Maria Peevey's Success Story

Founder of SimplyShe Inc.

Maria Peevey is famous for being Founder of SimplyShe Inc, a fashion company, based in San Francisco. She does not only create fashion wear for women, but also for pets. Her company designs and makes a whole gamut of products for pets that is probably unrivaled by any other company. Today the sales have reached around $50 million a year. Surely, you are thinking about how did she come to the idea of running up such a business. Just keep reading and you'll find out.

Years before Maria founded SimplyShe, she wrote a book, called SimplyDog, which contained anecdotes and humorous lessons from life, which were basically inspired by her golden retriever. She says that when she realized that the pet fashion industry was virtually non-existent, “a light went off in her head”. That's when the idea of creating a product line of fashion accessories for pets was actually born.

Maria was already an accomplished designer and creator of fashion products for women. From 1999, she had designed and created fashion products for women through her company SimplyShe. She also had a lot of success selling her products to high-end boutiques. This provided her with a lot of experience in designing and developing products for the fashion industry. She used this as a launching pad for her next venture, SimplyDog, which she founded in 2004.

Since Maria already had a lot of experience in selling her products to high end retail stores, she took the same approach for her new product line for pets too. She leveraged the presence, reached and branded image of huge retail chains to showcase her products.

In 2005, Maria convinced one of Petco’s Vice Presidents of merchandising to display her product line in their stores. This was the first breakthrough that she got for her SimplyDog products. The very next year, she was able to convince Wal-Mart and win a contract with them. Her products included dresses, jackets, necklaces, carriers, beds and even toys for pets. Being a trend setter in the pet fashion business and having the support of giants like Wal-Mart to sell the products, her company was able to quickly rise to the top within a very short period of time.

Maria Peevey’s company today reaches the entire nation with brands including SimplyCat, SimplyShe and SimplyWee apart from SimplyDog. She is also planning to expand the reach to other countries as well. Maria attributes her success to her guts to go and approach big time companies like Wal-Mart. Today Wal-Mart has dedicated a whole aisle to pet fashion products from SimplyShe. Maria feels that this would have never happened if she didn’t have the boldness to approach them.