Q&A

How one founder turned viral buzz into real retail growth

Leila Shams shares lessons on team-building and authentic strategy

(Courtesy Leila Shams)

Womenswear designer Leila Shams's rapidly growing direct-to-consumer brand has leveraged authenticity on social media to power her company TA3, a line of shapewear-infused swimwear designed to be both flattering and functional.

But social media is only one part of her recipe for retail success. Shams says, “Going viral no longer equals sales.”

Now five years in, TA3 (“eat” spelled backwards) is expanding into body-shaping apparel and preparing for wholesale distribution. Here, Shams shares insights on building a team, connecting with customers on social media and scaling a brand that started with a single product and a lot of ambition.

—Interview by Marcy Medina, edited by Bianca Prieto

How do you use social media to reach your customers?

In the beginning, it was really only Instagram. When I eventually hired someone, we started doing Facebook, and we were going viral on TikTok. It was very easy in the beginning creating content and seeing what worked. A lot of times user-generated content would go viral as well because no one else was doing what we were doing. Now, a lot more effort goes into working with the right creators and creating the right content that will work as ads.

Virality does not equal sales anymore.

You have to grab people right in the beginning with a verbal or visual hook. You can’t put out videos where no one is talking. It’s easy to pull up an AI script, but it just comes off as inauthentic. That's me talking and walking around in a swimsuit. I doubt myself sometimes, because I want to make sure people think we are high-end, but no matter what, people really respond to the authenticity.

(photo credit: Ta3 Instagram)

How did you grow your team? Who would you say is the most important hire?

There has to be one person focused on the cash because cash flow is everything. In the beginning we had a fractional CFO who I found on Upwork. I’ve used so many people from Upwork—our UX designer, the person who filed my first patent, my first pattern maker. It’s such an amazing tool.

I can’t imagine having the money to hire a full team in the beginning, it would wipe you out.

You just have to get contractors as cheap as you can and when you get the money, hire them full-time. The easiest thing for me is to hire people I’ve worked with before. But I would have to court them for years because they didn’t want to work at a start-up.

Would you ever consider a physical store for TA3?

I want a store in every city, even more than I want to wholesale, to be honest. I always say you have to touch and feel and try it on. My dream is to walk into a store where every top, swimsuit and pair of pants makes your body look 10 times better. But I haven’t done it yet because it’s very hard to take a bunch of cash and gamble.

How have tariffs affected your business?

Tariffs did affect our costs and we did increase the price of a couple of core styles by $10, but I would rather spend less on photo shoots or cut down on contractors than raise our prices. We just had a conversation about Canada today because a Canadian store wants to carry us but the numbers just don’t work. It costs us $100 more to ship there so we’ve almost written Canada off until we can have a warehouse there.