Another brainchild of Jessica Herrin, Stella & Dot has received an investment amounting to $37 million from Sequoia Capital. This 24-year old Stanford graduate also co-founded Weddingchannel.com, which attracted several investors and was eventually sold to The Knot. According to reports, Stella & Dot is predicted to be the next generation Mary Kay—a successful direct selling business in the United States. While the latter focuses on selling beauty products, Stella & Dot capitalizes on “social selling” of jewelries and accessories.

The same report noted how Stella & Dot operates: “Each stylist has a personalized fully enabled e-commerce site with a custom URL, where clients can visit later to order more items. The site can be promoted with the help of Facebook and Twitter, and the head office pitches in with PR, too. Stylists aren’t obligated to purchase inventory and the jewelry is designed and produced by Stella & Dot’s team in New York, so they don’t have to worry about competition from other sites. There’s also no quota, but there is a chance to work your way up the food chain, by recruiting stylists to sell underneath you.”

Herrin built the company in 2004; but it was not until 2006 that she was able to fully concentrate and gear up Stella & Dot to the next level. In 2009, the business ticked the $30 million mark and grew by almost 300% in 2010, with a total of $104 million. The funding came right in time as Herrin plans to execute an expansion in Europe as she expects tremendous growth this year. To date, Stella & Dot has released over $50 million from sellers’ (or fondly called “stylists”) commissions alone.

Their investment partner, Sequoia Capital, on the other hand will be led by former COO and CFO of Zappos.com, Alfred Lin. According to him, “It’s a nice business with very little paid-in capital. It’s gotten to $100 million and is a very profitable business in a short period of time. I look forward to making it a standalone company for many years. I’m very excited to work with her and the team.”

A recent study conducted by the Direct Selling Association revealed that in the United States alone, more than $28 billion is spent for products sold direct yearly. Big chunk of the 16.1 million sales people are women. We’ve certainly seen moves in this fashion in men’s clothing with Bonobo’s investments and direct-sales definitely work extremely well for sites like Etsy and their recently updated browsing mechanism.