Although Deborah Moser may be the star of her own success story, some of the credit for her professional prosperity can be spread among a very diverse supporting cast, which includes her family and employees, a couple of pairs of unwanted jeans and a trendsetting Jennifer Lopez.
The founder and CEO of online fashion marketplace Luxury Divas (LD), Moser says she's been interested in design and clothing trends for as long as she can remember. Her earliest forays into fashion helped her and her friends stand out from the crowd at Blue Mountain High School in Schuylkill County. “If there was a dance on Friday night, we all figured out what we were wearing,” she recalls. “My mom always had fabric at the house. I would just start making shirts and skirts.” She'd also buy irregulars from a local knitting mill, take out her scissors and go to town. She describes her style back then as “punk”—fishnets and short skirts. “I always wanted to be different. Not freaky, but different. Individual.” She also entertained the idea of turning pro. “I wanted to be a fashion designer,” she says. “But then I thought that was far-fetched.”
And so the same savvy that helped her snag a “best dressed” nomination from her high school was moved to the back burner as she started to make her way in the working world. It would, however, be a temporary reassignment. Moser studied political science and business at Montclair State University in New Jersey. “I wanted to go into politics, law school,” she says. “But it just wasn't for me.”
Instead, she began carving out a career in tech implementation. Around the year 1999, Moser was recruited to join what she calls “the company of my dreams”: Netgov, a Dutch company with an office in Morristown, New Jersey. “That's where I learned about e-commerce, and really got into it,” she recalls. But, about a year later, a gut punch: “The company just went out of business,” says Moser. “I was devastated.”
She also learned she was pregnant with her second child (at the time, she and her husband, Wayne, already had a daughter, Nikki) so Moser made a conscious decision to take some time off.
One problem: Moser has never been a “sit still” kind of woman. While cleaning up at her family's Stewartsville, New Jersey, home she happened upon some old jeans in the basement and decided to put them on eBay to see what would happen. Much to her surprise, they sold. Moser moved on to handbags, belts and accessories—more sales. But her fledgling fashion retail business was hardly a cash cow. “I lost money on every sale because I didn't know what I was doing,” says
Moser. And yet, she says, a seed that would later bear much more lucrative fruit had been planted: “I thought, ‘I really love fashion. I really love e-commerce. Why don't I look further into this?'”
Moser purchased the domain luxurydivas.com (the name was suggested by then-six-year-old Nikki) and began to seek out items that she could add to LD's online closet. Having previously lived in the Hoboken area, she says she was familiar with the wholesale district in New York City. She'd drag her husband there on the weekends. “I would bring him just to carry all of the stuff,” she says with a laugh. And sometimes Moser had her eye out for very specific “stuff.” She recalls hunting down and purchasing a dozen versions of a floppy hat that she had seen adorning the noggin of none other than actress, singer and dancer Jennifer
Lopez. “My husband said, ‘You're never going to sell these,'” says Moser. He was wrong (sorry, Wayne!). In fact, Moser says a version of those hats is still for sale on the Luxury Divas website today. And cribbing from J.Lo's closet proved to be an important lesson in learning what sells, and what doesn't. “I would look at what the stars were wearing, and buy that the next weekend,” Moser says. “I credit my instinct. Sometimes it's wrong, but a lot of times, it's right.”
For a while, LD was a one-woman show. Moser made her first official hire in 2003: current operations director Frank Complitano, who is the son of one of her friends. From there, the payroll gradually expanded, one by one. By 2005, the Luxury Divas operation had outgrown its space in the Moser home. “By the time it took over the dining room, the living room and the office, it was like, ‘OK, enough,'” says Moser. “The business has overtaken my entire life.” She relocated to a four-story Victorian home in Phillipsburg, New
Jersey. That same year, LD registered with Amazon Marketplace and continued to grow. In fact, those roomier digs were only roomy enough for a couple of years; by 2008, Moser and her staff were once again in need of more elbow room. They searched for two years before finally settling on an old car dealership in Phillipsburg. They purchased the property and converted it to warehouse and office space. As for whether she'll be reserving another fleet of U-Haul trucks in the future, Moser has a quick reply: “I don't plan on moving anywhere ever again.”
With that issue firmly settled, Moser has spent the past nine years focusing on the LD brand; she describes the overall vibe of the clothing and accessories as “classic and traditional.” Luxury Divas works with both vendors and manufacturers in the U.S. and overseas. While its earliest offerings came strictly from wholesalers, the LD team began designing some of its own products in 2014, with Moser taking the lead. “I enjoy creating,” she says. “I can look at something and see it very different than anyone else.” The end result is approachable rather than pretentious; practical, yet contemporary and fresh. “The things we design ourselves are traditional,” says Moser. “There's nothing wild or crazy about them.”
And luxurydivas.com is truly one-stop shopping, offering everything from shawls to dresses to lingerie to hosiery for women, and a more limited (yet still substantial) line for men. “We sell fashion and accessories that everyone can afford,” Moser says. And some of the bold-faced names in the business have taken notice; Luxury Divas has been on the receiving end of shout-outs in the pages of Vogue and Cosmopolitan magazines, among others.
When asked to take stock of her success, Moser seems somewhat surprised that what was originally conceived as a means of distraction during her maternity leave took her down an entirely new career path. “I thought this was going to be something I did until my son turned two, then I would go back into the corporate world,” she says. Marco Moser is now 17 years old, so it seems safe to say, there's no going back now. “I happen to be a workaholic,” Moser says. “I usually have a few projects up in the air.”
Some of those projects are tied to Luxury Divas—including the launch of a subscription box service in 2017—and others are not. Wayne and Deborah Moser operate their own real estate company, NicMar Holdings, which specializes in rehabbing properties in the Phillipsburg area that have seen better days. “We buy the worst of the worst,” says Moser. They own 18 “doors,” she explains, a mix of single and multifamily homes. “That's one of the things I'm most proud about—we're taking the profits from our businesses and re-investing them in the town.” Really, it's another way of blending design and beautification, something Moser knows a thing or two about. “It's very rewarding to step back and see how something used to look, and how it looks now,” she says.
