Melissa Mash was 24 and running a Coach store at London’s Heathrow Airport when she started hearing the same complaint from customer after customer. Their bags had turned into what she’d later call “black hole bags” — the kind you dig through to find your keys, your phone, your sunglasses, all swallowed somewhere in the same undivided pit. She’d already spent years around the product, having interned at Coach during college in New York before moving to the UK to handle buying, visual merchandising, and operations, and to run a nine-person international sales team. What she hadn’t expected was how consistently women described the same unsolved problem with the bag on their own shoulder.
From a Wharton classroom to a company
Mash carried that observation into business school at Wharton, where she watched classmates doing what she called the “two-bag schlep” — a laptop bag in one hand, a purse in the other, because no single bag did both jobs well. She decided to build the bag that would.
She didn’t build it alone. At Wharton she recruited Deepa Gandhi, a longtime acquaintance and classmate, to help shape the business. For design, she brought in Jessy Dover, a recent graduate of Parsons School of Design, to lead the creative side. The three of them founded Dagne Dover in 2013 — Mash as CEO, Gandhi as COO, Dover as chief creative officer.
Turning down the fast money
By 2014, Dagne Dover needed capital to grow, and the founders faced the decision most consumer startups face at that stage: chase a venture round, or find another way. They chose another way. That September, the company closed a $1.25 million seed round — not from a traditional VC fund, but from angel investors with e-commerce, fashion, and retail experience, including David Bell, an early investor in Warby Parker and Bonobos, and David Williams of 2020 Ventures.
The founders have since described the choice in blunt terms: patient capital over venture capital. In an interview with ABC News, Gandhi said the model let them build “a product-first, customer-first brand” — one that could make decisions for the product and the customer instead of bending every choice toward the growth numbers a VC-backed board expects.
“It was really important that we had [financial, operational, and design] skills represented on the founding team, so that we could move quickly and move longer without having to raise money,” Mash told Glossy.
Built like a retail brand, run like a tech one
That founding-team structure — one operator, one designer, one business lead, no missing seat that outside money would need to fill — has stayed intact. “In many ways, we often run more like a traditional retail brand, but with the efficiencies of tech and of the modern times,” Mash said.
Mash has also been candid about why she wanted a founding team, not just a founder. “We didn’t see ourselves reflected in management,” she told Glossy of the retail industry she came up in. “[Retail] was and continues to be a very male-dominated industry, despite who they’re selling to and who the products are made for and who actually works at these companies.”
Gandhi has framed the company’s product philosophy around the same patience. “At Dagne, we believe in equipping our customers so that they feel like they’ve got this,” she said. “Over the years, we have introduced collections that address the ever-evolving life of our customer. We hope that he or she can grow with us. In the end, we try to anticipate their needs so that we’re there when they need us.”
Ten years, one luggage line
The clearest evidence of that patience showed up in 2024, when Dagne Dover launched its first luggage collection — three years after the founders first started talking about building it, according to Forbes. For a company that could have chased a faster product cycle with outside capital pushing it, three years to ship one category is the strategy working as designed, not a delay.
Speaking to Forbes about staying aligned on purpose rather than comparison, the three co-founders offered advice that reads as a summary of their own decade: “Don’t compare yourself to others. Invest time and energy in pursuing things that light you up… just because you’re good at something doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s serving you.”
Mash, Gandhi, and Dover are still the company’s CEO, COO, and chief creative officer. No fourth co-founder replaced any of them; no VC-mandated executive hire filled a gap they’d already covered themselves in a Wharton classroom in 2013. The bag business built to fix one specific problem — the black hole at the bottom of a woman’s tote — grew by refusing to let anyone else set its pace.
Related founders
- Kyle Bigley Found a Faster Lane in SMS — another founder who chose to grow on his own terms, bootstrapping TxtCart from $25,000 in savings to nearly $3M ARR without outside funding.
- $300, a Crockpot, $10M: Oliver Zak’s Mad Rabbit Origin Story — a contrasting founder path: two college sophomores who did take outside capital, including a Shark Tank deal with Mark Cuban, to scale fast.
Quotes from Melissa Mash and Deepa Gandhi are drawn from: Glossy, “Dagne Dover founders Melissa Mash and Deepa Gandhi: ‘When you make great product, word of mouth happens’” (glossy.co); ABC News / Good Morning America, “Dagne Dover co-founders on choosing patient capital over venture capital” (abcnews.com); and Forbes, “Dagne Dover’s Three Female Cofounders Are Passionate About Sustainable Fashion” by Mei Mei Fox (forbes.com, June 2022). The 2014 seed round and investor names are reported in AlleyWatch, “Here Is Why NYC Startup Dagne Dover Just Bagged $1.25M in Funding” (alleywatch.com, September 2014). The 2024 luggage launch and its three-year development timeline are reported in Forbes, “Why It Took The 3 Cofounders Of Dagne Dover 3 Years To Develop And Launch A Luggage Line” by Tanya Benedicto Klich (forbes.com, June 2024).
