Who Owns Dolls Kill?

Bobby Farahi and Shaudi Lynn founded Dolls Kill in San Francisco in 2011. Farahi had previously founded Multivision, a broadcast monitoring service he sold to Bacon's Information in 2005. Lynn, a former DJ who performed under the name Shoddy Lynn, had been selling clothing on eBay. The pair met at a rave, and the concept for the business came from Lynn's experience shopping for festival and club clothing while touring as a DJ.

The store launched as an online boutique selling eccentric accessories, including the colorful fox tails that became an early signature item, before expanding into full apparel. Its merchandising organized products around persona-style collections, each built on a character archetype with its own look, an approach that gave the site a distinctive editorial identity among e-commerce competitors.

Growth was fast. The company took its first major venture round in 2014 and opened a large fulfillment center in Southern California to handle volume. Press coverage in the mid-2010s described Dolls Kill as one of the fastest-growing private companies in San Francisco, profitable from early in its life and built largely on social media marketing rather than paid acquisition. It opened physical stores in San Francisco and Los Angeles and expanded into footwear, swim, festival wear, and licensed collaborations.

The brand weathered a major backlash in June 2020 during the Black Lives Matter protests, covered in detail below, followed by slower but steadier growth through the early 2020s. It expanded its in-house labels, added a resale vertical, and continued releasing collaborations with musicians and entertainment properties. In October 2025 the company won a copyright damages ruling at the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in a case against online merchants selling copies of its Teddy Deady backpack design.