Zoe Damacela’s Plex dorm room is catalogue-perfect, defined by bright accents like her shaggy hot pink rug. Fashion magazine ads are splayed in huge collages on her walls. A stack of glossy business cards and a small sewing machine are tucked away in a corner on her desk. Most of her wares are at home, but she pulls out two pieces from her overstuffed closet — a shimmery layered dress and a strapless sunflower print dress. This is the ad-hoc headquarters of the blossoming Zoe Damacela Apparel line.
Damacela has come a long way from the high school student who sold her first dress for $13. The Weinberg freshman now makes and sells high-end clothes and accessories that have gained attention from the likes of Tyra Banks and Maria Pinto, both of whom have been her mentors. Her award-winning line and equally impressive life story have made her a serious up-and-coming name in the fashion world. Zoe Damacela Apparel took years to develop, and not always at easy costs.
Wanting something is not always enough, a lesson Damacela learned at a young age. It was a value that her mother, Farah Damacela, worked hard to instill in her daughter by teaching her to always find some way to get what she needed on her own. The necessity to be so independent proved indispensable for Damacela as a young entrepreneur, and has kept her grounded even in her increasing celebrity. ”She’s just a really nice, honest, genuine, humble person, and I’ve gotta say because we just didn’t have that much and we haven’t had that much, she always knows the price of a dollar,” Farah says.
Before moving to Chicago, Damacela was an eight-year old living in low-income housing in Santa Barbara, Calif. When her mother couldn’t afford a Razor scooter like Damacela’s friends had, instead of feeling sorry for herself, she sought a solution. “I said, ‘Well you know what, I’m not just gonna sit here and cry about it,’” she says. “‘I’m gonna do something about it.’”
To Farah’s surprise, Damacela raised enough money to split the cost of a scooter with her mom within a day of selling handmade greeting cards on the street. “The biggest lesson that I took was definitely that I don’t need to sit around and wait for things to happen,” she says.
It’s this attitude that propelled her through high school, where her business was at its height. A graduate of Whitney M. Young Magnet School in Chicago, Damacela challenged herself as both a student and an entrepreneur. While the rigorous curriculum prepared her for academics at Northwestern, she found her niche in the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship program at Young. The program, which seeks to give low-income students access to lessons about business and entrepreneurship, gave Damacela the core, practical skills she needed to round out her business. She learned to how to develop her entire brand, and took valuable lessons from her novice mistakes. That $13 dress she sold in high school, she realized, would be worth at least a couple hundred dollars.
“I definitely attribute all of my success as far as business to NFTE, because that’s how I learned to run the business,” she says. “That’s how I learned that I was seriously under-pricing all of my garments, and learned how to market myself and I made a business plan.”
These practical skills went into her business model for Zoe Damacela Apparel, which won her top honors at the NFTE Chicago Citywide Business Plan Competition and second place at the NFTE National Youth Entreprenuership Competition Meet. As a reward for the latter, she met President Obama.
As a freshman, Damacela is now at Northwestern on a high from all of her recent success and recognition with her line. However, she’s hit a somewhat of a roadblock already. According to university rules, students are not allowed to run businesses out of their dorm rooms. Damacela is still trying to work around this hindrance, as she can’t drop her business just because she’s in college now. She says she has emailed people multiple times about what she should do, but hasn’t gotten any responses.
“Of course, as an entrepreneur, I have to make phone calls in my room, I have to answer emails, I have to keep up with running the business while I’m here because I live here,” she says. “I have no choice but to continue to run my business because this is how I’m supporting myself. This is what I’ve been working on for the last five years now and I don’t know what else to do.” But overall, the hindrance hasn’t affected her too much. She still has her main home base in nearby Chicago, and she still has the right to make phone calls and send emails. “I’m an entrepreneur and it is a legitimate business, and so I’m gonna continue to do what I need to do to keep that running.”
Damacela isn’t letting the situation hold her back. While she can’t sell items directly from her dorm room, she can still run her business as a whole, and she’s still finding other ways to hone her skills. She wants to get involved in campus fashion such as STITCH Magazine, and would like to take classes in costume design. She also wants to take advantage of some of the more typical aspects of college life such as joining a sorority and studying abroad. It’s opportunities like this that Damacela, who is undecided in her major, wants to explore outside of fashion.
Whatever she chooses to look into next, Farah will be right behind her. She has supported Damacela in endeavors from aspiring author to painter to bookmark-maker. “I’ve always encouraged her to do anything, so it didn’t matter if she came up with these wild ideas, I just went with it,” she says.
Her long term goals are also as open-ended as her childhood ambitions. After college she plans on attending business school and majoring in entreprenuership and business administration, and possibly marketing. While fashion is a huge part of her life, she’s not limiting herself in her options. “I might go back to design school if I feel like that’s necessary at the time but I feel like I’ll always be running businesses because I define myself as an entrepreneur,” she says. In a few years Damacela might not be defined by her signature cowl neck minidresses or ruffly baby doll tops, but she’s sure to find another avenue for her creative drive.