Dia & Co. Launches Dia Holiday Market to Support Struggling, Female-owned, Plus-size Businesses

Dia & Co., the plus-size lifestyle and clothing brand exclusively in sizes 14 to 32, will today introduce Dia Holiday Market, a digital marketplace designed to provide for the community while supporting small local businesses.

Following an open call in October, during which it received applications from small businesses across the country, Dia & Co. and founder Nadia Boujarwah selected 10 boutiques, now being featured in the first Dia Holiday Market.

Dia created the holiday market as a pilot program and is committed to working with entrepreneurs and small business owners on an ongoing basis to support the future of the plus-size fashion community. There is no end date at this point.

The businesses include a vintage-eclectic boutique, Bold and Curvy, owned by a mother of three in Chicago; a Las Vegas boutique, Rene’ Tyler Boutique, owned by Angela Rene’, who had to close her store only two weeks after opening due to COVID-19, and The Source Apparel owned by Alexis Rheinwald-Jones, an environmentally friendly, plus-size capsule collection shop in Los Angeles.

Shoppers will be able to browse items from each boutique on Dia.com. In addition, the Dia Holiday Market will recognize Black Friday with 30 percent off sitewide from Nov. 23 through Nov. 29 and a 50 percent off sitewide sale on Cyber Monday.

For several of these businesses, the Dia Holiday Market introduces them to an online e-commerce community for the first time. Some 67 percent of American women identify as plus-size.

Through yearend, these retailers will receive free marketing resources and exposure from Dia’s community of five million women. To further support small businesses in the plus-size market, Dia & Co. will spotlight all the applicants in an upcoming blog post, social media and through media outreach.

“These are tough times for businesses everywhere, especially those owned by women, to come together to support one another,” said Nadia Boujarwah, chief executive officer of Dia & Co. “With the launch of The Dia Holiday Market, we are helping these businesses to keep their doors open, amplify the voices and stories of business owners in our community, and keep the plus-size fashion community of more than 100 million women alive and thriving.”

Over the last eight months, the pandemic has hit small retail businesses particularly hard, resulting in many stores having to close their doors, also reducing options for plus-size women across an already limited market landscape with major store chains closing.

According to a recent analysis by Dia & Co., about 30 percent of brick-and-mortar plus-size stores have said they would be closing permanently.

Dia & Co. was founded by Boujarwah and Lydia Gilbert in 2015 and to cater to more than 100 million plus-size women in the U.S.

Sign up for WWD's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.