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Retaining a 16.6% share in Stitch Fix, Katrina’s net worth stands at more than $200m. However, she didn’t initially set out to become an entrepreneur.<\/p>\n
After growing up in Minnesota and San Francisco, she had wanted to follow in the footsteps of her father and become a doctor. Instead, after getting a degree in economics from Stanford University she started her working life as a management consultant, and later worked for an investment firm.<\/p>\n
Her passion was clothing retail though, and she hoped that being at an investment company would enable her to meet e-commerce founders, so that she could become part of the next big thing in the consumer fashion industry.<\/p>\n
“I just wanted to work at whatever was going to be the future of apparel retail,” she says. But she soon gained the confidence to go it alone. “I realised there’s nothing special about being an entrepreneur,” she says. <\/p>\n
Katrina had the idea that people wanted a more personalized approach when it came to shopping for clothes, and that AI could help. At 5ft 2in (1.6m) tall, she says that she had always struggled to find clothes to suit her petite stature.<\/p>\n
Her sister, a fashion buyer, was also an inspiration. “She was like a personal stylist to me sometimes… she knew all the up and coming brands,” says Katrina.<\/p>\n
To pursue her idea for Stitch Fix she enrolled at Harvard. While there she started to build the business from her student digs, along with her co-founder Erin Flynn. Flynn, a former buyer for US retailer J Crew, subsequently left the business in 2014.<\/p>\n
“We cobbled together things you could do online for free,” says Katrina. She would conduct online surveys to find out what potential customers wanted to buy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n