Katrina Lake never set out to run a fashion empire. In fact, she didn’t even consider herself particularly fashionable. She was the daughter of a Japanese immigrant mother and a Minnesota-born physician father, raised to believe in the power of education, rigor, and humility. But what Katrina had—long before the startup world began buzzing about AI, personalization, and “disruption”—was a rare ability to see patterns where others saw chaos.
She didn’t just want to sell clothes. She wanted to decode them.
While earning her MBA at Harvard, Katrina noticed that shopping—especially for working women—was still an inefficient, emotionally exhausting ritual. Retail was built around the idea that the customer would come to the store, wander the aisles, try things on under fluorescent lights, and leave either frustrated or poorer (sometimes both). Why hadn’t anyone reversed the model? Why hadn’t anyone built a company that put the customer at the center, using data and empathy to make her life easier?
With no background in fashion and no cofounder, Katrina sat alone in her Cambridge apartment, stuffing clothes into boxes and sending them to early users based on surveys she designed herself. She called it Stitch Fix, because she was trying to fix something that was broken—and because she believed every detail mattered.
She was laughed out of more than a few meetings. One investor told her that women didn’t want data; they wanted boutiques. She smiled politely and kept going.
What Katrina built was quietly radical: a hybrid of machine learning and human intuition, where algorithms handled the complexity of fit, preference, and inventory, while stylists curated each order with warmth and creativity. It wasn’t just about clothes—it was about trust in the algorithm the company developed.
By the time she took Stitch Fix public in 2017—becoming the youngest woman ever to do so at the time—she had defied nearly every expectation Silicon Valley had for what a founder should look like, act like, or care about.
She wasn’t loud. She wasn’t flashy. She was precise. Patient. Analytical.
She built Stitch Fix with tenacity, thoughtfulness, and confidence—a blueprint for every entrepreneur.