How This Yale SOM Silver Scholar Built A Denim Startup While Earning Her MBA

Working as a product manager for Microsoft Teams, where jeans were the unofficial tech uniform, Karina Gupta dreaded getting dressed most mornings. Unforgiving denim is often tight and uncomfortable by midafternoon, especially for women whose weight can fluctuate month to month, day to day, or even hour to hour.

Gupta, an engineer by training, decided to do something about it. She designed a premium slip-on pair of jeans that looks like it has the rigidity, structure, and style of real denim, but are built to adapt to women’s bodies throughout the day.

Now in her second and final year at Yale School of Management through its Silver Scholars Program, Gupta has turned that everyday problem into KarinaJ Denim, a direct-to-consumer startup officially launching this Tuesday, February 3.

The Silver Scholar’s unique structure – with a working gap period between the first and second MBA years – gave Gupta the time to test ideas in the real world, refine her product, and return to Yale with a clear sense of what she wanted to build.

“For a long time, I sat on the idea,” Gupta says. “Even when I first started prototyping, I was a little one foot in, one foot out, wondering if it really made sense or if I should just focus on my full-time job,” Gupta says.

“I’ve now gone full steam ahead, and I have no regrets.”

AN UNUASUAL WAY TO AN MBA

Gupta grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and studied engineering at Vanderbilt University. She considered consulting and interned in banking at JPMorgan her junior year. Working with clients made her realize that she didn’t want a career analyzing the financial plans for tech companies, she wanted to help build something herself.

So, she applied to deferred MBA programs during her senior year, including Yale SOM’s Silver Scholars. In the program, students complete the MBA core immediately after undergrad, work for a minimum of one year or up to five years, then return to Yale finish the degree.

“The structure of the program allows the Silver Scholars to be fully-integrated into the MBA class and learning in a cohort structure for Yale SOM’s unique integrated core curriculum,” says Amber Walsh, senior associate director of SOM admissions.

“In the Core, students gain foundations of management that can be applied to any industry while learning from their classmates who can share their own insights from their professional experiences.”

Silver Scholars, unique among top business schools, began 25 years ago as part of SOM’s 25th anniversary year, which is where it took its name. It was designed in part by Barry Nalebuff, the Milton Steinbach Professor who has taught negotiations, innovation, strategy and game theory for more than thirty years.

In any given year, Silver Scholars account for 5% to 7% of Yales MBA cohort of about 350 students. In the current SOM Cohort, there are 24 Silver Scholars in their first-year and 29 who have returned for their second.

“Once the Silver Scholar is ready to return to SOM, the final year is entirely electives that can be taken at SOM or across the Yale campus,” Walsh says. “This allows Silver Scholars to fill in any gaps they have identified during their work experience or focus on a specialty within their longer-term professional or personal goals.”

THE YOUNGEST MBA IN THE ROOM

Gupta entered the MBA somewhat blind. At 22, she was younger than almost everyone around her and with no real-world work experience. She enrolled in 2020, during the first year of COVID, and she hadn’t taken a single business class as an undergraduate at Vanderbilt.

“I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, these people are so much older, so much wiser,’” she says. “But I got out of my head pretty quickly. Once I humanized them, I realized they were just students again, the same as me.”

What followed was one of the more unexpected benefits of the experience. Gupta found herself surrounded by classmates in vastly different stages of life who taught her almost as much as the curriculum itself. Her closest first-year MBA friend turned out to be a VP in investment banking at Bank of America. She ended up invited to a lot of weddings in her early 20s, something her undergrad friends were pretty jealous of.

After completing the integrated core curriculum, Silver Scholars step away from campus for one to five years. Some remain with a single employer. Others try multiple roles to find the right fit. Still others pursue internships, project-based work, or build startups of their own with support from Yale’s entrepreneurship resources. Throughout that period, SOM’s Career Development Office and professional clubs help students refine their goals and tap into the school’s alumni network.

Gupta spent four years with Microsoft, working through the shift from pandemic-era hybrid work to an increasingly AI-driven product environment. It was just weeks into the job that the idea for KarinaJ Denim came to her after failing, again, to find a pair of jeans that fit her throughout the day.

“I think I was just getting sick of it. I was working in tech, so you wear jeans every day, and I would wake up in the morning dreading having to put my jeans on. Especially if I had eaten a lot the night before,” she says.

“I literally just woke up one day and thought, well, maybe I can make better jeans that actually fit me.”

BUILDING A JEANS BRAND WITH NO FASHION EXPERIENCE

The problem KarinaJ sets out to solve grew out of the generational gap in the denim market. Brands popular with Gen Z and millennials prioritizing style over comfort. Companies that focus on slip-on or elastic-waist jeans, meanwhile, skew older and look like, well, pull-on jeans.

KarinaJ Denim is meant to bridge that divide. The jeans have classic silhouettes such as straight-leg, bootcut, and flare jeans that look premium but wear comfortably.

Gupta began cold-messaging founders on LinkedIn who had launched apparel brands without fashion school pedigrees: How did you do this? Where do you even begin? One founder helped her lay out a basic roadmap – find the right fabric, hire a technical designer, understand manufacturing end to end.

“It wasn’t linear,” Gupta says. “But it helped me understand everything A to Z.”

She decided to go all-in at a trade show in New York, surrounded by suppliers, manufacturers, and people willing to answer questions.

“That’s when I realized, Okay, I really want to do this,” she says. “I knew exactly what I wanted my second year at Yale to be about.”

Because she wasn’t racing through a traditional two-year MBA, Gupta could experiment quietly. She prototyped in the background and learned more about the industry. She added a consulting internship at McKinsey & Company to broaden her experience, then returned to Yale in 2025.

She worked with a Los Angeles–based manufacturer to developed four prototype pairs: straight-leg and bootcut styles in both light and dark washes. KarinaJ Denim looks, at first glance, like classic premium denim. It has real belt loops and pockets, a metal snap button and a zipper flap.

But, turn them inside out, and there is no zipper and the button is just a decoy. Instead, there’s a discreet knit panel at the waistband — sourced from the same mill that supplies Lululemon — allowing the jeans to stretch and recover as bodies fluctuate throughout the day. The denim itself comes from the same mill used by premier denim brand Everlane.

“They’re real jeans,” Gupta says. “They just acknowledge reality.”

TAPPING IN TO YALE’S ENTREPRENEURIAL ECOSYTEM

Gupta has just finished the first semester of her second year at Yale. She enrolled in a startup practicum where student founders meet regularly with guest speakers, work closely with assigned advisors, and receive academic credit for the hours they spend building their own ventures. For Gupta, that meant dedicating class time to refining Denim’s design, supply chain, and launch strategy.

Beyond SOM, she plugged into Yale’s broader entrepreneurship ecosystem through Tsai CITY, the university’s campus-wide innovation hub. There, she joined an accelerator program that brings together founders from across Yale including undergraduates, public health students, medical students, and more. The program includes weekly Friday sessions with structured programming and founder talks, along with $2,000 in grant funding that Gupta has put directly toward early costs, from prototyping to launch preparation.

The rest has been about momentum and people. Knowing she has just one year with this cohort, Gupta has been intentional about building relationships with classmates while pushing the business forward. She is finalizing her prototypes, hosting launch events where women can try on the jeans, and preparing for Tuesday’s Kickstarter launch to fund an initial production run of 400 pairs manufactured in Los Angeles.

“My second year has been great. The first semester was about establishing myself in the class. Now I’m excited to lean into it more and really enjoy my last semester ever being a student,” she says.

“Coming back to Yale and finding a community of students who are also working on startups was really refreshing. A lot of second-years are relaxing and enjoying themselves. It’s nice finding people who are also grinding and not totally certain what the future looks like.”

Follow KarinaJ Denim on Instagram at @karinaj_denim or check out the Kickstarter campaign here. 

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