With the help of her two daughters, Gina Rodríguez managed to make sales explode in her quinceañera dress shop, where young people from all over the world come to try on the outfit of their dreams that will make them feel like queens when they reach age. of illusions.
“By taking the store to social media, they made sales soar, and people from all over the world come to Disneyland for their quinceanera dresses,” says Gina.
It all began 32 years ago when a year after emigrating from her native Guerrero, Mexico, Gina opened a casual clothing store in the city of Anaheim that she called Fashion 2000.
But when 15 years ago, she offered to give her niece her dress for her fifteenth birthday party, she didn’t know that it would lead her to turn her business around.
“I realized that the girls couldn’t try on the dress for such a special day because they usually order it from a catalog, or they don’t let them in the same stores,” she says.
That’s how Gina let her imagination run wild and she thought that if her business focused only on quinceañera dresses, she could offer a very good service by allowing the minors to measure them so they could see if they liked how they looked or not.
“It was a process of a lot of teaching and starting over because we didn’t know the industry. Our customers were used to buying casual clothes.”
But they weren’t counting on the 2008 recession, which caused them to fall behind on their rent and get an eviction order.
“We had to sell the house and with the equity (the profit) we paid the debts, the six months that we owed rent for the business premises and we parted with all material things”.
The most painful part for her and her husband was telling their four children that they had to sell the house to save the business.
“They were not aware that things were so serious, and that they had to come to terms with a new reality because that same day, we had to go live in the business. And another surprise, we had nowhere to bathe. My husband went to Walmart to buy a tub, and every time we took a shower we had to flush the water down the toilet.”
The only good thing is that the place was very wide, 25,000 feet, and his children were able to keep their beds.
“Dad and mom had to sleep on the floor on the cushions of some armchairs.”
They also had to adapt to cooking on a gas grill because they didn’t have a kitchen.
“In those conditions we lived for about three years. In 2018 we went to rent an apartment where we stayed for two years, and in 2020, we bought our house”.
A few years ago, in 2016, his 26-year-old daughters Gipsy and 25-year-old Gelssy began to integrate and get involved in the business by making marketing, in the administration and in the promotion in the social networks. And the daughters’ foray into the business made a difference, since they went to social networks to promote with all their dresses.
“During the pandemic we try to maintain communication with our clients. We reinvent ourselves with catwalks on-line. Gipsy has three million followers on Tik Tok and our Instagram page is highly ranked with over 245,000 followers.”
The daughters also have fifteen empire a show on YouTube where they promote their dresses, talking about the entire process for choosing the dresses.
Gina says without hesitation that the service vision of Fashion 2000 By focusing solely on selling quinceanera dresses, it has helped them a lot.
“We are also launching ourselves as designers. The entire new collection is designed by my daughters and myself.”
After all the sacrifices made to get her business going, Gina confesses that she is happy.
“I am passionate about what I do and aware that our purpose was for the girls to be able to measure their fifteen-year-old dress and have a nice experience during the preparations.”
She says that young women from different parts of the country and even from Mexico come to the store for her quinceañera dress.
“The plane ticket costs more than the fifteen-year-old dress.”
Gina attributes the success of her store to the fact that her dresses make every girl feel like a queen or princess on her quinceanera.
“They fill the requirements of an elegant, classic and modern dress.”
Your dream is that Fashion 2000 become a global brand in the quinceañera industry.
focus mija
To share what she has learned in the business world with other women, Gina created a business leadership and empowerment course.
“We are going to play it in the city of Garden Grove in Orange County throughout the day this Wednesday. What I am doing is creating a community of women who have chosen to start a business, based on my own experience of how to run a business, since we generally do not train or educate ourselves to manage it”.
The course focus mija It will be this Wednesday March 22 from 10 am to 7 pm.
To enroll you can call 714-365-8595.
The first 10 people who call saying they found out about this course through La Opinión will have free admission, Gina assured.
“focus mija it’s designed to make us notice what the conversations are that empower us,” said Gina.
On Instagram you can find Moda 2000 at @moda2000inc