A Rave, A Love Story, A Keychain
Bobby Farahi met his future wife and business partner, Shoddy Lynn, at a rave in Los Angeles. Their first product together was a foxtail keychain - the kind you can source from Asian factories by the hundreds. They sold them from their apartment in San Francisco. That was 2011. By 2019, Sequoia Capital handed them $40 million.
The story of Dolls Kill is, at its core, the story of two people who understood their customers viscerally because they were their customers. Festival-goers, goth girls, rave kids, punks - the communities mainstream fashion either sneers at or awkwardly mimics every few seasons. Farahi and Shoddy Lynn built for them directly, and refused to stop even when the money got big.
What makes this unusual is not the rags-to-riches arc, but the deliberateness of staying weird. Farahi has been explicit: Dolls Kill will not dilute its brand to chase a broader audience. "There was a macro shift in this idea of conforming," he has said, "and we've always stood for being yourself." In a world of VC-backed startups that pivot toward the center the moment revenue plateaus, Dolls Kill kept its fringe identity as a core asset, not a liability.
Sequoia Capital told Farahi that Dolls Kill represents "the next generation-defining brand, the way The Gap was in the '80s" - Alfred Lin, former Zappos COO, joined the board after leading the Series B.
Before Dolls Kill existed, Farahi was already a seasoned operator. He founded Multivision Inc. in 1997 - a broadcast monitoring company in Oakland that tracked client mentions across television reports and delivered digital recordings. Not glamorous. Not fashion. But it ran for eight years before Bacons Information acquired it in 2005. He spent the next two years as Senior VP at Cision, then walked away from media monitoring altogether.
The pivot from broadcast tech to festival fashion might look random from the outside. From the inside, the through-line is community and data: who is talking about you, where they gather, what they value. Farahi understood audiences before he understood sequins.
Dolls Kill: Fashion for the Misfits
KILL
Founded 2011. Goth, rave, punk, festival, kawaii and alternative fashion for communities that mainstream retail overlooks. 3.6M+ Instagram followers. Shopify Plus powered. Sequoia-backed.
Dolls Kill is not a fashion brand that stumbled into subcultures. It was built inside them. The early inventory came directly from the festival and EDM scene: the clothing, the accessories, the aesthetic sensibility. When most e-commerce brands were chasing whatever was trending on Pinterest, Dolls Kill was tracking what people wore to Burning Man.
The brand's growth relied heavily on what Farahi calls authentic influencer marketing - not celebrity endorsements, but real community members given creative control. "It's a real girl. It's authentic. We give the reins to these people to be themselves, whether in videos or the way we shoot product or editorial." The result was a community that felt seen rather than targeted.
By 2015, the company had hit $7.6 million in sales and earned the No. 33 spot on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing private companies. Farahi was 41 at the time, running a business that most people in his industry peer group would have found entirely foreign.
$40 Million and a Benchmark
In December 2019, Dolls Kill closed a $40 million Series B led by Sequoia Capital. The lead partner was Alfred Lin - the former COO, CFO, and Chairman of Zappos, who joined the Dolls Kill board after the round. Lin told reporters he believed Dolls Kill could be "the next generation-defining brand, the way The Gap was in the '80s."
That comparison cuts two ways. The Gap became the Gap by being everywhere, approachable, the safe choice. Dolls Kill has built its identity on being the specific choice - the brand for the girl who knows exactly who she is and has no interest in being the Gap. The tension in that analogy is not lost on Farahi, who has been clear that scale does not require selling out.
The funding was earmarked for international logistics, platform improvements, and manufacturing diversification. Farahi had his eye on sourcing outside China as tariff pressure mounted. He also started asking questions about physical retail - which, for a company that had scaled exclusively online, represented a genuinely new frontier.
The Day the Digital Cult Showed Up in Person
On August 18, 2022, Dolls Kill opened its second retail location: a 10,000 square foot, three-floor flagship in SoHo, New York, at 33 Howard Street. It was the brand's first major move into experiential retail on the East Coast. Customers lined up around the block at 8 in the morning.
Farahi said the moment "blew my expectations." After years of building community online - through Instagram, through influencer campaigns, through the energy of digital brand-building - seeing that community in person, before sunrise, was something different. "We always felt the power of our fans and their sentiment toward the brand," he said, "but seeing them in person, at 8 in the morning lined up around the block, we'd never done anything in person before."
"We spent a lot of time thinking through store acoustics. In nightclubs a lot of time is spent on acoustics and sound and music."- Bobby Farahi, on designing the NYC SoHo flagship
The store design was not an afterthought. Farahi approached it the way he understood the environments his customers loved: nightclubs. The acoustics were engineered with the same care a venue promoter would bring to the speaker placement. Interactive art installations were built in. A "Quickie Pickup" service let online customers retrieve orders from the physical space. The store was an extension of the brand world, not a concession to traditional retail expectations.
The harder question - where next, how many, which markets - is one Farahi has been honest about not having a ready answer for. "That's the big question that's keeping me up at night," he told reporters. "If you know the answer to that, let me know." For a CEO comfortable with uncertainty, that kind of candor is part of the brand's charm.
What Bobby Farahi Says
It's a real girl. It's authentic. We give the reins to these people to be themselves, whether in videos or the way we shoot product or editorial.
There was a macro shift in this idea of conforming, and we've always stood for being yourself.
After navigating a pandemic alongside us, our customers are ready to return to 'real life.'
The Road from Broadcast Monitoring to Rave Fashion
Achievements
- Co-founded and scaled Dolls Kill from a single apartment product to a $50M+ annual revenue business
- Raised $91.6M in total funding including a $40M Series B from Sequoia Capital
- Ranked No. 33 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing private companies in 2015
- Founded, built, and exited Multivision Inc. via acquisition by Bacons Information (2005)
- Opened a 10,000 sq ft three-floor NYC SoHo flagship store with customers lining up at 8am on opening day
- Built a 3.6M+ Instagram following and engaged community around alternative fashion subcultures
- Attracted Alfred Lin (former Zappos COO/CFO) to join the Dolls Kill board via Sequoia Capital
The Specifics
He met his co-founder and wife at a rave in Los Angeles. Their entire brand is essentially that meet-cute, scaled to $91.6M.
The first Dolls Kill product was a foxtail keychain sourced from Asian factories. Volume one sold from a San Francisco apartment.
Before rave fashion, he spent 11 years in the utterly unglamorous world of broadcast media monitoring.
He thinks about retail store acoustics the way a nightclub promoter does. He actually built the NYC flagship with that framework.
Dolls Kill hit the Inc. 500 at No. 33 while most mainstream media still couldn't define what "rave fashion" meant.