From Patagonia To Lululemon, This Stanford Styling Startup Knows What MBAs Wear

What does the modern MBA wear? Caden Broussard and Jinny Chen have the data.

More than half of the men they’ve worked with own at least one Patagonia jacket or vest. If they do find shirts that fit, they tend to buy them in multiple colors. Mostly neutrals. Roughly three quarters of the average male closet is colored with black, white, gray, and navy.

The Lululemon ABC pant? “Virtually every MBA guy has at least two or three pairs,” Broussard tells Poets&Quants.

Broussard and Chen, MBAs from Stanford Graduate School of Business Class of 2025, are cofounders of Cello, a startup which combines human stylists with AI to make one-on-one personal styling more accessible.

They won HubSpot’s Next Big AI Idea competition shortly after graduation. The company has since grown into one of the country’s larger men’s styling services.

“I think our whole mission is to make everyone feel very confident, and to take the stress out of picking what to wear,” Chen says.

‘BUILD BEFORE IT’S READY’ AND OTHER MBA LESSONS

The co-founders met during a pre-MBA trip in 2023, both nearing their 30s and still trying to make skinny jeans work.

“We showed up and we were like, ‘We’re so unfashionable compared to these mid-20-year-olds,” Broussard says. “We weren’t showing up in the way we wanted to.”

It became a running joke, but underlined a real problem. Their MBA classmates were navigating the same period of intense professional and personal transition, interviewing for internships, attending conferences, and thinking more deliberately about how they wanted to present themselves.

Neither came to Stanford from fashion nor with entrepreneurial roots. Broussard worked at Boston Consulting Group and Capital One before pursuing an MBA. She wanted to build something but had no idea what that looked like.

Chen worked in strategy and operations at LinkedIn and previously in analytics consulting at EY. She is a first-generation college student who was highly risk averse, she says. She applied to Stanford and only Stanford for her MBA.

They took Stanford’s acclaimed Startup Garage together.

“There was this big emphasis that, on week one, you’re going to put something out there,” Broussard says. “You’re going to test with customers. It’ll be totally hacked together and probably kind of horrible, but you must put it out there and start iterating. I was not used to thinking that way.

“Coming from a corporate background, I was very unused to putting out things that were not incredibly polished.”

The pair threw together a rudimentary website and sent it to classmates to see whether anyone cared. A couple hundred people signed up.

They worked on Cello throughout their MBA, taking advantage of Stanford’s entrepreneurial electives and resources. They plugged into the Valley’s startup ecosystem, including StartX, while using early customer revenue to help finance the business rather than immediately relying on outside venture capital.

They used pitch competitions to find customers, validate their ideas, and fund the project as they built. They won HubSpot’s Next Big AI Idea competition in 2025, taking home $50,000 in non-dilutive cash, along with AWS credits and other tech perks. Media buzz filled their waitlist and early beta cohort.

“We had customers, we had people willing to pay, we had funding,” Chen says. “We thought, ‘We can actually just start running.’”

Early feedback — even angry feedback before they worked out the tech bugs and customer flow — helped them figure out what they needed to build next.

For Chen, the most valuable MBA lesson came in a Stanford course on product-market fit. She learned to stop worrying about competitors, marketing and scaling until you know customers actually want what you’re selling.

“It’s so counterintuitive to not think about competitors,” Chen says. “And it’s really hard not to think about, ‘How am I going to get more customers and scale?’ But if you have that kind of hammered into you, you can really focus on the product.”

By graduation, Chen abandoned plans to pursue a search fund while Broussard turned down a return offer at Capital One to work on Cello full time.

HOW CELLO WORKS

Cello works by applying AI and professional styling expertise to a client’s existing closet. Its premise is that technology can make highly personalized styling more scalable without removing the human judgment that makes it useful in the first place.

It starts with a 20-minute video call with a human. For now, that’s usually Broussard or Chen, who have deliberately stayed close to customers to learn what they want and where the experience can improve. As Cello scales, more of those calls will shift to its trained stylists.

During the call, clients walk their phone through their closet or hold up individual pieces while talking through their lifestyle, budget, goals, and what they actually need clothes for.

Behind the scenes, Cello’s technology scans, documents, and renders roughly 70 to 100 items so they resemble polished e-commerce product shots. It parses the video and conversation, builds a virtual closet, and uses AI to synthesize what it learns about the client — from purchase preferences and price points to fit and lifestyle — into a customer dossier. It can even capture details such as stains.

That dossier and virtual closet then go to a human stylist,. They identify gaps, recommend pieces within the client’s budget, and create new outfits from clothes they already own. Cello also generates avatar-based visuals, matched generally to the client’s coloring but not their face, so customers can see how the outfits come together.

The division of labor is key, Chen says of the human interaction. While AI handles much of the tedious cataloging and synthesis, humans make the aesthetic judgments.

“We feel very strongly that it should be a human.”

Cello works with fashion professionals trained at institutions including Parsons School of Design, the Fashion Institute of Technology, and Central Saint Martins. Its stylists have worked in editorial and fashion design, with work appearing in publications including ELLE and i-D.

Traditional personal styling can cost several thousand dollars. Cello is currently in early-access mode, with a waitlist for new customers. Its beta offering costs $160 for closet digitization, outfit planning, and curated shopping recommendations.

Chen had enough coding experience to build some of Cello’s earliest prototypes herself, but advances in AI dramatically lowered the technical barrier. She used AI to help learn unfamiliar programming languages and translate that knowledge into early versions of the product.

“If I don’t know something, I can ask it and it’ll teach me,” she says.

THE MBA’s TRANSITIONAL CLOSET

Before Cello’s tech could automatically catalog a closet, it started with video chats with a couple hundred MBAs. Broussard and Chen Zoomed with each of them, asking them to hold clothes up to the camera. They then hunted down every item themselves, often staying up until 2 a.m. trying to identify an MBA’s exact shirt.

“We would spend like eight hours per customer going in reverse Google image searching for every item of clothing they had shown us,” Broussard says. “But I think if we had waited, we would have potentially built something that no one wanted.”

While the founders have styled MBAs from several top programs, their early customers naturally skewed Stanford.

There, they found a very particular kind of closet pain point. A New York banker who landed in Palo Alto with a wardrobe built for Manhattan. They’d graduate and maybe move to Boston where they suddenly needed to dress for snow. Or, they’d go into tech and realize they didn’t need all those suits anymore.

In MBAs, Cello found a market full of people newly conscious of how they were showing up. Many described becoming acutely aware of their wardrobes within the first month or two of business school. That included men who ordinarily hated shopping.

“You really notice because you’re in a transition. Everyone around you can physically see what others are wearing,” Chen says. “You want to dress for the world in which you want to be.”

WHAT COMES NEXT

About a year after launching full time, customers are already showing up well beyond elite MBA programs and coastal professionals. They’ve styled customers in smaller U.S. cities, ranging from their 20s to their 80s.

Cello is also exploring partnerships around other life transitions, including women returning to work or rebuilding wardrobes after having children. Scaling will mean fewer video calls for Broussard and Chen, and more for the trained stylists.

But the human element will remain central. For all the AI behind Cello, the goal is not simply to recommend clothes. It is to make customers feel understood.

“It is a lot of fashion and a lot of how you dress to look good,” Chen says. “But … a lot of it is also about making someone feel seen and heard.”

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