Dolls Kill is an international online clothing label. Dolls Kill was recognised as 2014’s “Fastest Growing Retailer” by Inc. magazine, which also ranked the company among San Francisco’s “top businesses.”
To promote its apparel, shoes, and accessories, Dolls Kill runs a retail website called Dolls Kill, which showcases six collections modelled by “Dolls” that portray character identities for each collection’s style.
You may get kawaii, punk, goth, streetwear, and festival clothing at Dolls Kill. It has also been operating under licence as a sub-label of the popular 1990s brand Delia’s since 2018.
History
DJ Shoddy Lynn’s wife, Shoddy Lynn, and her husband, Bobby Farahi, co-founded Dolls Kill in 2011.
Farahi previously founded and served as CEO of Multivision Inc., a broadcast monitoring firm that was sold to Bacons Information in 2005.
After Farahi sold his first business, he and his wife founded Dolls Kill, which has allegedly been successful. Selling clothes on eBay was Lynn’s initial foray into the world of online commerce. A full-fledged clothes and accessories e-commerce site, Dolls Kill first debuted as an online marketplace for outlandish accessories like colourful fox tails. Lynn’s time spent touring as a DJ at music festivals inspired the idea for the company.
Dolls Kill received $5 million in Series A funding from Maveron in 2014; Maveron is a Seattle-based venture capital firm that has previously invested in Shutterfly, eBay, zulily, and Pinkberry.
Betsy McLaughlin, formerly of Hot Topic, became a director after the fundraising round. As measured by percentage growth in sales, Dolls Kill was the San Francisco Bay Area’s fastest-growing private firm in 2014.
Dolls Kill launched its first temporary retail location, or “pop-up shop,” in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood in the summer of 2017.
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Controversy
Dolls Kill has been the target of a social media-wide boycott after the brand’s owner, Shoddy Lynn, responded to criticism of the company in a video posted to Instagram. Lynn wrote on Instagram in support of the police who were beating and detaining protesters in Los Angeles in the wake of the global Black Lives Matter marches.
Almost immediately, the company’s social media accounts were inundated with backlash from people who were upset that it had chosen to show support for the police rather than the Black Lives Matter movement, of which many of the company’s target customers are members.
The corporation, though, has been the target of scathing commentary before. For allegedly stealing ideas from black artists and selling items that suggest a connection to white supremacist groups, as well as for allegedly romanticising rape with items that scream things like “Goth Is White” or “Dead Girls Can’t Say No,” it has been the target of boycotts in the past.
The label’s reputation for alternative styles and rave garb has won it a devoted following among the outcasts who frequented Hot Topic in the early aughts (and maybe still do).
In 2011, a former DJ named Shoddy Lynn and her husband Bobby Farahi founded a firm with the intention of selling clothing to music festival goers that went against the grain of the typical festival attire at the time.
hi everyone, meet Shoddy Lynn, the owner of @DollsKill, praising the police for shooting peaceful protestors outside her store.
— elijah daniel (@elijahdaniel) June 1, 2020
do not ever shop there again.
do not even accept a brand deal from them again.
take a fucking stand. pic.twitter.com/m6pBMIYvAZ
In the decade of the 2010s, the company expanded rapidly, becoming a major player in the festival wear and rave garb retail market. Its rapid expansion was accompanied by an equally rapid accumulation of scandals, with hundreds of industry innovators going to social media to rail against the company and its methods, most notably its theft of ideas from independent designers and rebranding them as fast fashion.
After the company offered a Native American headdress as part of its Halloween collection in 2014, it began to receive unwanted attention from media outlets including the Huffington Post. Shoppers who complained through email were met with a boilerplate message condemning racism but no action being taken to remove the offending item from the shelves.
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A Modest Amount of Damage Was Done to The Dolls Kill Store During the George Floyd Protests
The major problem for the brand occurred when Shoddy Lynn commented on Instagram in support of the police. Dolls Kill’s proprietor, in contrast to many other businesses, did not use social media to express support for the movement until after she had received widespread criticism for a pro-police tweet.
Almost immediately after the brand came under fire, Shoddy Lynn uploaded an Instagram video apologising for her lack of enthusiasm, which prompted even more criticism.
It took the company less than a day to lose hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers, and many people pointed out that this was probably the only reason Shoddy Lynn issued an apology in the first place.
Ex-clients have taken to Twitter in the wake of the most recent protest to show support for victims of the company’s activities by using the hashtag #BoycottDollsKill. Dolls Kill has been widely criticised, leading many media publications to compile lists of alternative designers and brands that their readers will love.
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