Fort Worth entrepreneur juggles high school and fast-growing online apparel business | Fort Worth Report

Talk about a juggling act: high school senior Marielou Melchiors skipped her junior year, narrowed college application choices to schools such as Stanford and Princeton and, over the summer, started what has turned out to be a small but growing online apparel retailer — with manufacturing she arranged during a month in China. All before she turned 17 in November. 

As for order fulfillment: “I go to the post office every day,” Marielou, who graduates next spring from Fort Worth ISD’s I.M. Terrell Academy for STEM and VPA, said.

Touts on TikTok and Instagram of her Marieloulou.com products have pumped orders — sweatpants and hoodies under the Homebody and Cloud N9ne labels sell for $85-$88 — since Marielou launched the streetwear lines in June.

Marielou, whose admitted nervousness about the business’s prospects belies her poise and confidence, acknowledges she routinely spends parts of her school day working on the business.

“My phone will go ca-ching” when an order rolls in, she says. “My teacher will say, ‘What’s that?’ and I’ll say, ‘Oh, nothing.’”

Marielou, who goes by the nickname Loulou, has strong role models. Her mother, Jie Melchiors, co-owns the fast-growing, $100 million-a-year-plus Karat Home online home furnishings retailer, which sells into the apartment, college dorm and second home markets.

Earlier this year, Jie Melchiors and her partner purchased the assets of the Z Gallerie online retailer out of bankruptcy for several million dollars. Melchiors subsequently moved her business headquarters to Las Colinas from Fort Worth, where the family lives. Melchiors said in an interview for this story she expects this year’s sales from the combined business to reach $140 million-$150 million, with Z Gallerie adding $20 million-$30 million.

Marielou’s father, Fort Worth architect Matthijs Melchiors, developed the Connex Fort Worth office park — built out of shipping containers — at Evans Avenue and East Rosedale Street in the Hillside neighborhood.

Matthijs Melchiors, who likes to tinker on old cars in his spare time and took his family on a road trip this spring to Canada in a 1985 Mercedes-Benz wagon with 450,000 miles, said he’s trying to help Marielou maintain balance through everything she’s juggling — particularly given what she’s learned from her mother, who he describes as “extremely driven.”

“I feel it’s very important (Marielou) does maintain that personal time where you take care of yourself,” he said.

Jie Melchiors started Marieloulou more than 10 years ago to sell jewelry; her daughter commandeered the site this year for retailing her apparel.The budding business remains small, but its prospects are intriguing, given the social media attention it’s received since Marielou repositioned the site. 

Marielou has long been interested in making money, selling lemonade, hot chocolate and even pecans picked up from her yard when she was younger, and graduating to making items and selling them on Poshmark.com and helping her mother with Marieloulou. 

“She was always like a little business person,” her mother says, laughing.

The apparel business got its start when Marielou — interested in streetwear but finding nothing comfortable, casual and “cool” she wanted to wear — bought a sewing machine, taught herself to sew and made her first garments by hand earlier this year. She decided to offer them for sale on Marieloulou.

“All my friends wanted a pair (of sweatpants) and I frequently got stopped in public because people loved them,” she says. “That’s the point where I figured I’d make this a business.”

With sales showing strength, and her mother preparing to travel to China to tour factories for Karat Home, Marielou — at her mother’s recommendation — searched the Alibaba.com e-commerce platform for apparel manufacturers. She used Adobe software to design mockups and sent them to a factory near Shanghai that she and her mother, who is Chinese, visited last summer.

With her mother serving as her initial investor, Marielou, who speaks Mandarin, negotiated a first order of 300 Cloud N9ne pieces from the Chinese factory. Since receiving the order, she’s sold about 200 pieces, which are embroidered with cloud-like formations and embossed with the Cloud N9ne logo.

With the help of a local seamstress, Marielou made and sold about 120 Homebody pieces, each taking about 90 minutes to complete. She then ordered 200 from the Chinese manufacturer late this summer and is waiting out a 50-day delivery turnaround. With interest continuing to surge, she ordered another 340 Homebody pieces and now estimates she has taken about 350 preorders for them.

Homebody sweatpants have been Marielou’s more popular seller, a fact she attributes to having spent more time marketing them on social media. Fans have touted them as “blanket pants,” she said, given their warm sherpa lining.

Some of Marielou’s TikTok and Instagram posts, using hashtags such as #comfy, #loungewear, #streetwear and #sweatpants, have racked up several hundred thousand likes, with viewer comments including “I will be living in there;” “these would literally cook me;” and “this looks ridiculous; I need it now.” 

The attention of some social media influencers, who have put up their own attention-grabbing posts, led to volatility in sales. Marielou can go for days with a few orders per day, and “then I get 30,” she says. “I thought it would go slow, but then it all blew up on TikTok.”