Bogg Bag founder Kim Vaccarella started her company as a side gig in 2008 and was “scared to death” to make it her full-time focus. But accidental success during Hurricane Sandy recovery and virality among mom-focused Facebook groups has sent revenue—and demand—soaring.
By Lindsey Choo, Former Contributor
AtBogg Bag’s headquarters in Secaucus, N.J., the decorations on the office’s gray walls are sparse. Aside from a “#boggbabe” neon sign by the entrance and a shelf displaying some of its bags, the walls are largely blank as employees sit in cubicles typical of an office. The blank walls are a stark contrast to the whimsical plastic tote bags—which are shaped like picnic baskets and range in color from bubblegum pink to deep royal blue—from which the company has built a cult following.
Founder Kim Vaccarella, 55, has an explanation for the dichotomy: She has had to move the company’s offices six times in the past five years, each time more than doubling the size of its warehouse to fit the growth of its inventory.
Bogg had a two-year backlog coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, Vaccarella said, as the company experienced an influx of orders from people who saw the bags on social media. “You’re all over Peloton Moms,”—a Facebook group of more than 110,000 members—she recalls her friends telling her.
The company, which recorded $100 million in sales last year and which Forbes conservatively values at $88 million, is on track to hit its goal of $170 million in revenue in 2025 thanks to the success it found online – first on Facebook, then on TikTok and Instagram. The company has been profitable for three years, something Vaccarella said was made possible by strategic hiring (headcount is up to just north of 80 employees now, from a little less than 60 last year) and not spending a dollar on marketing until 2024.
Starting at $60 for the smallest “bitty” version (11” x 4.5” x 8.5”) and $90 for the original full-size version (19” x 9” x 14”), the bags can be found at major retailers like Dick’s Sporting Goods and Target, the latter of which has an exclusive collaboration on a bag that literally looks like a Target shopping basket.
All Bogg bags are peppered with holes on the front and back panels and made out of a rubber-looking plastic material (ethylene-vinyl acetate) and, essentially, look like a Croc shoe mated with a Birkin bag. These quirky aesthetics were intentional, Vaccarella says. Her initial idea was to bring the design to Crocs; after seeing that the company had acquired shoe charm brand Jibbitz for $10 million in 2006, Vaccarella thought that she could net at least $50 million for a bag.
When she set out to officially found the company in 2008, Vaccarella faced a number of challenges: She didn’t have a background in fashion (she worked at a commercial real estate lender after dropping out of high school), and nobody in the apparel industry wanted to invest in the idea.
Vaccarella’s idea was rejected by the retailers she pitched to in New York City. After finally getting someone at Crocs on the phone and before she said what her idea was, the representative said the company had a research and development team and wasn’t open to external ideas. When she said she’d move forward herself, the representative told her “good luck with that.”
“I got all the reasons why it wouldn’t work,” Vaccarella told Forbes. The bag, a design on paper at the time, was “too utilitarian, too big, and nobody would want to buy more than one,” went the typical criticism.
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She decided to move on with a sample of her own. After getting some positive reactions at trade shows with her early prototypes, Vaccarella went for broke in 2012, using money from her husband’s pension and her kids’ college funds to buy a whole shipping container worth of bags (equivalent to about 1,200 bags). But when the shipment arrived at her home—at midnight, no less—Vaccarella’s excitement soured. When she opened up the boxes, bags that were otherwise functional had black streaks marring their fronts due to an error with the dying process. “I can’t sell these,” she remembers saying.
Vaccarella ultimately found another use for the defective shipment, and the pivot ended up breathing new life into her company: She donated the black-streaked bags to victims of Hurricane Sandy when it hit the Jersey Shore in late October that year. Soon thereafter, phone calls and emails from customers requesting more bags started rolling in; the people that had been using the bags through storm recovery liked how sturdy and grime-resistant they were. The Bogg bag then became a hit online on Facebook in the aftermath of the pandemic within groups of suburban moms (including the Peloton Moms group), Vaccarella said, and found its second wave of virality online with TikTok and Instagram where it found its audience with younger moms, healthcare workers and teachers who frequently carry a lot of things and work messy jobs.
There’s an inherent element of click-bait to posting the Crocs-like tote bag on social media platforms, said Kayla Gresh, a 29-year-old lifestyle social media influencer and mother of three with 1.6 million followers, who also purchased the bag after seeing it online. Her videos perform well when it features the bag—the comments section on Gresh’s TikTok videos featuring the bag often see a divide between people who don’t understand the hype and those who rave about it.
While Bogg is now available in more than 1,900 locations across retailers and through its direct-to-consumer website, Vaccarella credits smaller retailers for getting her off the ground in the early years. Jeff Glik, owner and chief executive of Midwestern apparel chain Glik’s, said he received a call from a friend in Florida in 2018 saying “you’ve never heard of this item, but it’s called Bogg Bag, and you’ve got to jump on this item as fast as you can.”
As a smaller retailer with 72 locations, Glik said the only way for him to be successful is to chase hot items and be on the early side of a trend. The strategy paid off – his first order of the bags sold out within two weeks. The second order, triple the size of the first, followed the same path. When he decided to put in an order for a full shipping container, Vaccarella told him she would need 50% of the payment upfront. Glik agreed, to his CFO’s chagrin.
“[Vaccarella] is the type of person you automatically trust and want to build a partnership with,” he told Forbes. “I personally felt it was about as risk free as we could make happen.” The shipment, meant to last for the summer season, sold out in a few weeks, Glik said.
Vaccarella, who started focusing on Bogg full-time in 2018 at age 48, said she didn’t raise outside capital to build the company other than a $120,000 personal loan from her boss at the real estate lending company, until 2023. After turning down an acquisition offer from a publicly-traded company—an NDA prevents Vaccarella from saying for how much or to whom, though she did say she would have lost majority control of Bogg—she got a call from a man who said he was musician Post Malone’s manager.
“It was the most random thing ever,” she said. Bobby Greenleaf, the music manager, told her about his quest to find a Bogg Bag and how he, a single dad on the go, became a fan. He wanted to connect her with the team behind Electric Feel Ventures, the venture capital arm of Electric Feel Entertainment. But coming straight from the offer from the publicly-traded company, the fund, which only had $30 million in assets at the time, didn’t feel like a big enough acquirer.
As it turns out, Electric Feel’s founder and chief executive is Austin Rosen, who connected Vaccarella with his father Andrew Rosen, a fashion veteran who started his career at Calvin Klein. She struck a deal with a group of investors including Rosen and Lew Frankfort, chairman and former chief executive of Coach, to buy a 40% stake in the company at the end of 2023 at a valuation of less than $50 million, where she would retain control.
“A lot of what I’ve done in my life goes on gut and intuition, and I followed my gut,” Vaccarella said of the deal. “I knew I had a good product. I knew that our process was lacking. And I love the people that were willing to help me take this to the next level.” The sale of the 40% stake was a step towards adding infrastructure and establishing a warehouse system for the fast-growing company, she said.
Now, Vaccarella is focused on keeping her product line fresh with new colors every season, and most recently introduced a line of accessories that make the bags more customizable and functional. At age 55 (and now a member of the 2025 50 Over 50 list), Vaccarella said she would tell her younger self to trust more in herself and worry less about what other people think.
“I held back so many things, because I was so worried how people would perceive me,” she said. “If you feel like you want to do something, no matter what age you are, go for it and give it a shot.”
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/lindseychoo/2025/07/30/how-this-founder-turned-a-crocs-inspired-tote-into-a-100-million-business/