London-based Jenny Liu is on a mission to help petite women find premium fashion from leading independent designers.
Last year, she launched Bomb Petite, a high-end online fashion marketplace dedicated to petite women who stand at five feet four inches or 163cm and under. The site has already been featured in The Independent, In-Style and Glamour Magazine.
About the entrepreneur
Liu, 28, is a Taiwanese-American who moved to London in her early twenties to work with high-end fashion brands including Agent Provocateur, Burberry and All Saints before finding a gap in the market.
As a petite individual, she talks about the mismatch in the market and how smaller women have been left in the dark when it comes to high-end fashion, instead of making specific clothes with petite women in mind.
She explains, ‘If you wear a size 10 on your feet, you wouldn’t be offered a size 11 shoe and just manage or spend your life wearing thicker socks. Clothing should be no different.’
Currently, over 86 million UK and US women fall into the petite size category and actually around 50 per cent of the population is under five foot four.
About the business
The Bomb Petite website acts as an online marketplace, combining a number of specialist petite designers from across the globe including Hong Kong, Estonia and Vietnam. This gives customers a variety in clothing such as little black dresses, formal wear and evening gowns unique tailoring, and evening wear. It is Bomb Petite’s role to keep finding designers and making collections fresh for each season, as they take a percentage for every transaction without having to hold any stock.
The launch of the website attracted a lot of interest through social media, with a combined following of over 20,000 fashionistas across Pinterest, Twitter and Instagram. Big players in the industry have follow suit with their own fashion collections petite line.
The website also acts a community for like-mind and fashion-obsessed petite where they can browse, shop around and exchange tips. Some of the most popular topics have included how to make your legs look longer (and by the way, its wearing vertical patterns on your trousers, not horizontal).
The business is currently self-funded but is hoping to secure a round of investment in January next year.
