Active brand Set Active is all about making people feel confident in their everyday lives — being honest in communication and taking community opinion to heart. Led by Lindsey Carter, the brand has gone from bootstrapping to a sales tally in the eight-figure range with daring color combinations that have effectively disrupted the category.

Set Active’s unique aesthetic is its attention to bold color combinations that have captivated a robust community of followers, including Hailey Bieber, Kylie Jenner and Kaia Gerber, on social media. The brand’s approach to social media, however, is not strategic, according to Carter. Rather, Carter makes authenticity her guide, using full transparency to connect with the brand’s community even when mistakes are made.

While recently Set Active celebrated its resort collection, creating a revenue of $1 million in under an hour upon launch, Carter is quick to share the brand’s setbacks as well. For example, when Set Active recently had a manufacturing error on a product, the brand owned the mistake and sold it at a discount. Fittingly, the drop was called The Bloopers Collection and was given color names including Burnt Toast and Spilled Matcha.

Here, Carter talks to WWD about her passion for transparency, creating community and celebrating seven years.

WWD: As you celebrate seven years, what has changed about Set Active and what has stayed the same? 

Lindsey Carter: Even saying seven years out loud is kind of like insane to me. A lot of people, a lot of founders in the industry, say that the first five years are the infancy stage of business, so to say seven is crazy.

What’s changed is everything operationally within the company. We’ve grown from me packing orders in my apartment and being our shipping warehouse, customer service, social media and graphic design to a full team and infrastructure. But what has stayed consistent at the forefront of Set in all of the seven years has always been community and transparency. I started Set in the DTC space at a time when no one was prioritizing their community — it was all about shiny aesthetic brands on Instagram.

I wanted to show the messy, the in-between and the behind the scenes. I wanted to talk to my community. We also still obsess over every fabric and every color story the way that we did during year one. We still make decisions based on what our community wants.

WWD: Who is the Set Active community if you describe the brand’s consumer?

L.C.: They are the early adopters of trends. I feel like our consumers are so quick to understand what’s buzzing on social media, and they know when to pull that lever and hop on a trend. They come to us expecting us to have like a finger on the pulse. Our consumer comes to Set because we are known for being ahead of the game when it comes to colors and styles and trends.

We’re not just following trends; we’re setting them, and I think that’s why the consumer turns to us for color. We pair bold, unexpected colors with each other. I don’t think other brands or people think the way that we do when it comes to how we’re drawing inspiration. It’s an effortless but elevated outfit.

WWD: What does Set stand for today?

L.C.: It’s to make people feel confident in their everyday lives. I feel like people, whether they want to say it out loud or not, are doing everything they can to feel like they fit in or feel like they’re a part of something. I want to make people feel confident, like they can walk out the door the same way that Hailey Bieber and Kylie Jenner can walk out the door and feel their best selves and not have to think about if people are going to like their outfit. They know that they’re walking out the door in a matching set, looking sporty, looking cute, looking chic and, honestly, above all else, they’re really building an authentic community.

WWD: How has being transparent with your community prompted growth?

L.C.: I think some of my greatest memories are when we’ve been the most transparent with the community.

We had a huge production mess up, where we sampled a legging and we were fixing the fit, and the factory didn’t let us know that the sample fabric that they made the legging in had more spandex in it. We were making all these changes based on having more spandex in the leggings and then when we approved the sample and it went into production, what came back was so small. When we put on the leggings, we realized that it’s still a great product, and it’s still really great fabric. It just doesn’t fit how we expected it to. We did a whole blooper campaign and put the leggings on sale — all you had to do was size up one size. And it was successful.

WWD: What’s next for Set Active?

L.C.: We have our second Parke collaboration coming in [late summer or early fall], which is bigger and better than the last one. The last one, we kind of just dipped our toes into a collaboration. This next collaboration with Parke is more thought out, more intentional in every design and every color to tell the story.

Something else I’m excited about is our breast cancer drop in October. I think that there needs to be more education on breast cancer in general. I feel like no one’s educated on it under the age of 30, and we just want to bring more awareness to breast cancer and how serious it is. My grandma had breast cancer, and I know so many people who had the BRCA gene. If you have the platform to be doing stuff like this, why would you not? Any way that we can give back is super important to me.