The Beauty of Being an Outsider

Senreve is a luxury fashion brand, but it wasn’t created by luxury fashion insiders. Here’s how its founders came to dominate a very insider-driven industry.

- STEPHANIE SCHOMER

Coral Chung and Wendy Wen had built successful careers in business consulting and investment banking, respectively. When they both ended up doing some work with storied luxury fashion brands (Chung with Prada, and Wen with Chanel), the Stanford business school grads identified the same big problem: Nobody was taking a digital-first approach to serving professional millennial women—so they decided to try. Chung and Wen created Senreve, a direct-to-consumer luxury fashion brand, and launched their first product in 2016. (It’s called Maestra, a bag that can be worn as a tote, a crossbody, or a backpack and has enough space for the many tools of a busy executive.) Since then, Senreve has exploded, being embraced by celebrities like Selma Blair and Priyanka Chopra, and raising $23 million. How’d they do it? By owning their outsider status.

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