Student business owner combines passion for fashion with business education

Holly Fairchild, a junior studying psychology and entrepreneurship from Overland Park, Kansas, has been running her vintage clothing resale business, Vogue Girl Vintage, since 2019, collaborating with other small businesses, students and cross-state flea markets. 

She’s been involved in the Kansas City fashion scene since she was in high school, forming her first connections by modeling in various fashion shows. By the time she decided to run her business full time, she already had a footing in the Kansas City area and an established customer base.  

“I guess you could say that my friends and I were the fashionistas of our school,” Fairchild said. “We were always wearing crazy outfits, doing random modeling gigs and getting ourselves into the Kansas City fashion scene before we were really in it. That made for an easy transition once I decided to make fashion my career since I had already built those connections from such a young age.” 

Fairchild primarily runs her business via local pop-up events, selling in cities like Lawrence, Kansas City, Manhattan and Wichita. She also holds a long-term vending spot at the River Market Flea in Kansas City and frequently vends with Hawk Vintage Flea, a Lawrence-based vintage clothing pop-up flea market. She sells clothing on Depop, a resale website, through Instagram stories and is currently building a website to launch Vogue Girl Vintage into e-commerce. 

She’s also learned to stretch and contract her business depending on the season. She says that winter is slower than summer, where pop-ups are frequent and more people are out at flea markets. In the summer, she stocks up on clothes to sell in the winter, storing them in bins at a parent’s house to pull from when she’s low on stock. 

“I’m really big on the circular economy, which is basically just redistributing waste, so it’s not going back into the ecosystem and never biodegrading,” Fairchild said. “I source organic fibers. I like everything I sell to be 100% cotton, linen or silk, for example. Everything needs to be 100% biodegradable.” 

Fairchild says that her addiction to shopping is what led her to start Vogue Girl Vintage. In the early days of her business, she sold clothing on Snapchat and Instagram and decided to run her business full time when the COVID-19 pandemic began.   

“I was constantly keeping up with trends and reselling like crazy,” Fairchild said. “I loved shopping and reselling and turning things around. I had an entire wall dedicated to the sales I made. That’s how I organized my sales.” 

When Fairchild started at KU in 2023, she didn’t expect to get involved in any extracurriculars, saying that her initial goal was to graduate on time. She was encouraged to join the Fashion and Business Organization (FBO) by her friend and FBO founder Marilyn Jewett, a recent business graduate, which she said helped her find the fashion-forward community she was looking for at KU and various networking opportunities, including getting to speak with Kate Spade co-founder Elyce Arons during her fall 2025 visit to KU.  

Eventually, she joined The Catalyst program after a recommendation from a professor, whom she had reached out to for advice on filing business taxes. She attended one of the lunch-and-learns led by Ryan Rains, director of The Catalyst and entrepreneurship co-curricular programs, and expressed her interest in joining the program. After the interview process, she joined and now currently serves as a guide-in-training for those years below her in the program.   

“I had originally wanted to go to fashion school, and I was so set on it. I was so upset that I couldn’t go,” Fairchild said. “When I found KU FBO and the entrepreneurship community, that really turned things around for me. Getting the opportunity to work with other people who aren’t exactly in the fashion industry but are building their own companies and to talk to other people who are going through the same thing I am is so nice.”  

The Catalyst is a cohort-based program for students interested in collaboration, where students get advice on how to run their businesses, get opportunities to pitch their businesses to potential investors, collaborate with one another and develop professional and entrepreneurial skills necessary to continue to keep their business thriving. The program progresses through three stages, taking the student through a three-yearlong journey with their business or entrepreneurial idea.   

“Entrepreneurship can feel like a lonely journey, and there are a lot of ups and downs,” Fairchild said. “You have really good days and bad days. In The Catalyst, we’re able to talk about that with each other. We’re also able to apply critical thinking to our businesses instead of just being stuck in an emotional up-and-down framework.”  

Fairchild says that she appreciates how The Catalyst supports “all kinds of businesses,” making it a more accessible way for students to develop their endeavors. She says that not everyone is on the same level of business development: some have full-fledged businesses, while others are just in the idea stage, but the program works with them all in different ways to achieve their goals. 

She also finds it interesting how the concepts they’re taught can apply to all kinds of businesses in the program, from beauty, to fashion, to window-washing to nonprofit organizations.  

“It’s really interesting to see how all these business frameworks are applicable to all of our businesses in a way where they can still be totally different from each other,” Fairchild said. “We work together in a cohesive way.” 

After graduation in May 2027, she hopes to continue working in the fashion industry, with plans to scale her business into e-commerce, pitch to various companies and venture capitalists and reach her monetary goal to invest in a private label company. She says that through The Catalyst, she’s been given the opportunity to work on these skills and begin to raise funding, reaching about 15 percent of her goal so far.  

“Fashion is about 90 percent of my focus,” Fairchild said. “It’s great that KU has given me this outlet to put fashion and school together in a way that works for me. I sometimes have a hard time balancing that, and now I have this outlet where I can get paid and teach. It inspires me to keep showing up.”