With her e-commerce clothing brand, Rachel Schifter ’97 Thebault is outfitting the next generation.
On the internet, there’s a vintage-style T-shirt with a little green alien. The alien is throwing the peace sign and is surrounded by clouds, rainbows, butterflies, stars, and Ring Pops. The text on the shirt reads, in a graffiti-like font, “It was all a dream.”
Rachel Schifter ’97 Thebault didn’t buy this shirt three decades ago — she manufactured it in 2022, through her teen-focused, e-commerce clothing company Woodley + Lowe. Alongside the aforementioned vintage tee, every Woodley + Lowe item follows the ’90s and early aughts aesthetic that’s taken over the fashion industry in recent years: baby doll tees, pleated miniskirts, and matching tracksuits. “Gen Z is so comfort driven, and how things feel on their body is so much more important than for previous generations,” Thebault notes.
She created Woodley + Lowe in part because she saw a hole in the market: “As the mall went away, no one came in and filled in these favorite teen apparel brands,” says Thebault. The days of mall browsing are dead (e-commerce sales grew by 50% during the pandemic, according to Forbes, with 39% growth in the clothing and clothing accessories category.
Also, teens are mostly shopping at fast-fashion stores, the Colgate economics major explains, which are notorious for providing cheaply made garments. “There are so many pain points,” she says. “Nothing fits them well. The quality’s poor. The brand messaging is kind of reprehensible. There’s nothing that feels inclusive. It’s feeding on their insecurities and not really pumping them up.” So, collaborating with Neda Talebian (the wife of Brian Funk ’97), she created her e-commerce platform to provide fashionable, well-made clothing to tween and teen girls. To counteract the negative practices of fast fashion, and recognizing that sustainability is important to this generation’s future, clothing is made largely from recycled materials and organic cotton. Because teens often change sizes and styles, Woodley + Lowe offers a trade-in program. The items that are returned through this effort are upcycled, resold, or donated.
Thebault’s ’90s dreamland isn’t built on off-the-cuff decisions. She relies on qualitative data provided by 150 teenage W+L ambassadors who are recruited to give feedback on new clothing items or design choices. Thebault uses the teens as a focus group to help decide what ultimately ends up on the website. “At first, we assumed these girls [weren’t] into pastels,” Thebault says. “And then we found out very quickly, oh yes, they love a pastel aesthetic, but then they love pops of color too.” Thebault jumps in to try to enter the mind of Gen Z girls in other ways — she’s constantly lurking on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and BeReal to figure out what that generation is listening to, what’s trending, and what emojis they’re using. She uses that information to inspire new designs for both clothing and the Woodley + Lowe website. It helps that Thebault has three girls of her own, who act as live-in guides to what it means to be a teen girl in the 2020s. “It’s an automatic litmus test,” she laughs.
Woodley + Lowe isn’t Thebault’s first foray into the business world — she’s adept at career pivots, spending seven years in the investment banking world before deciding to follow her passion and earn a degree from the Institute of Culinary Education. She then owned and operated the successful dessert company Tribeca Treats, crafting colorful kids’ birthday cakes, personalized cookies, and holiday confections before closing that chapter in 2018. “There are dozens of things easier about running a website than a physical store, but customer acquisition and marketing require a lot more work and planning,” she told Authority Magazine last year. Getting into the mind of today’s teen has helped focus Thebault’s mission of bringing ethically made closet staples to Gen Z closets. “[To run a successful business,] you have to be a risk-taker but you also have to be able to listen to people,” she says.
Rachel is married to Robert “Robin” Thebault ’99.