Interview with Liz Lange - Great Expectations

It started out, as have many great businesses, with someone noticing a market void. In this case the void was high-end maternity clothing, and the smart business owner-to-be was Liz Lange. Lange had spent five years on the fashion staff at Vogue before going to work for a small designer. While at that job, she started to hear complaints from friends about their inability to find suitably fashionable maternity clothes. She thought it was a great business idea, but her partner wasn’t interested, so in 1997 she opened Liz Lange Maternity in a tiny, 800-square-foot store.

The growth has been steady and impressive. In 1999, she launched a catalog and website. In addition to moving to a bigger boutique on Madison Avenue in 2000, Lange opened a store in Beverly Hills. In 2002, her Long Island boutique debuted. The company also sells wholesale to about 100 maternity stores around the country, in addition to Nordstrom’s.
 
The company has partnered with some of the biggest names in American business. In 2001, Lange signed a deal with Nike to provide maternity athletic apparel, and in 2002, Target began its Liz Lange for Target line, designed by and licensed by Lange’s company. Today the company is the exclusive provider of maternity wear for Target. Along the way she wrote a book for Random House, Liz Lange’s Maternity Style: How to Look Fabulous During the Most Fashion-Challenged Time, and did some product testing of her own when she was pregnant with her two children, now aged 8 and 6. Last year she launched the “fourth trimester” line, selling to women who, post-partum, haven’t quite managed to fit into their old wardrobe yet. Her company has about 45 employees. In 2005, Business Week estimated Lange’s revenues at $10 million. Recently NY Report editor-in-chief Robert Levin sat down with Lange to talk about the challenges of building a company, and how she created a business out of proving the naysayers wrong.

RL: What made you decide to start a high end maternity business?

LL: I had no idea that I would one day end up in fashion and certainly no idea that one day I’d end up in maternity fashion. After college I went to work at Vogue magazine, but I was just a writer there. While I was at Vogue I met a young, struggling designer who was designing regular women’s ready to wear, not maternity. It was in the early ’90s, and I loved what he was doing, and even though I was working at the glamorous Vogue offices and he was working in a very gritty little garment center office, I basically begged him to let me come work for him.

Since he couldn’t afford to pay me, I begged to just come apprentice for him. There were just three of us there: the designer, me and a business person. Out of necessity I learned everything about the business. I sourced fabrics, I set up fashion shows. I was actually the fit model. I started designing just by saying, “Hey, this dress is more like what my friends and I would be interested in wearing,” or, “Why don’t you try it this way?”

What I noticed was that my friends who were pregnant would all continue to come up to our showroom where we sold our non maternity clothing even though they were pregnant, and they would try to squeeze themselves into things. This led to my sort of double “aha!” moment. The first was I would say to all these friends, “What are you doing here? Go to a maternity store.” They would all say, “We can’t find anything in any of the maternity boutiques.” So that was a bit of an “aha!” moment. Why are all these different women, who not only want to shop but actually need to shop because their bodies are changing, not finding anything in maternity boutiques?

“Aha!” number two was that because the clothes we had in our showroom didn’t really fit them, they would kind of squeeze themselves into things that had a little bit of stretch in the fabric. This was 1996, and it’s hard to imagine today in 2007, but stretch fabric was a brand-new phenomenon. Stretch existed in maybe in a sweater, but it certainly didn’t exist in a pair of jeans or a blazer or a shirt the way today it’s just de rigueur. It was not the case. It was brand-new and we had these stretch fabrics in our non-maternity clothing. So my friends would kind of squeeze themselves into these things that stretched a little, and I noticed that they actually looked better and slimmer than they did in the oversized maternity things that they might have walked into our showroom wearing.