With more than 2 million followers across Instagram and TikTok alone, you may mistake Sophia Begg, better known as @ sophadophaa_, for being just another influencer. She begs to differ.
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Sophia Begg always thought she’d become a doctor, until a debilitating illness struck in her final year of high school, which saw her unable to achieve an ATAR. In a crisis and on the verge of a mental breakdown on bed rest, Begg says she downloaded TikTok and began uploading videos
to pass the time.
“They were terrible,” she says from a hotel room in Ibiza (on a brand trip sponsored by Amazon Prime, for context). “But it was just a good time to start.” It was 2020, so Begg, who was just 16 years old at the time, was not the only one chronically online. “TikTok was new, it was COVID, no one in Australia had really been posting yet. I got in early, and the next thing I knew… It’s just been the most amazing few years.”
In those years since her personal brand took off, Begg’s worked with the likes of Dolce & Gabbana, Maybelline, Princess Polly and YSL Beauty, but she’s also launched her own retail brand: All for Mimi. Named after her great-great-grandmother, who was a seamstress with her own bridal couture and lingerie boutique in Sydney’s Mosman in the 20s, Begg launched All for Mimi in 2023, first and foremost, for herself.
“We don’t want investors. We want to get as big as possible without losing our touch.”
Sophia Begg
“I was shopping one day and I couldn’t find what I was looking for. I never thought it would happen, but my mum has always said I can do whatever I want to do, and she’d support me, so together we thought, ‘Let’s do this’.”
Before launch, All for Mimi was looking like it could turn out to be a “flop”, Begg recalls. “We had no idea what we were doing – Mum was a lawyer, I’m a student, we could not get this off the ground.” The mother-daughter duo left the project alone for a year before returning with some more knowledge of manufacturing and sampling. After the grit work was complete, All for Mimi says it turned over seven figures in its first year of trade.
Now, in its second year, it says it’s on track to turn over eight figures. Its biggest restock of its viral’ boob job’ tanks saw 400 items sold every minute until units sold out completely. Begg recalls record numbers of customers online at launch time.
“I still don’t know that I feel like we’ve ‘made it’ yet,” she says. “But a huge moment for us was moving into our new offices. We used to have a warehouse downstairs and an office upstairs, and we had one staff member who physically packed all the orders. But the orders started getting out of hand, especially when the tanks came around. So, we moved to a 3PL that now packs all our orders, which meant we could move to a much nicer office. That’s when we started to feel like a real brand.”
As for what’s next, Begg says she has her hands full balancing her time as an influencer and entrepreneur, but she admits the possibilities with All for Mimi excite her most – though growth at all costs isn’t the plan.
“We don’t want investors,” she says. “We want to get as big as possible without losing our touch.”
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