Favorite Daughter co-founder Sara Foster reveals $150M in projected retail sales and profitable growth built on authenticity

Summary

Favorite Daughter co-founder Sara Foster projects the brand will hit $150 million in retail sales in the next year, a figure she confirmed publicly at a Bloomberg conference before repeating it here. The company is already profitable, with EBITDA improving materially over the past four months after the tariff shock forced rapid supply chain restructuring.

The tariff hit landed without a clear plan. The team scrambled to evaluate alternative manufacturing in India, Turkey, and Mexico, though Foster credits president Jennifer Stender Hawkins with leading the operational response that stabilized margins. The speed and quality of that pivot, she says, is what drove the profitability recovery.

The brand's positioning is its core competitive moat. Foster argues that celebrity and influencer brands have failed to scale at comparable rates because their founders do not actually wear the product in real life. Favorite Daughter was built for the woman who wants elevated, tailored clothing without spending $1,500 on a blazer. The working professional segment has become a particularly strong cohort, with law firms cited as a repeat reference point.

Video is the top-performing content format across both organic and paid channels in 2025. Conversion does not depend on Foster or co-founder Erin appearing on screen. Office staff of varying ages, shapes, and sizes perform comparably well, which has become a deliberate creative strategy rather than an accident.

On influencer strategy, Favorite Daughter has leaned heavily into ShopMy as its affiliate infrastructure. The most commercially effective partners have been micro-influencers, with Foster specifically citing a Dallas-based mom as outperforming celebrities with millions of followers in terms of actual product movement.

Product expansion is methodical and test-driven. The brand validated $1,000-plus outerwear with a cautious rollout before scaling it. A footwear license with Caleres just launched. Accessories, particularly logo products, are a distinct customer segment that subsidises ready-to-wear growth.

On AI, Foster sees genuine cost and efficiency upside in e-commerce photography, which she describes as expensive and time-consuming, but is cautious about customer trust. The brand has not yet adopted AI-generated models and is treating the question as an open risk. Her view is that consumer loyalty is the only durable asset, and anything that erodes it carries disproportionate downside.

Beyond the brand, Foster runs a consumer-focused investment fund alongside her sister Erin and partner Phil Schwartz. The thesis is narrow: they only back companies for which they are the target customer and whose products they believe their audience will adopt. She passed on an early investment in ShopMy, which she flagged as a notable miss given its subsequent growth and reportedly significant valuation round.