Her bag brand Freja, worn by Hailey Bieber and Jennifer Lawrence, is on track to do $20 million in revenue this year.

BY DIVYA BHARDWAJ, EDITORIAL INTERN

Freja founder Jenny Lei. Illustration: Inc.; Photo: Courtesy company

When Jenny Lei launched bag brand Freja New York in 2020, she knew that without prior design experience, she would need to build trust and credibility with consumers. “We started as a work bag brand in the middle of Covid. No one knew who we were. There was no reason to buy from us,” Lei says. “I was like, the only reason anyone would be interested is if they knew the story and the intention behind why we made every decision.”

That led her to start Freja as a blog in 2019, before she even manufactured her first bag. She chronicled the highs and lows of creating the Linnea tote — finalizing the design, choosing the vegan material, curating the colors, and finding the factory to bring the functional, understated work bag she envisioned to life. Five years after launching its first 300 bags, Freja is on track to close 2025 with $20 million to $22 million in revenue, up from $13 million in 2024.

Freja wasn’t Lei’s first entrepreneurial venture. In 2018, the summer after she graduated from Cornell, after an unsuccessful job search, she Googled how to make money fast online and learned about dropshipping. She launched products ranging from kitchen supplies (an avocado slicer was a hit) to jewelry to bags, drawing in customers through Facebook ads. Her seventh store took off, bringing in six figures of revenue monthly by month five.

Though she felt she had cracked the code, she had always known that........

© Inc.com