Cut from a different cloth: Inspiring confidence through fashion

Alum Lisa Sun, founder of Gravitas, delivers more than clothing for her clients.

Lisa Sun (right) dresses a Gravitas model

Ask Lisa Sun (DCO 00-11) about her company Gravitas, and she will pretty quickly tell you that while they make and sell women’s clothing, their mission is really not about apparel.

The deeper purpose of Gravitas, she says, is to “catalyze confidence.”

The name of the company comes directly from a piece of feedback Lisa received early in her career at McKinsey; she was told that she came across as too young and overly enthusiastic, and that she needed to seek to have more gravitas. While taken aback at first, Lisa realized that the feedback really spoke to the confidence – or lack of it – that she had in herself.

“I often get questions around how a fashion company is connected to confidence,” Lisa says. “Our clothing is just a vehicle to remind women of their inherent strengths and gifts. It's not really an apparel company. The clothing is simply a reminder to believe in yourself. We dress for our own self-belief.”

Lisa says that the dressing room is an analogy for how we take on the day. Many women, she says, go into a dressing room with self-loathing, which triggers a deficit mindset where they focus on their flaws over their potential. They set themselves up to fail before they’ve even started. That inspired her vision for Gravitas—to create products and experiences that would galvanize self-assurance. This meant, among other things, being size-inclusive and making clothes that are designed around women’s bodies.

“I do this thing called ‘The Confidence Closet,’” Lisa says. “Before I recommend something for a customer to wear, I spend ten minutes with them not talking about clothes. I ask them what their superpower is and get them in a positive mindset. Then I become a ‘dress whisperer.’ I get my recommendation right the first time.”

Lisa recognizes that not every woman needs to draw confidence from the way they dress. “I have seen people who don't care about what they wear, but are still very confident. That's okay,” she says. “They have other sources of renewal. But I do think for most women, the psychology of their investment in themselves is translated into how we show up in the world.”

Success for Lisa and Gravitas came quickly; in 2013, just six weeks after launching the company, Lisa appeared in Oprah Magazine. Other features in major publications such as Fast Company and Forbes followed. Lisa saw her brand flourish and grow over the next several years. Then came COVID-19.

COVID lockdown: A business pivot

Lockdown, March of 2020. “This was the first time in company history that the cash register had a negative number,” Lisa says. “We refunded more than we sold that month.”

Gravitas had just presented at its first-ever runway show at New York Fashion Week, and department stores had begun placing orders. They were all cancelled. The company’s ten-city pop-up store tour was cancelled as well. “The entire market that we had built our business around collapsed in less than two weeks,” says Lisa. “There were moments where I felt like giving up.”

Lisa knew she needed to pivot – and she did so while also giving back to the community. “We ended up making hospital gowns for Mount Sinai Hospital,” Lisa says, “and we made a quarter million face masks in our New York City factory.”

And the proceeds from the sale of some Gravitas products went to frontline health-care workers and the nonprofit New York Cares.

How we dress post-COVID

Besides temporarily changing her business, COVID also changed the way people dressed. Lisa explains that the pandemic, and working from home, has changed clothing trends in several ways. “What we've seen is a compartmentalizing of the wardrobe,” she says, “and less willingness to spend frivolously.”

Superb Stitch's Samplemaker Cho Yuen
Photo credit: Gravitas

She adds that staying at home for long periods of time changed our bodies – some began strict workout regimens at home, while others became inactive. “Nobody's body is the same as it was before COVID,” she adds.

Lisa explains that we’ve divided up our wardrobe into three categories: the everyday, stretchy-yoga-pants, athletic part of our closets, which has become more socially acceptable in more venues. Then there's the section of our closet dedicated to the times when we really have to dress up. And finally, Lisa says there’s “the hybrid part of our closet, which is, ‘two to three days a week, I have to go into the office. What can I get away with?’"

Lisa says that she still focuses on the more formal part of women’s wardrobes, and her team has extended the range to answer the “what am I going to wear to the office today?” question.

Changing the scorecard on rating women’s potential

To make her ideas accessible to all women, Lisa has written a book, "Gravitas: The 8 Strengths That Redefine Confidence," that will be published in September. Lisa says that she wanted to give all women the opportunity to access a dressing-room experience with her.

The book’s premise – that there are eight different types of confidence (leading, performing, achieving, giving, knowing, creating, believing, and self-sustaining) – is shored up by a quantitative study of thousands of women. She conducted the research with one of her mentors from the Firm, fellow alumna and former Partner Sally Dancer.

“We realized that the definition of ‘gravitas’ is patriarchal,” Lisa says. It's the Dale Carnegie version of ‘shake hands, stand on a stage, puff up your chest.’ Those are only two of the eight types of confidence. Most of us have two or three of them; your confidence language drives your self-belief.”

She goes on, “In the dataset, what we found is that achieving, giving, knowing, and believing are the most frequent forms of confidence in women. Kelly Shue at Yale just wrote this great piece about how women are scored high on performance, but low on future potential, while men are scored lower on performance and high on future potential. The scorecard is built around leading, performing, and self-sustaining – the three attributes the fewest women have as their top skills, but are the ones that most correlate to senior levels of leadership. So we have to change the scorecard. But at the same time, we have to give women these other tools for these moments that matter.”

"In the dataset, what we found is that achieving, giving, knowing, and believing are the most frequent forms of confidence in women."
– Lisa Sun

Best moment at the Firm

Leadership is one skill Lisa says she gained at the Firm, and she says she is grateful for the mentors she had at McKinsey who helped her to succeed. Few alumni would describe their favorite moment at McKinsey as being when they received “the worst [performance] score you could ever get” – but Lisa does.

“I always tell people that one particular study is the one that changed my life – not because it went well, but because it went badly,” she says. “At the end of it, only two out of the twenty people on the team said they would work with me again.”

She was afraid that would be the end of her career at the Firm. But instead of letting her go, her DGL said the Firm would invest in helping her to become a better leader. “[My DGL] saw that score and said, ‘I still see something in you. I still believe in you. Let's set you up to win.’" Lisa got coaching to “break my bad habits,” one of which was pivoting from a command-and-control style to a servant leadership mindset.

“Thank goodness I had that bad score, because it taught me that the way I was doing things was not the best way,” Lisa says. “It changed who I became as a leader long term.”

Image of Lisa Sun and two others holding signs

What matters

Lisa says that by far the most gratifying part of her job is the emails and text messages she receives from her customers, many of whom she gives her personal phone number to. “I have very deep, personal relationships with our customers,” she says. She also expresses gratitude to those who helped her along the way – and says her experience at Gravitas has helped her to figure out what really matters.

“I owe so much of a debt of gratitude to the Firm, to my connections, to my relationships, and to my angel investors,” she says.

“Right after we launched the company in September of 2013, Oprah gave us two pages in her October issue,” Lisa continues. “We were on the TODAY show. We were in People magazine – all in the same week. And I always tell people that's not what mattered. What I realized is that it wasn't about the clothes. I think we make fabulous, innovative clothes, but what matters are the messages I get from women saying that they have transformed the way they feel about themselves.

“I realized being in magazines and on TV shows doesn't make you happy. Being on a 30 Under 30 list doesn't make you happy. What makes me happy is every single day, somebody in the outside world who I don't know sends an email saying, ‘You made me feel really good all day.’ That's the stuff that matters.”