Trash Queen was created by me, Paige! I'm a nonbinary, plus sized, disabled, 29 y/o graphic designer and illustrator. For Trash Queen, I'm the sole owner, designer, and work on pretty much everything!
I started selling my work under the name Trash Queen online in 2014, and started out just selling a few small accessories. As the shop grew, I was able to sell t-shirts, and then more complex garments, like skater dresses, skirts, and tights! Every year the business and my vision for it grows a little bit more.
For years, I ran the shop myself as a solo venture—working on designs and orders in my spare time at first while making my way through college, and later during nights and weekends while working as a graphic designer as my day job. In late 2020, I recruited my partner Alison (who is a trans woman and customer service maven from years of working in the service industry!) to help me keep up with orders.
With my graphic design background, our website might look like a lot of your favorite big businesses online, but we're actually a super tiny small business!
Nowadays, my partner and I currently run Trash Queen entirely out of our apartment, working hard together to get items from my brain onto your body! Our day to day can really vary and since we're a very small team, that means a lot of multitasking. No matter what, my fingerprint is on everything we do in the business, from the concepting stage and designing, to trimming excess threads off of garments before packing up orders and sending them with a cute little logo sticker to make their way over to you!
Here at Trash Queen, most of our items are made to order, and anything that isn't is made in small batches. That's something we do for a lot of reasons—the fashion industry is one of the world's worst creators of waste. Fast fashion brands push out hundreds of new releases on their sites daily, chasing after ephemeral social media trends. With the social media trend cycle now shorter than ever, and some trends literally only lasting a day or two, any unwanted items end up being thrown into clearance for dirt cheap prices, and if they're not sold, they often are trashed.
The pieces we make here are released in collections with overarching concepts, then released roughly in seasons, following the old school traditional fashion house model. We're not chasing social media trends, we're hoping to make art that delights our audience and resonates with them for the long term.
We also do not produce in excess—this does mean we are slower than other fashion brands, but this sacrifice gives us more advantages than just not contributing to this huge waste issue. Keeping our items made to order allows us to have more choices for you on our site in terms of item colors, size, and also gives us the opportunity to work with folks on cool custom projects on occasion. It also helps keep our items more affordable,. forgoing some of the heavy cost that comes with keeping a lot of inventory.
a closer look into our made to order process!
we send out emails to you during each step
to make sure you're kept up to date with the
latest status of your order. 💖
An order is made by a cutie like yourself. This order gets sent to us through our website and we either go straight to step three if a product is one of the small batch items that we are able to keep in stock, or we move into the production stage if it is made to order. This is where you'll get your order confirmation email!
Depending on the product, printed fabric might be sourced or a whole garment produced to the original specifications, either in house for more customized, specific pieces, or externally through one of our production partners. As soon as your order is in production, you'll get an email letting you know it's being made!
When all pieces in an order are finished, the items are checked for quality, we package individual pieces to make sure they're safe for their journey and add cute little details like stickers. Once all of the items in your order have been quality checked and are accounted for, you'll receive an email letting you know the order is complete and ready to ship!
Your order is then packed up and shipped according to the details you gave us when you ordered. You'll be given tracking information to track the order's progress, and once we know the order has been received, you'll be sent another email asking for your thoughts in a review!
To me, clothing should always be about style, self expression.
For too long, the fashion industry has not been interested in giving entire swaths of people an opportunity to express themselves in this way. But picking out what to wear each day is important...the right outfit can truly feel like a suit of armor.
At Trash Queen, we want to give more people access to that feeling. We're not about depicting the supermodel body, we want to show real people in all their complexities, of all genders, races, sexualities, shapes, and sizes. We want to give as many people as possible access to that invincible, killer ass outfit feeling, to give people the confidence to face the world head on.
Fashion is not one size fits all. But that incredible moment of looking in the mirror and just completely feeling yourself is something we all deserve.
One CROWN fits all.
You're royalty just as you are, and if we can give you even some of the tools to help you get to that feeling, I consider my job done.
