Discover How Trisha Bantigue Becomes The Face of Forbes: Under 30 Art & Style
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Trisha Bantigue started Queenly (which recently raised $7.1m in funding which is almost unheard of for female-founded companies) to ensure that all women have access to gorgeous formal attire for a price that doesn’t break the bank.
Queenly got its humble start in pageants. 27-year-old Trisha Bantigue was born and raised in Angeles City, Philippines before moving to America.
After winning emancipation from her abusive mom at 17, and without parental support to make Bay Area rent payments during her time at the University of California at Berkeley, Bantigue, who had worked both modeling and McDonald’s jobs to get by, decided to compete in pageants as winning prize money could keep her in school.
“Pageants really helped me get my degree, and they changed my life,” she says.
After college, she began her successful career working for Facebook, Google, and Uber but pageants were never really far from her mind. While competing, she had noticed how inaccessible the pageant industry was for women with backgrounds like her own.
“These gowns sometimes cost as much as a car!” she says. “I started noticing how hard it was for other people, and even myself to find a gown, afford a gown, and then resell it.”
So she enlisted Kathy Zhou, a Chinese-American Penn-educated engineer with whom she interned at a tech startup, and told her about her idea to build a peer-to-peer formalwear reselling platform.
Queenly’s inventory of over 50,000 gently worn authenticated dresses (including couture dresses!) by over 40 different designers takes the stress out of formalwear shopping by bringing together all the best styles in one place. The unlimited potential of peer-to-peer resale inventory is what makes Queenly stand out from the crowd.
The San Francisco-based startup has been featured in Vogue Business, Forbes, Wom
