I
N THE MID-1990S, LIZLANGE WAS WORKING IN A TINY FASHIONbusiness in New York City when she had an “a-ha moment.”
She kept meeting all these well-heeded pregnant women who kept complaining that they had nothing to wear. They would come into her studio and try to squeeze into normal ranges, exasperated that they could choose to burst out of non-pregnancy clothes or wear the traditional maternity gear—tent-like dresses, dungarees, and other frumpy styles. Lange knew maternity wear was a fashion wasteland and that there were plenty of women prepared to pay handsomely to look stylish, whatever the trimester.
Traditionally, the rag trade, particularly the big brands, has not seen maternity wear as a potentially profitable area, reasoning that women aren’t prepared to spend money on clothes they can only wear for a few months. Liz’s extensive customer experience told her that there was an opportunity here that no one could really see. She knew there were all these doctors, lawyers, and stay-at-home moms with nothing to wear and she knew what they needed.
Born in 1967, Liz Lange is an Upper East Side girl through and through. The daughter of a wealthy business owner, she grew up in the finest blocks of New York City and was educated at private schools and prestigious Brown University, where she studied com-parative literature. She had a summer internship at auctioneers Sotheby’s and worked at Vogue magazine. Her life was on track to marry well, start a family, and become a lady who lunches. But Lange chose a very different path. “Always an achiever,” she admits
her life took a different path when she fell in love with Jeffrey Lange. He grew up in less privileged circumstances. His success came through a series of scholarships to Stanford and Yale and he now runs a company that designs mathematical models for trading derivatives. He made her think differently about her future—to make bolder plans.
At age twenty-four, while working at Vogue, Lange met strug-gling young designer Stephen DiGeronimo, who was producing a small sportswear range in the garment district. Lange became his “sort of apprentice” and ended up revamping the brand and working alongside DiGeronimo. “That’s where I learned the business,” says Lange, who has never formally studied design.
The label Geronimo was “somewhat successful.” Lange worked there for several years during which time she met and married Jeffrey Lange. “Things started to shift in me, in my expectations of life,” she says.
When Lange mentioned her maternity line idea to DiGeronimo he was not keen. Maternity was boring, right? She had to get used to pretty much everyone telling her that her business idea would never work. “I ignored all the outside advice and listened to my instincts,” she says. Jeffrey Lange advised her to “block out the noise around you and just forge ahead.” Lange wanted to create a fashion label like any other high-end brand, it just happened to be for pregnant women.
“It got to the point where if I didn’t do it, I would always regret it,” says Lange, who quit Geronimo in late 1996 and launched Liz Lange Maternity in late 1997 with no business plan and no brand strategy. During that period, she remembers spending many days curled up in her bed wondering what she was doing. She kept going because she realized that “customers and investors will never have your vision for the product because they can’t touch it and feel it in advance. It’s your job to follow your instincts, prop yourself up, and trust that if you build it, they will come.”
The business started out with a small range of cashmere twin sets, stretchy knits, and smart separates. She sold through appointment-only in a tiny first-floor office on East 61st Street. There was a phone, a fax, and a rack of clothes. The rent was $1,500 a month. Orders took two weeks to fill, with the range being made up by a small factory on 8th Avenue. One of the biggest myths about Liz Lange Maternity is that Lange started it because she herself was pregnant and couldn’t find anything to wear. This is not true. Although she has a son and a daughter now, she believed that if she had been pregnant at the time she started she would have been too “bogged down in the mechanics of pregnancy” to be thinking about making beautiful clothes.
The seed funding came from her father. Lange estimates that start-up costs were $50,000. The range sold from the very start, so sales easily covered the modest overheads. A year later she moved to larger premises on Lexington Avenue. The first-floor premises was always busy. By this stage, while the wives shopped, their husbands
“were throwing their business cards at me,” says Lange. They wanted to invest in the business. She partnered with two silent investors that remain on the board of the privately-held company. Their money funded new retail stores on Madison Avenue and in Beverly Hills.
Her fashion background helped Lange understand how a product gets exposure, the right editors to approach, and the people she needed to dress. “I was very pushy about that. I had to get over any shyness,” she says. If a celebrity was pregnant, she would contact them or their people and invite them to have a Liz Lange pregnancy.
Having supermodel Cindy Crawford appearing on national televi-sion every week telling the audience she was wearing Liz Lange would always cause the phones to ring off the hook. The line appealed to fashion-forward women. She dared to dress her customers in fitted clothes, so radical at the time that the New York Times reported the trend. Other “yummy mommys” such as Catherine Zeta-Jones and Cate Blanchett were powerful ambassadors for the brand.
For a company with thirty-five employees and annual sales of around $10 million, it is no wonder that Lange jokes “the brand is bigger than we are.” Licensing deals with Nike (2001) and Target (2002) to produce maternity ranges have given Lange national expo-sure (at no cost to the business). Lange remembers when she received the call from Nike. She was on vacation, and one of the female senior executives called her up. Lange assumed she was pregnant and want-ed some clothes, but she wantwant-ed Lange to design a range for Nike.
Lange doesn’t think her business would survive if she was start-ing out today. “Then, I was offerstart-ing somethstart-ing that couldn’t be found. It is different today.” Customers wouldn’t wait two weeks for their orders, and she would not be able to compete with more established maternity brands or afford to advertise.
Lange’s success has inspired many competitors, and many well-resourced moms, to think about starting their own little range.
What sets her apart from those start-ups is that her label filled a
“genuine hole in the market. I had struck oil,” she says. “It was one of those crazy things. I hit on something.”
These days while Lange is juggling the business and a young fam-ily (“and that feeling that you are always in the wrong place”), she appears on cable television and has plans to open more stores. While the business is a success, “there are no plans to go out and buy a Gulfstream.” There are no plans to sell up and become the Upper East Side wife either.
NOTES
“I ignored . . .” Harvard Business Review, “The Best Advice I Ever Got,” 1.05.
“Block out the noise . . .” Harvard Business Review, “The Best Advice I Ever Got,”
1.05.
REFERENCES
Crains New York Business, Fortune, Good Housekeeping, International Herald Tribune, Time, Mail on Sunday, New York Magazine, New York Times, USA Today, Vogue, Washington Post, Women’s Wear Daily