Going against the industrywide trend of prioritizing e-commerce over brick-and-mortar stores, LoveShackFancy has built a healthy retail business. Thanks in part to Todd's real-estate background, the brand has opened stores at a rapid clip in recent years. There are now 17, many of them in areas with a big prep-school presence (like Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side), or college towns with a Greek scene (Charleston, Nashville, Austin). Resort areas also do well; Palm Beach, Florida, where the Cohens vacation, is the top-selling store. Five more are planned for 2025: Aspen; Chicago; South Carolina's Kiawah Island; Washington, D.C.; and a pop-up in Northern California at Marin Country Mart. Todd says all the stores are profitable, and the brand now does 70 percent of its business direct-to-consumer.

LoveShackFancy fangirls congregate at the frilly, dreamy boutiques, gushing over "ribbon bars" where they can adorn their clothes with flair. The stores have hosted engagement proposals, bridal showers, sweet sixteens, book clubs and bat mitzvahs. Celebrity "girl dads" like Adam Sandler, Jerry Seinfeld and Mark Wahlberg have shopped there. Sacha Baron Cohen stopped by to shop for his daughters -- and then asked the saleswoman if she was free to babysit. (Baron Cohen declined to comment.)

Another turning point in the business was the 2021 explosion of "Bama Rush." In viral TikTok videos, would-be sorority sisters at the University of Alabama and other schools filmed themselves rattling off the brands they were wearing to rush events. Some winners emerged: Kendra Scott, the Pants Store, Lululemon, Van Cleef & Arpels, Hermès and, perhaps most of all, LoveShackFancy.

Hessel Cohen capitalized on the new market by visiting college campuses. She transformed her Sag Harbor store this summer into a mock sorority house, "rushing" herself as a stunt.

Hessel Cohen traveled to the College of Charleston in 2024 to reveal a complete makeover of the Delta Delta Delta sorority house, co-sponsored by Pottery Barn Teen and LoveShackFancy. They painted the door pink (what else?), hung wallpaper, decorated a Pinkmas tree and made the beds with branded linens. In a TikTok video promoting the project, Hessel Cohen dances alone to "Love Shack" by the B-52's in the sorority house's dining room, set for a party with pink balloons: "Oh, my God, they're gonna love it!" she squeals.

"When she's connecting with us, it's not like she's connecting through this fake image of herself," says Kiley Mullen, a College of Charleston Tri-Delt who sleeps on LoveShackFancy sheets. "It's not this fake persona that she thinks is going to do well in the business world. It's truly just her wanting to have fun."

With her mostly LoveShackFancy wardrobe, physique toned by legendary taskmaster Isaac Boots (who's also trained Kelly Ripa) and casual mannerisms ("You guys..."), Hessel Cohen is fully comfortable in a role many designers and founders eschew: star. She signed with Hollywood talent behemoth Creative Artists Agency in 2023; one could easily picture her hosting a makeover or home décor show.

Although Hessel Cohen says she has turned down the chance to appear on The Real Housewives of New York City, a 2024 viral video of her home on Caleb Simpson's popular Instagram house-tour channel again stoked rumors that she would join the cast. The video, which has been liked over two million times, was featured on the Today show and catapulted the Cohens to a new level of fame. Todd was deemed "America's sweetheart"; commenters likened Hessel Cohen to a real-life Carrie Bradshaw; and the Cut complained "The LoveShackFancy Founder's House Makes Me Feel Poor."

The house, whose painstaking renovation was chronicled in an Architectural Digest story, features a "party barn" in an original carriage house, with French 19th-century chandeliers that can move up and down with motorized pulleys. Most of the furniture is antique, with the exception of a few custom Rose Uniacke pieces. The pièce de résistanceis Hessel Cohen's boudoir, a floor-through sanctuary including a bathtub cut from one block of marble and a jewel box of a closet that she hears inspired Glinda's pinkalicious wardrobe in the 2024 Wicked movie.

After all, she says, "I am Glinda!"

LOVESHACKFANCY'S girly maximalism is not for everyone.

"It's completely off-zeitgeist," says Ana Andjelic, author of The Business of Aspiration and Hitmakers: How Brands Influence Culture.

But the brand has tapped into a latent femininity in the culture that was clearly ready to be mined. Because it's unique in the market, it's become its own ecosystem: a "participatory social communal brand," Andjelic says. She compares it to Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop, another brand based on the taste, influence and whims of a single woman.

Like Goop, LoveShackFancy has been critiqued as an exclusive playground of privilege, for blondes by a blonde. A 2022 Business Insider story called the company a "pretty, skinny, rich-girl dreamworld," and alleged a failure to respond to calls for diversity both within the company and in its branding.

"We have so many different types of girls who associate as part of a LoveShackFancy brand," says Hessel Cohen. She brushes off the article: "It's not even something that gets brought up at all anymore since then, to be honest."

Priya Shukla, Hessel Cohen's friend, says Hessel Cohen has "always had people around her who don't look like her, who aren't like her." She says the critiques may come from a place of jealousy. "I think people look at her and they think, 'She's pretty, she's wealthy, she's famous -- she can't possibly be nice,' but she just is."

Andjelic warns that an aesthetic as defined as LoveShackFancy's can be "a prison." She sees the stream of collaborations as a way to break out of that mold and try something new.

Lilien, the brand's president, says collaborations account for eight percent of the company's business, and that they are indeed intended more as a marketing exercise than strictly a revenue play. In 2024, the brand did 16 collaborations, and 19 are planned for 2025. Some deals are structured as a flat fee, while others involve royalties. The real gold rush here is new-customer acquisition. With the Stanley mug collaboration, 65 percent of the buyers were new to LoveShackFancy.

The brand is betting that its very niche world can become very, very big. Beauty, currently five percent of the business, is a potential growth area as well as a pet project of Todd's (he looks to Tom Ford, who sold his business to Estée Lauder for $2.8 billion in 2022, as the "north star"). Along with the slew of store openings and collaborations planned, there's worldwide expansion in the works. LoveShackFancy recently partnered with the Brama Group, which has also worked with Missoni and Staud, to expand distribution in Europe and the Middle East.

Hessel Cohen says she'd love to open a boutique hotel, as well as a coffee shop "that's all pink, a little retro, but it's super fun and it has great music and girls are in cute outfits.

"I'm like, 'Todd, if you don't want to do it, I'm finding an investor.' "

Write to Rory Satran at rory.satran@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 09, 2025 10:00 ET (15:00 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.