Welcome to Jenny's Journal, a founder series and newsletter where I'm sharing behind-the-scenes stories and all the lessons we've learned building a sustainable brand.
You see Freja as it is today — but there’s so much context behind how and why the brand exists. This is that story.
PART 1: THE INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT
The year was 2008, and I was a 12 year old who had newly fallen in love with the early world of food blogs — back when chia pudding and green smoothies lived in niche corners of the internet. I woke up at 5am before school to go for a run on the treadmill I haphazardly assembled myself, tested recipes on my parents after school, and learned everything I could about wellness. Looking back I would call it my first true passion in life.
My other passion appeared to be completely uprooting my own life and starting over – which is exactly what I did at age 13. We had moved to a city I didn’t love, and I felt suffocated. I spent a year campaigning to my parents to allow me to move back to China, and that’s exactly what I did. I stayed with my grandparents for a few months until they moved back with me, and enrolled into a local high school. I speak Mandarin fluently, but learned how to read and write in high school.
During this time I missed a lot of the recipe and ingredients I grew up with in the US. So I started an Instagram account and started posting recipes and saving ideas. This was the early Instagram era..there was no strategy, no aesthetic, just a VSCO-heavy chronological feed.
The account grew. Fast. I was one of the few plant-based creators (if you can call it that) at the time, and before I knew it, the page reached 800k followers. Brands reached out. I navigated my first collaboration with my parents at our dining table. We settled on $30 for a post (I had 100k followers). It makes me laugh now, but it also taught me early the value of an audience, of trust, and of creating something people genuinely want to follow.
By high school I had written and sold three recipe e-books through my own website. The income covered part of my tuition and all of my living expenses in college. It was my first real education in entrepreneurship: creating value, building systems, designing products, nurturing a community…and learning the power of passive income. I think that really stuck with me. How can I build something once and have it keep working for me?
PART 2: THE DROPSHIPPING STORE
Because my Instagram brought in a steady income, I never felt pressured to lock down internships the way everyone else did. I graduated without a job, and honestly had no idea where to even start. I felt like I wasted my four years of college – everyone around me had impressive internships starting from freshman year and I felt so behind. I could not believe I had been so blind to reality, but that was 22 year old Jenny. She lived one day at a time and never thought about or planned for the future.
The Instagram algorithm had shifted, my revenue plummeted, and I knew I needed to move on. A late-night Google search (“how to make money online”) led me to dropshipping. It seemed like the perfect, low-risk, low-investment business model.
Curious about this seemingly magic money printing machine, I dedicated the next two months of my life to job hunting in the am, and consuming every semi-related reddit thread and youtube video and applying whatever the 19-year-old driving a supercar with insane shopify dashboards preached at night. I spent every spare hour tinkering with fb ads, designing graphics, and making websites.
My first six stores failed, but the 7th one I tried got a sale within a week. Then another, then a few more, and by month five I was pulling six figures in revenue. A month. I felt like I had cracked the code and it was exhilarating. I continued running that store for the next year, and learned so much — from scaling ads to hiring to cx to light operations.
I also learned the difference between a running business that prints money, and building a brand that provides value. I saw the former (like my instagram account and dropshipping stores) start with a bang and gain steam rapidly, then fizzle out just as quickly. I learned that you can sell any product with good marketing. But a great product sells itself. I recognized that the way I ran the businesses was unsustainable – I exchanged long term growth for short term gains, and customer goodwill for making a quick buck. And that was understandable. I was young, didn’t know any better, and needed money to pay rent now, not years down the line.
I vowed to myself that my next venture would be personally meaningful and built for the long term. I was not going to invest so much time into building something, just to run it to the ground and have to start over yet again.
PART 3: THE START OF FREJA
While dropshipping gave me some breathing room and flexibility, I still had to figure out my future. Do I go back to grad school? Continue job searching? I decided I would try UX design — it seemed like a good balance between creative and practical.
I dedicated myself to my studies and career fairs and interviewing for any roles I had an inkling of interest in, determined that I would do college “right” this time around. Somehow, I secured a last round interview at a very prestigious firm. I felt like this could be my chance to join the ranks of my peers, live that dream finance life, the beginning of my own impressive LinkedIn profile...
Every option was either too floppy, too small, too loud, or too impractical. I needed something classic, understated, and functional. I ended up purchasing a plain stiff beige tote in a random store the next morning. Complete with my fresh, very not-broken-in heels and contrived, memorized stories, I shuffled up the stairs and waited for the beginning of the rest of my life.
Well the interview was a complete flop – I was scheduled for a full day of interviews on-site, and they let me go after just 2.5 hours. I changed back into my comfortable shoes and spent the rest of the afternoon in Bryant Park, reflecting on what went wrong and my next move.
I got back to school that night and started dreaming about creating something of my own. Something small, something personal. The original idea was to create my perfect interpretation of the work bag – designed for the modern day woman’s busy lifestyle, by a woman. It should be handcrafted with attention to the little details, one that both pulled my outfit together and kept me organized and on top of everything. I got started immediately.
I already had a marketing internship at a real estate firm lined up for that summer in NYC. I called my future manager Ivan, told him how much I was looking forward to working with him, and also about my plans to start Freja. I told him not to pay me for the duration of the internship, but that I would also only come in the mornings and leave in the afternoons to work on my own thing. He said yes. I took two weeks off in July to go visit factories in China, and went back to school in the fall. I worked on Freja every day and night, replying to my factory in China and receiving samples in between classes and homework. I graduated later that year in Dec 2019 and immediately went full time with Freja, launching our first 300 bags two months later in February 2020.