Meet our Founder and CEO, Yidi Campbell
Yidi Campbell is the quintessential San Francisco woman: a tech entrepreneur and a curious creative mind with a fearless attitude, all wrapped up in a pink power suit that strikes the perfect balance of femininity and presence. When I met Yidi, she had just come from a quick curiosity stop at a consignment store to no avail, further illustrating for her the pain points that Indyx is solving - and a testament to her inquisitiveness that makes her a born entrepreneur.
Yidi is a retail industry veteran who has held strategy and operations positions at Gap Inc. and Athleta, with prior finance experience in investment banking. With years in the industry under her Tom Ford belt and a lifelong love of fashion, she felt women were not receiving basic styling and fit advice, and therefore excessively spent on the wrong things. Despite fashion being a personal hobby - something you’d think she’d have all figured out - she was finding her wardrobe “to be both overwhelming and underwhelming, all at once!”.
While our culture loves to depict shopping as an joyful and exuberant exercise in consumerism, as Yidi explains, it makes many women feel overwhelmed and anxious, unsure if the newest celebrity or social media trend truly flatters them - but also unsure of how to feel stylish without buying into the never-ending trend cycle. The expert perspective of a personal stylist might be able to solve this, but currently this is still a luxury service that is out of reach for nearly all women.
Consequently, consumers buy more than they need and barely use what they have while feeling perpetually guilty at every step. Yidi wants to break this cycle to help women take back control of their wardrobes and make getting dressed every day a joyful experience.
In founding Indyx, Yidi paired this personal insight with her first-hand experience of waste in the fashion industry. At Athleta, Yidi perceived a gap in brands' and retailers' understanding of what they are offering and what their consumers are wearing.Instead of truly knowing their customers, too many brands rely on guesswork, which leads to overproduction and excess inventory. Inevitably, the less popular styles are left behind and liquidated at the end of the season, likely to end up in landfill in relatively short order. This lack of customer-centric information and understanding has an enormous environmental impact, both in the upfront production through pollution and carbon emissions but also in these items’ eventual landfill disposal.
As Yidi considered these consumer and industry pain points, she saw an opportunity to help women visualize their wardrobes, learn how to truly style rather than chase trends, and shop more guilt-free.
Yidi’s founder story is a combination of a personal pain point and the ability to see the universality of her experience - as well as seeing the opportunity to rewire the broader fashion industry. As she describes it, “Indyx is a platform that helps women who want to be more conscious about what they own in their wardrobe and equips them to make the best choice on what to keep, how to style, and what to sell.”
In 2022, Yidi was able to bring these ideas to fruition with the launch of the Indyx app, offering users seamless tracking of their wardrobe and access to on-demand styling services. Indyx’s new offerings are now a tangible example of what Yidi hopes for the future of the fashion industry: to be more transparent, seamless, and effortlessly elegant.
However, she is quick to point out that as a founder, translating your vision into a real product is never an individual sport - it was only made possible by the collaboration and contribution of her Indyx team. To her, the team she is building is her proudest achievement so far - so, Yidi isn’t shy about bragging about all of the talented and passionate members of the team.
Yidi’s leadership philosophy is evident in her day-to-day schedule, starting her mornings by meeting with her team to align priorities and work through any blocking questions. She then splits her day between rolling her sleeves up to get things done, building training guides or releasing new features on the app, and zooming back up to share her vision and execution plan with potential investors and team members.
Between building Indyx and being a mom to her 2-year-old, life has gotten increasingly hectic, and she is always short on time. Her hours after “bedtime” are spent “clickety-clacking” on her computer, attending to any area in the business that needs attention. Or, as is often the case, disturbing her husband in the middle of the night with her laptop’s soft glow as she races to write down one of many “lightbulb moments'' before drifting back to sleep.
As Yidi heads into more meetings with investors and I head across the Bay, I can’t help but feel I am leaving a basement in Cupertino, albeit a much more fashionable basement. With a much needed solution to several of the industry's biggest issues and the ability to draw in an A list team, Yidi’s vision for how women can interact with fashion is sure to soon become a reality.
Rebecca is a fashion stylist and writer, recently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and currently living in London. She enjoys reading, skiing and having people cook for her.
