Adeela Hussain Johnson on Béis' next phase: 'We haven't even scratched the surface yet'

Adeela Hussain Johnson has watched her own product move through airports for the better part of a decade, and it has not worn off. "Seeing a Béis bag in an airport still humbles me," the chief executive officer of the American travel and lifestyle brand told FashionUnited, "because I know what it took to build this from nothing." Eight years after she joined a start-up with no revenue, Béis is a 250 million dollar business — and, she argues, barely started.

But before moving forward, Béis decided to rebuild its foundation. In July, the company relaunched its Core Collection, updating its viral Weekender bags, in a commercial decision that meant transitioning out the brand's best-seller at the height of its success. "Our consumer told us it was the right time," Hussain Johnson said. Since launching in 2018, The Weekender has sold more than two million units and achieved an average year-over-year growth of 70 percent, according to the company.

The task, which she described as a tremendous logistical feat, was a capital investment, an inventory management challenge and a brand positioning decision at once. “It took years to assess the risk-equity on redesigning the Weekender, but we knew it was time. I wasn't afraid of the results, because I knew the team had done the work to ensure every change was consumer-forward, value-add and intentional,” she said, noting the brand’s conscious decision of making meaningful improvements “rather than changes just for the sake of having something new to market.”

“As a start-up, there's often an appetite to pursue every opportunity. At scale, that's neither realistic nor responsible. You have to make deliberate choices about where the greatest opportunity exists and where the business can make the smartest investment. Growth cannot only mean adding more. Sometimes the more strategic decision is to strengthen the foundation,” Hussain Johnson said.

"Building and scaling are two different skills"

Hussain Johnson believes that listening to the consumer is critical for a brand, something she learned throughout her career. She holds a degree from Indiana University and an MBA from its Kelley School of Business, and spent her early career at Ameriprise Financial in financial planning before moving to Target in merchandising and general management.

Target is where the operating instincts were formed. “Target taught me to start with the consumer while maintaining real discipline around the business,” she said. “As a merchant, you're incredibly close to the consumer-retail is where the customer interacts with hundreds of brands, and my job wasn't to represent one brand, it was to grow the full category. That forces a different kind of skill: prioritization, understanding the levers across a business and how they connect, and making difficult, sometimes multi-million or billion-dollar decisions where you have to sacrifice one part for the benefit of the whole. The weight of that scale is what really built the muscle over time.”

Knowing what best-in-class looked like gave her something to reverse-engineer. But the move to a start-up required deliberate forgetting. "What I had to unlearn was the expectation that there would always be an established process, a clear precedent or perfect information," she said. "You also cannot take the infrastructure of a Fortune 500 company and shrink it down. Process has to be introduced at the right time; too little creates chaos, but too much too early slows the speed and creativity that make a young company successful."

Her summary of the two halves is that "building and scaling are two different skills" and "having both made all the difference," she said.

Founding member to first chief executive

Béis was launched in 2018 by Shay Mitchell with the Los Angeles incubator Beach House Group. Hussain Johnson was there from the start, first as a founding member and later as president. The elevation to CEO came in July 2024, making her the company's first.

“Shay and I have a tremendously strong, complementary and aligned relationship. We're both very strong in different areas of the business that support each other well, and that has been a strength from the very beginning. It also helps that I genuinely love her as a person, we have a mutual respect and care for one another that makes all of this work,” Hussain Johnson said.

The next chapter

Béis is a 250 million dollar business, according to the company, reached in under eight years, with only one publicly documented outside funding round. Wholesale and retail partners now include Nordstrom, Anthropologie, Selfridges and Hudson airport locations.

In the next phase, she is expansive but hedged. "There's a lot to come, we haven't even scratched the surface yet. We still have tremendous opportunity domestically, especially in Middle America," Hussain Johnson said, adding that international growth "requires real investment in infrastructure.”

Physical retail is the frontier for a business born online, a strategy she framed to FashionUnited in 2024 around the Selfridges partnership as one of "creating retail partnerships that allow us to showcase our physical product in a way that brings our digitally native brand to life.”

"Each new touchpoint requires greater investment, so it has to be commercially viable," she said. "The opportunity is significant, but so are the trade-offs."

Eight years in, Béis wants to own the entire on-the-go journey, not just travel planning. “We read trends, we listen to the consumer, but the bigger piece is trying to anticipate what their needs could be before they've fully articulated it themselves. The greatest compliment we can receive is a consumer saying ‘I didn’t know I needed that and now I can’t live without it.' From there, it becomes a business decision as much as a brand one,” Hussain Johnson said.

"Listen first, talk second"

Hussain Johnson is based in Southern California with her husband, three children and a Goldendoodle named Montego. The best advice she has received, she said, is "listen first, talk second". The worst? "That financial performance is the only thing that matters. Performance absolutely matters, but how you achieve those results matters too."

She is one of relatively few Pakistani-American women running a consumer brand at this scale, and she traces her reading of the customer partly to that. "Growing up, I moved around a lot, and that built a certain adaptiveness in me," she said. "It broadened my perspective and taught me early that the world isn't black or white." Navigating different cultures, she added, "teaches you to pay attention to context and recognise that the loudest voice may not be the only, or most representative, one in the room." That scepticism about the loudest voice has a commercial edge. "There is no single universal Béis customer," she said. "Demographics can be informative, but behaviours, interests and the ways people actually move through their lives often tell us much more."