CAbi, a women’s fashion company, celebrated its move from Carson to Long Beach on Wednesday, bringing more than 100 employees to its fifth-floor office near the Long Beach Airport.
CAbi, which stands for Carol Anderson by invitation, was founded in 2001 by a dozen women, including clothing designer Carol Anderson and Chief Culture Officer Syd Ryan.
It primarily uses a multi-level marketing model where independent sales agents called stylists sell to clients in their homes.
Ryan said the idea came out of a “retail apocalypse” that happened in the early 2000s, when “stores were making safe decisions” and ordering expanded inventory of styles that sold well in previous years.
As a counter to that mentality, CAbi’s founders wanted to “design for women like ourselves” and help women “build a wardrobe over time” that fit their personal style, Ryan said.
CAbi Chief Financial Officer Russ Bowers said the move to Long Beach came about after he reached out to District 3 Councilmember Kristina Duggan for help finding a “more walkable” location than their previous spot in an industrial sector of Carson.
Bowers met Duggan when she knocked on the door of his Naples home when she was canvassing for her City Council run in 2022.
After Bowers joined CAbi as CFO last October, he said he knew the right person to ask for help finding the company a spot in Long Beach.
“This city is really meant for businesses like this,” Duggan said. “I am so proud of the fact that it’s a woman-owned business.”
Mayor Rex Richardson welcomed the company and its more than 100 jobs to the city during his annual economic forum, Grow Long Beach.
Those jobs are spread across marketing, design and merchandising, finance, information technology, sales operations and communications, said CEO Katie Malone-Woods.
CAbi hopes to grow its revenue by 15% over the next three years and add roles proportionate to that growth, Malone-Woods said.
“This space was designed to expand easily,” she said.
The company’s new 27,000-square-foot office space includes a photo studio, meeting rooms named after different fabrics and views of incoming and outgoing flights at Long Beach Airport.
District 4 Councilmember Daryl Supernaw, who represents the district where the new office is located, said the office space was “one of the greatest looking offices in the city.”
CAbi currently operates in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.
Each year, CAbi launches two clothing collections and provides stylists with a book of its latest clothing lines produced in-house.
Two decades ago, the company also launched a charitable foundation that offers microloans to women entrepreneurs.