Selkie
Kimberley Gordon co-founded Wildfox in 2007 and was forced out by 2015. In 2018 she launched Selkie alone, named after the folkloric sea-woman searching for her stolen skin. By 2021 the puff dress was on every TikTok For You Page, the size range ran XXS to 6X, and Gordon was the sole owner.
In October 2018, Kimberley Gordon launched Selkie out of Los Angeles with a small line of vintage-inspired dresses, a Scottish folktale, and no investors. Three years earlier she had walked away from Wildfox, the brand she co-founded in 2007 and watched grow to roughly $120 million in annual sales before the majority owner pushed her out.
The Puff Dress arrived in 2020. By the height of the pandemic, the dress, which retailed around $249, had spread across TikTok as a cottagecore lockdown obsession. The hashtag #PuffDress racked up roughly 30 million views, and #Selkie cleared 130 million. Anthropologie, Free People, and Revolve placed wholesale orders. Gordon found out about the virality second-hand: someone told her she had a viral TikTok brand, and she asked what they were talking about.
The structural difference between Wildfox and Selkie sits in the cap table. Selkie is sole-founder owned, bootstrapped, and has never raised outside funding. Annual revenue has been estimated at roughly $2.1 million by third parties, modest next to Wildfox’s peak but housed entirely inside one woman’s company. The puff dress that sold out across TikTok was Gordon’s to keep.
At a glance:
| Founded | October 2018, Los Angeles |
| Founder | Kimberley Gordon (sole owner) |
| Funding | Bootstrapped, no outside investors |
| Revenue (estimated) | ~$2.1M annually (third-party estimate) |
| Size range | XXS to 6X |
| Distribution | DTC (selkiecollection.com), wholesale at Anthropologie, Free People, Revolve, rental at Nuuly |
| Pricing | ~$249 signature puff dress, up to $1,500 made-to-order silk bridal |
| Viral moment | 2020-2021 Puff Dress on TikTok (#PuffDress ~30M views, #Selkie ~130M views) |
| Major collab | Bridgerton x Selkie capsule, July 2024 |
The Story
Mermaid without a voice
Wildfox was Gordon’s first chapter. She co-founded it in 2007 with childhood friend Emily Faulstich and CEO Jimmy Sommers, who held the operating equity. By 2015 both creative founders had left, and Gordon went public about being forced out through an investor partnership that did not align with her values. She has spoken since about feeling like “a mermaid without a voice after Wildfox, like my identity had been pulled out of me.”
Three years went into starting over. Gordon worked odd jobs with a three-hour commute, looking for what she said she needed to relaunch: the funds and a name. She landed on Selkie, the folklore creature from Scottish, Irish, and Icelandic stories of a woman who lives inside a seal skin. If a man steals her skin, she is forced to live on land as his wife. If she finds it, she goes back to the ocean, free.
“I thought about what would come next if it were a series, back to the ocean. A Selkie,” Gordon told UncoverLA in October 2018. “She is a woman searching for her skin.” The myth gave her the brand, the customer, and the through-line. Selkie’s first collection ran XS to XXXL at price points from $64 to $298, sold direct from her own site, with her name on every share certificate.
A puff dress, a pandemic, and a TikTok she didn’t know she had
The Puff Dress went on Selkie’s site as one product among many. Pastel, sleeveless, ankle-length, with a poofy gathered skirt that looked engineered for cottagecore Pinterest boards. It launched into the prelude of a global lockdown.
In 2020, while wholesale collapsed for most independent fashion brands, Selkie’s direct-to-consumer side boomed. TikTok was where it spread. Creators tried the dress on, twirled in it, paired it with white knee socks, and pushed it into the Bridgerton-adjacent aesthetic that defined that pandemic spring. Gordon was not on TikTok. “I didn’t know much about TikTok at the time, so I didn’t even know we were getting a lot of videos on there,” she told Glossy. “I remember when someone said I had a ‘viral TikTok brand,’ and I was like, ‘What are they talking about?’”
Supply chains stretched. Orders arrived months late, and the wait turned into part of the appeal. By 2021, #PuffDress was at roughly 30 million TikTok views and #Selkie at 130 million. Free People and Revolve placed wholesale orders, then Anthropologie. The dress that Gordon had made for a small audience of women who liked dreamy nineteenth-century paintings turned into the unofficial uniform of pandemic-era cottagecore.
Building the sisterhood the second time around
Gordon framed the brand around what she called the Selkie sisterhood, and the size range carried the operational expression of it. Selkie launched in 2018 with XS to XXXL. By 2021 it ran to 5X. By Spring 2023 the company was cutting up to 6X, and the September 2023 New York Fashion Week presentation cast XXS to 6X models throughout. The brand cuts patterns specifically for each size rather than grading up from a straight-size sample.
“I wouldn’t say it’s body positivity that’s integral to my brand, it’s not the basis of Selkie,” Gordon told Fashion Week Daily in 2020. “I want body positivity for all women. For me, it’s bigger than bodies, it’s more about wxmen embracing the story of themselves and their own myth and fantasy.”
The puff dress carried a politics with it. “Men hate the dress,” Gordon told Glamour. “When you wear them, you’ll be the center of any room. And for that reason, they’re kind of more powerful than they are sexy.” That was the second-act argument. Wildfox had taught her what she did not want. Selkie was being built around what she did.
The Strategy
One dress that became the brand
Most independent fashion labels chase a hit and rotate. Selkie did the opposite. The Puff Dress, available in dozens of seasonal colorways and prints, has remained the spine of every collection since 2020. Gordon expands the silhouette outward, into bridesmaid versions, holiday capsules, mini and midi cuts, and one-off prints, but the dress itself is treated like a signature handbag at a luxury house.
That decision held the brand to one identifiable shape during exactly the years competitors were chasing TikTok trends weekly. The Bridgerton x Selkie capsule, launched July 26, 2024 as the brand’s first official Shondaland and Netflix collaboration, leaned on the same silhouette across gowns, jackets, corsets, and dresses, with prices from $145 to $989.
XXS to 6X as a design discipline
Gordon’s sizing position is older than the brand. She told UncoverLA at launch that the lack of size range across women’s fashion made her angry, and she could not believe that as a size 12 she could not shop her favorite labels. Selkie cuts each size from its own pattern, runs preorders to test demand, and holds the same pricing across the size run, all of which compress margins on a product that is already labor-intensive.
The trade was made on purpose. By the time the brand could have raised growth capital, the size range was already inseparable from the identity, which made it operationally hard for any future investor to ask the brand to cut it back.
Wholesale on her terms
Gordon kept Selkie DTC-first by design, after watching wholesale collapse during the early 2020 pandemic months that flattened most small fashion labels. The brand later opened wholesale to Anthropologie, Free People, and Revolve, with rental availability through Nuuly. Each retailer was selected for fit with the brand’s aesthetic rather than scale, and the website remained the primary channel where the full Selkie world was sold.
A small in-house team and a preorder model kept inventory risk on the customer rather than the brand. Selkie’s WRAP and BSCI production certifications, listed publicly on the site, separated the brand from the fast-fashion lookalikes that started copying the puff silhouette inside Shein and Cider.
The Marketing
Instagram Stories, not TikTok
The platform that made the brand is not the platform Gordon uses. She runs Selkie primarily through Instagram Stories, where she talks to customers, previews unreleased prints, and frames the Selkie point of view in her own voice. TikTok stayed a discovery surface, fueled by user content the brand reposts but does not produce in volume. “It’s just such a vicious place,” Gordon told Glossy.
That separation kept the voice consistent through a viral moment that could have rerouted it. While other independent labels chased follower counts on the platform that had given them the most reach, Selkie ran its messaging where the conversation could remain one-to-one with customers, preserving the intimacy that the puff dress was already selling.
Borrowing the cultural waves
Selkie has built almost no traditional advertising budget. Awareness comes from cottagecore, regencycore, Bridgerton, and the broader fairytale aesthetic moment the brand was already aligned with by the time those labels existed. The 2024 Bridgerton capsule was the most explicit version of the move, but the same logic applied to the brand’s NYFW presentations, which staged collections inside venues like the Heritage Square Museum in Los Angeles to underline the Victorian and folkloric framing.
Reposted user content does most of the rest of the work. Customers post themselves in puff dresses on a wedding day, a birthday, a graduation, a Halloween, and Selkie reshares those images. The clothes only need to be photographed for so many seasons before the customers run the visual language of the brand themselves.
The Numbers
| Year | Milestone | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 2007 | Gordon co-founds Wildfox | Loses majority equity from day one |
| 2015 | Gordon exits Wildfox | Public statement about toxic environment |
| 2018 | Selkie launches in LA | Sole founder, bootstrapped, sizes XS to XXXL |
| 2020 | Puff Dress goes viral on TikTok | #PuffDress ~30M views, #Selkie ~130M |
| 2021 | Sizing extended to 5X | Wholesale: Free People, Revolve |
| 2023 | Sizing reaches 6X, NYFW SS24 presentation | XXS to 6X cast |
| Jan 2024 | Midjourney Valentine’s Day capsule controversy | Gordon pledges no future AI imagery |
| Jul 2024 | Bridgerton x Selkie capsule launches | $145 to $989, first Shondaland and Netflix collab |
The estimated $2.1 million annual revenue is a third-party figure and has not been confirmed by the brand. Selkie has not raised external venture capital, has not announced a funding round, and has not disclosed audited revenue or profitability. Gordon has consistently described the company as small, bootstrapped, and deliberately not chasing a thousand-employee scale. “There’s this temptation for people to grow as big as you can,” she told Glossy, “but there is something to be said about maintaining and being steady.”
Controversies
The Midjourney Valentine’s collection
In January 2024, Selkie revealed that its Valentine’s Day capsule, featuring vintage greeting-card-style puppies, kittens, and roses on $249 polyester puff dresses, had been designed using Midjourney, the generative AI image model. Backlash was immediate. One Instagram post drew over 750 comments, many from artists and customers calling the use of AI a slap in the face given the price points. Gordon defended the work to TechCrunch as her own, layered on top of public-domain art from the 1800s and 1900s, and noted she was the brand’s sole in-house artist. She later pledged that future Selkie collections would not use AI-generated imagery.
What You Can Learn
The cap table decides who keeps the brand. Gordon’s first company generated roughly $120 million a year at peak, and she walked away from it with no operational control and no path back, because her co-founder held the equity. Selkie generates a fraction of that revenue and is entirely hers. The post-Wildfox lesson she has spoken about repeatedly in press is that the structure of a company is set on day one, and a creative founder who does not own the brand owns the look while the brand goes with whoever holds the shares.
Inclusive sizing has to be drafted from each pattern. Plenty of fashion labels run an inclusive sizing campaign and grade up from a straight-size sample. Selkie cuts patterns for each size from XXS through 6X, and that decision is older than the brand’s first viral moment. The reason it works as an identity rather than a press release is that it costs the company money on every unit, and customers who have been turned away from inclusive marketing campaigns can tell when a 6X garment was actually drafted for a 6X body, because it fits differently from a graded one.
A viral moment rewards work that already happened. The Puff Dress went viral on a platform Gordon was barely aware of, while she was already running the brand the way she wanted to run it. By the time she heard about the TikTok numbers, the wholesale partners had already called. Selkie did not pivot to TikTok-first marketing afterward. The work that goes into a brand before it goes viral is the work that decides whether a viral moment becomes a business or a press cycle.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who founded Selkie?
Selkie was founded by Kimberley Gordon in 2018, after she left Wildfox, the brand she had co-founded in 2007 with childhood friend Emily Faulstich and CEO Jimmy Sommers. Gordon is the sole owner of Selkie and runs it as a bootstrapped, independently held company.
What is the Selkie Puff Dress?
The Puff Dress is Selkie’s signature product, a sleeveless, full-skirted dress with gathered volume, released in dozens of pastel and printed colorways since 2020. The dress went viral on TikTok during the pandemic and helped drive Selkie’s transition from a small independent label to a brand stocked at Anthropologie, Free People, and Revolve. The standard polyester version retails around $249.
What sizes does Selkie offer?
Selkie offers XXS to 6X across most of its core collections. The brand expanded its size range from XS to XXXL at launch in 2018, to 5X by 2021, and to 6X by 2023. Selkie cuts patterns specifically for each size rather than grading up from a straight-size sample.
Why is the brand called Selkie?
A selkie is a woman from Scottish, Irish, and Icelandic folklore who lives inside a seal skin. If a man steals her skin while she sleeps, she is bound to him on land. If she finds her skin, she returns to the ocean, free. Gordon chose the name to mark her exit from Wildfox and her search for her own creative identity inside a brand she fully owned.
Did Selkie really design clothes with AI?
In January 2024, Selkie released a Valentine’s Day capsule featuring imagery generated using Midjourney. Following customer and artist backlash, Gordon defended her use of the tool as a way of layering on top of her own public-domain art library, then pledged that future collections would not use AI-generated imagery.
When was Selkie founded?
Kimberley Gordon launched Selkie in October 2018 in Los Angeles with a small line of vintage-inspired dresses sold direct from her own site. The brand started at sizes XS to XXXL with prices from $64 to $298, three years after she walked away from Wildfox.
What is Selkie’s revenue?
Selkie’s annual revenue has been estimated at approximately $2.1 million by third parties, and the brand has not confirmed audited figures. The company is sole-founder owned, bootstrapped, and has never raised outside funding.
What is Selkie’s valuation?
Selkie has no publicly disclosed valuation. Gordon owns the brand outright, has not announced a funding round, and has consistently described Selkie as small, bootstrapped, and deliberately avoiding venture-scale growth.
Sources
- UncoverLA, “Meet Selkie, The New Unapologetically Feminist Label From Wildfox’s Former Founder,” October 2018. Selkie launch context, Gordon’s account of leaving Wildfox, original price points, mermaid quote.
- Selkie, “About Selkie”. Brand origin, name meaning, sizing, production certifications.
- Glossy, “After the TikTok-viral puff dress, Selkie goes goth”. TikTok virality account, Gordon quotes on TikTok and growth, Lucy collection presentation.
- Fashion Week Daily, “Small Brand Spotlight: Selkie’s Kim Gordon,” August 2020. Pandemic DTC boom, sisterhood framing, Wildfox loss quote.
- TechCrunch, “Selkie founder defends AI-aided collection,” January 19, 2024. AI controversy, Gordon’s defense, current pricing.
- PR Newswire, “Selkie Announces Exclusive Bridgerton Capsule Collection,” July 2024. Bridgerton collab pricing and details.
- StyleCaster, “Selkie’s Fall 2023 Show Cast Sizes XXS to 6X”. Size-inclusive runway casting, Nuuly rental availability.
- Notre Dame Observer, “For the Girls That Get It,” March 2022. Glamour interview quote on power and the puff dress.
- Sourcing Journal, “Selkie Generative AI Valentine’s Day”. AI controversy outcome and Gordon’s pledge.