How Natalie Dusome built a nine-figure brand from her basement: 'It started with me crying, looking for my keys'

Natalie Dusome was standing in her hallway with her nine-month-old daughter on her hip, late, exhausted, digging through her bag for a set of keys she could not find. “I was feeling completely overwhelmed by something that should have been so simple. Eventually, I just put my bag down and started crying,” she told FashionUnited. The meltdown turned into inspiration. “I remember thinking, how much time are we all wasting digging through our bags, carrying two bags instead of one, looking for our keys, our chargers, our lipstick? Why had nobody designed a handbag around making our lives easier?”

In 2015, Dusome created Poppy & Peonies, a Canadian accessories brand that has since grown to a reported 100 million dollars without outside investment. “It started with me crying in my hallway looking for my keys. But what I was really looking for was a better way,” she said.

From her basement in Ontario, Dusome, who’d studied design at Ryerson University in Toronto, set out to create handbags that make everyday life easier. She started her mission leaning into her corporate background — Dusome had designed for brands such as Abercrombie & Fitch, Fossil, and Aldo, before funding her own brand.

“Corporate taught me how to be a designer. Poppy & Peonies taught me what was worth designing,” she said.

Prioritizing functionality over trends, Dusome left behind the idea of “designing for the sake of newness” and started creating based on a woman’s day. “Corporate taught me the discipline to create products people want to buy. Entrepreneurship gave me the freedom to create products I believe should exist.”

Entrepreneurship freedom

Poppy & Peonies is self-funded. Dusome built the company with her savings and reinvested every profit into the company to fuel growth. “And the truth is, being self-funded is really fucking hard,” she said, candidly. “It took me years to pay myself. I was paying my employees long before I started taking a salary. You grow more slowly, you make trade-offs constantly, and when you own 100 percent of the business, you also carry 100 percent of the risk.”

With the challenges of entrepreneurship also came a level of freedom. Dusome never had to make a product because an investor told her so or follow a timeline established by a third party. “We could connect directly with our customers, listen to what they actually wanted, and build on our terms. We could trust our instincts and play the long game,” she said, without recognizing that outside capital would have allowed the company to grow faster or build infrastructure earlier. “But I also think those constraints made us better operators. We became resourceful, learned the economics behind every decision and ultimately built a business that could support its own growth.”

Dusome is currently hiring for multiple senior roles, including director of operations, vice president of marketing, and director of retention. “It’s about adding depth. The bigger the business becomes, the more important it is to surround yourself with people who are exceptional at what they do,” she said.

The company is intentional about staying DTC and not moving into wholesale, Dusome explained. “Being a DTC brand has allowed us to build an incredibly close relationship with our customers. We have this almost cult-like community of women who tell us exactly what they love, what frustrates them, what they’re carrying and what they wish existed. And we actually listen,” she said.

Before expanding into physical retail, Poppy & Peonies is experimenting with pop-up concepts, including one set to open in the middle of New York’s Times Square on September 25.

Mom feedback

Poppy & Peonies sits at the intersection of fashion and function, with prices roughly between 29 and 150 dollars. The entire collection is vegan, cruelty-free, and PETA-approved, with packaging designed to reduce environmental impact. “Durability is actually a really important part of sustainability for me. I would rather make a bag someone loves and carries for years than something that checks a sustainability box but doesn’t hold up to real life,” she said.

A decade after she started the company, Dusome still looks for inspiration in daily life. “A lot of our best ideas start with a complaint,” she said, adding that “Mom feedback is woven throughout that entire process.”

“So many of the women in our community are moms, and we’re constantly hearing from them through comments, DMs, reviews and customer feedback about what’s working, what isn’t and what they wish existed. We’re not designing for some imaginary customer in a boardroom. We’re designing alongside the women who are actually going to carry the bag, and then testing those ideas in real life until we get it right.”

'We’re already juggling enough'

Dusome started growing Poppy & Peonies at the same time she was growing her family, an experience that shaped her business, she said. “We talk a lot about supporting female founders through access to capital, mentorship and networks, and all of those things matter. But I think there’s a much bigger conversation we need to have about what women are expected to carry outside of work.”

“When I was working, I felt guilty that I wasn’t with my daughter. When I was with my daughter, part of my brain was thinking about the business. It felt like no matter how hard I worked, something or someone was getting less of me than they deserved,” Dusome said.

For her, to better support women building businesses, it’s necessary to look beyond the business itself, as women often need better childcare, more equitable responsibilities at home and “a culture that stops expecting women to do everything perfectly,” she said.

“I don’t think the answer is teaching women how to become even better at juggling. We’re already juggling enough. We need to stop creating a world where women have to carry everything in the first place. Women shouldn’t have to choose between being ambitious and being present in the rest of their lives. We need to build a version of entrepreneurship that actually acknowledges the reality of women’s lives.”

Dusome credits her success to a promise she made to herself when she started the company. “I took quitting off the table. I didn’t know exactly how I was going to make the business successful, how long it would take or how many times I would have to change my approach, but I decided I was going to keep going until I figured it out,” she said.

Her advice for other women exploring the idea of entrepreneurship is simple: “Find a problem you genuinely care about solving. Start small. Listen to your customer. And if you find something people truly want and you believe in it with everything you have, go all in.”