Winner. Business Leader of the Year 2023

Ziqi Deng

Position: Co-founder, COO
Company: RE(SOURCE)
City: Brooklyn, New York
Country: USA
Economic/Business Sector: Fashion Supply Chain Technology

Ziqi Deng is the co-founder of RE(SOURCE), a fashion supply chain tech startup that revolutionizes global fashion production. Coming from a fashion manufacturing family in China, Ziqi graduated from Duke University with a dual degree in Public Policy and Statistics. During her undergraduate, she spent a summer at Oxford researching the political economy of forced migration and a summer in Tanzania introducing literacy through photography to local educators. She took four internships during a gap year and worked at a lobby firm, a family foundation, a social enterprise incubator, and an E-commerce startup. Besides she also worked at a prestigious PE firm during one of her summers in Beijing.

She started her entrepreneurial career during her last year at Duke, where she started an Amazon store, and the monthly revenue peaked at $13k. She earned two 'Amazon’s choice' endorsements for products, demonstrating high client satisfaction and comprehension of ranking metrics. She expanded product offerings through a successful sales pitch and negotiation with Duke University Store sourcing manager and sourced custom products for the university store.

After graduation, she joined Deloitte Consulting as a Product Analyst, serving Fortune 50 clients by building business cases, go-to-market strategies, UI/UX research, and product development. The project she worked on spanned from recreating digital employee onboarding experiences and creating proof-of-concept for a care management system to managing the project of a Fortune 50 company’s global financial transformation (SAP). She was also a winner of the Startup Deloitte 2020.

As a first-time and young entrepreneur, Ziqi reached 800k GMV in the first year of her current fashion supply chain business while still searching for the product market fit. She and her cofounder quickly built and iterated 4 MVPs (minimum viable products) in the first year, talked to over 800 customers to understand their pain points and user journey, and raised the first round of 590k as first-time, female and foreign founders.

She built an effective multi-channel marketing strategy and achieved 35%+ MoM user growth with $0 spent on ads. She established 30+ effective business partnerships with tech partners and industry thought leaders and hosted 5+ fashion industry events with accumulated attendees reaching 3000. Her company’s weekly fashion newsletter also has over 2000 subscribers.

Her company, RE(SOURCE), introduces a more data-driven approach to the fashion industry and opens access to the first-class supply chain to more independent emerging fashion brands. The digital and agile supply chain is historically built by fast fashion giants like Zara and Shein, but her company creates the opportunity and opens access to the global supply chain to the most ambitious fashion brands.

Ziqi is a member of the Forbes Business Council, Founders Network, Launch House, and On Deck Fellow. She was a guest on multiple podcasts, including Superstition, Verve, Start Scale Succeed, and Unfiltered Fashion Talks.