Morgan Lashley and Caroline King have been best friends since freshman year at NC State and avid shoppers for as long as they can remember. A few years ago, they made a plan to open Vestique, an affordable and stylish women’s clothing store.

Lashley and King met in Owen Residence Hall and have been friends ever since. After college, they became even closer when they both decided to stay in Raleigh to pursue their careers.

Almost 10 years later, the women are more like sisters than friends. They’ve traveled the world together, their husbands are best friends and they even have babies within two months of age of one another.

“We spend 10 hours a day together, pretty much every day and somehow we still love each other,” Lashley said.

The women decided at its inception that Vestique would always be a go-to place for chic apparel at prices that wouldn’t break the bank. They have most definitely stuck to that motto.

“Our entry-level salaries after graduation didn’t leave us with much disposable income,” Lashley said. “We started looking for affordable, yet on-trend clothing options and realized that there was a big gap in the market.”

The young entrepreneurs started working on their business plan in January of 2010 and launched the original website for Vestique that October.

The name of the store came from the Italian word for “garment” with “-que” added for “boutique.”

“Our clothes are trendy, a little boho and a little edgy,” Lashley said. “Almost everything is under $50, which makes it easy to update your wardrobe each season.”

“I could tell that the store was really tailored to younger women, and I liked the atmosphere a lot,” said Amanda Godley, a junior studying agricultural education.

“I even follow Vestique’s page on Instagram and check out their blog for style tips and motivation to get through my week.”

Exactly a year from the website launch, the first Vestique store opened on Oberlin Road here in Raleigh.

“We sacrificed so much to get Vestique to the point that we could even open that first store,” Lashley said. “We worked pretty much around the clock to make it happen.”

Lashley and King both had full-time jobs apart from Vestique, and they would race home after work to fill the stream of online orders.

“We would spend the rest of the night until we couldn’t hold our eyes open, taking pictures of new arrivals, writing descriptions for the website and answering customer service emails,” Lashley said. “Then we would get up early the next day and go back to our regular jobs again.”

It wasn’t until the spring of 2011 that the women realized that if they really wanted their retail business to grow, they needed to quit their full-time jobs and focus solely on Vestique.

They started looking to move the production area from the spare bedroom of Lashley’s home, where they operated the online store, to a retail space where they could grow their inventory. This became the company’s warehouse, located in Charlotte.

“We were so blessed to get help from both of our families,” Lashley said. “I’ll never forget my mom and Caroline’s mom running around the store on that first day. We were so busy. They were steaming clothes in the back, tagging merchandise and helping customers in the fitting rooms.”

In the beginning, the owners decided the locations for the brick-and-mortar stores based on where the online orders were coming from.

Currently, Vestique has eight retail locations. There are three stores in South Carolina and five in North Carolina, including one that opened last Friday in The Streets at Southpoint Mall in Durham.

“I’ve been to Vestique in Crabtree Valley Mall a few times and have loved everything I’ve ever bought there,” Godley said. “I bought some really cute and comfy dresses that were pretty inexpensive that I wear all the time.”

Vestique has been featured in numerous magazines, blogs and newspapers such as Family Circle, the Huffington Post, Today Style, Carolina Style and WCCB Charlotte.

As the company began online, it’s fitting that they still value social media and the influence that the internet has on consumers. Lashley and Caroline attribute their many achievements to their marketing strategy.

“If our website hadn’t been so successful, we could have never opened the stores,” Lashley said.

Lashley graduated with a master’s degree in communication and King was a business education major. King comes from a long line of educators and always thought that she wanted to be a teacher.

Owning a clothing store was definitely not a childhood dream for either of the women and nothing they’ve done has been easy. Both entrepreneurs knew that they possessed leading qualities and wanted to do something on their own, dubbing themselves as workaholics.

“Hard work is everything,” Lashley said. “We haven’t been given any handouts. Caroline and I started with just $5,000.”

Lashley and King absolutely love their jobs, but they understand how difficult what they do would be without help from family, friends and over 60 loyal employees.

“We work long hours and lots of weekends,” Lashley said. “Luckily, we both have supportive husbands and wonderful employees; we couldn’t do it without them.”

A version of this article appeared in print on Sept. 29, 2016, on page nine with the headline: “Best friends curate clothing line.”