Company

Name: Balodana

Legal: Balodana, LLC – Balodana Fashion Series

Location: Chicago, IL

Founded: 2018

Founder(s): Dana Todd

Website: https://www.balodana.com 

Social Media Following: 344 Followers on Facebook, 211 Followers on Twitter, 365 Followers on Instagram, 64 Followers on LinkedIn, 30.4k viewers on Pinterest

Industry – Apparel and Accessories Retail E-commerce

Size: $102.15B in 2018 (Source: Statista)

Projection: $740B by 2023 (Source: Statista)

Introduction

Balodana believes that a woman’s body cannot be categorized into a few defined sizes available in the market. It is an online marketplace that brings together designers from Ukraine, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Israel, and Canada for professional women looking for great couture fashion on their own terms. The platform also provides its customers with a personal style team and focuses on providing sustainable fashion.

The Product

Balodana is an online marketplace that serves the professional woman’s couture needs by providing a wide range of collection of chic workwear that is made-to-fit especially for their unique bodies. The online marketplace brings women and custom clothiers from America, Canada, and Europe, while adding the high-touch customer service of a posh retail store to the online platform to guide customers and help them with advice and ideas. 

Origin and Founding Team

Dana Todd has served as an interim chief marketing officer at several leading organizations in the US. The press has called Dana as one of the pioneers of the internet marketing industry. Dana saw an opportunity to create a marketplace for women looking for custom-fit, high-quality work clothing after being disappointed by the available options in the retail and high-end stores which were of low quality, ill-fitting, and often shapeless garments that didn’t feel powerful or stylish.

Separately, reports on how fast-fashion created significant environmental damage by creating massive amounts of waste, chemical impacts to water and land and exploitative labor practices, further inspired Dana to create a unique space for sustainable fashion. She invited talented designers and tailors across the American and European continent to her marketplace to bring back dressmaking at competitive prices for the American women but with the best new technology to create Balodona.

Performance and Trends

The team currently comprises less than 10 employees. As of March 2019, the company has raised $80,000 in a pre-seed round. Balodana is also one of the 10 companies in 1871’s latest WiSTEM cohort, a startup accelerator for female founders.