our products into our lives (we are actually wearing them to work, etc.) so we’ve strategized social media content that shows off our business and products without “selling” to people. No one wants to be sold to all day. We focus more on creating fun, funny, or relatable content that allows our followers to get to know us. Our best performing content have been DIYs, funny montages, glow-ups from childhood to adulthood, etc. We’re still working on expanding our social media presence, but this strategy has been working pretty well for us.
Taylor Swift has always done this incredibly well. She’s my personal hero, but she’s also a perfect example of someone who has created an accessible platform where her fans can reach and relate to her. Humans seek connection. Creating a brand that makes people feel included and understood garners fans who are loyal not to a product (in Taylor’s case, a song, album, etc.) but to the person behind the brand. No matter what Taylor produces, her fans will love it because SHE is the brand. Kinley and I work to produce content that reflects this principle.
And if nothing else, high quality, efficient content (not cinema level, but not blurry, dark, or hard to follow) is key.
Do you sell on your site, or do you use a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc?
We do not currently use any online sales platforms other than our own website (built through Shopify), although we recently expanded into a local brick & mortar store in downtown Philadelphia! We’ve found that targeted ads, social media, and personally representing our brand (by wearing it) are some of the most effective ways to grow and increase our sales.
Using our own website (in lieu of selling on Etsy or another platform) greatly decreased percentage cuts from our sales, and instantly made our brand look and feel more established.
Contact Info:
- Website: smellslikecrime.com
- Instagram: @smellslikecrime
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Smellslikecrime
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/smellslikecrime
- Other: tiktok: @smellslikecrime