BY NOAH DILL
As the million dollar 5th avenue stores opened in early August 2015, Mariemont’s own, Madeline Falknor launched her small business for designing cute and functional girl backpacks in the hopes of establishing a little credit in the business community. Fast-forward to 2016, Madeline and Company is a fast growing company that is now expanding its line of products to include dresses. So how did a high school student from a small, Midwestern town establish such a company?
Falknor is a well-known figure in the Mariemont business community. She is ranked in the highest percent of her class, and has competed at the international DECA Competition.
With this competitive spirit, she took the idea of designing backpacks to the drawing board. “I’ve had the idea for several years, but I began the business this past summer,” Falknor says. “I could never find a backpack that was both cute and functional, so I wanted to design my own.”
In order to create a successful product to sell, there are three key steps.
- Design
- Production
- Marketing
In order to design a product, most entrepreneurs have to draw out their ideas. Instead, Falknor took her own backpack and marked up changes she wanted to see, in order to make the backpack more fashionable. The process of designing an entire product line is certainly not easy. “I was so surprised by how many little things there were; everything from the size of the zipper to the color of the tissue paper in the packaging to the exact shade of gold thread used for the logo embroidered on the front to the exact font on the website had to be chosen,” Falknor explains.
Once she had the idea of what she wanted the backpack to look like, the next step was production. Falknor handpicked a factory to successfully produce a large quantity of the prototype. She chose a factory in Indiana where a sample bag was produced. “After picking all of the fabrics and colors, the backpacks were made, which then allowed me to photograph and market the bags,” Falknor says.
In recent months, Madeline and Company has expanded their line of production to include dresses. This expansion was much more difficult than Falknor had expected. “I knew what I wanted the dresses to look like, but it was very hard to get the fit right,” she explains. “It took several tries before we got the final product. The design aspect, such as picking fabrics and colors, was similar to the backpacks, so that made the process slightly easier.”
Through the entire process, Falknor’s favorite part was simply seeing people around the school carrying the backpacks she had spent hours designing. “It was fun to see a few while walking through classes,” she says. It’s hard to get a few steps in Mariemont without seeing a female teenager pacing through the halls with a Madeline and Company backpack slung over their shoulders.
Sophomore Analise Hinebaugh is the proud owner of a Madeline and Company backpack. “I really like it because the backpack has enough space to hold everything, while still keeping it organized. Plus, it looks pretty good,” Hinebaugh says.
Through a sluggish economy, Falknor has been able to establish a profitable and expanding company. With all the success, Madeline and Company is able to continue pushing forward in their product expansion. Falknor claims she is currently working on the prom dresses that will hopefully be on the website soon.