The year was 2004, and Susan Hess was a stay-at-home mom who had recently gotten the golf bug. She fell in love with the game but not the clothes; she could not find a golf skort that she liked. Fashionable in her everyday life, she was irritated that what was available in the golfwear market at the time was what she called “frumpy and very unfashionable.”
Hess took matters into her own hands, and thus was born Golftini, a leading women’s apparel brand that Hess started and still leads today.
Living in New Jersey at the time, Hess found a sample maker in the garment district of New York City. She made a skort, then two, then 20 and then 50, all sold out of her home. She concluded that enough women liked what she was doing, “so I decided to go for it and start a business.”
With her credit cards maxed out and payment on the order to follow 60 days after delivery – an eternity for a startup business – she turned to her father for a loan. ... He was paid back in full, with interest.
Hess needed a name for her budding enterprise. So off sh...