Laura McGuire had plenty of negative experiences with pantyhose and tights, often finding sizing confusing and the fit constricting and uncomfortable.
She struggled with hosiery for years before it struck her that she could be the one to create a better solution for women.
Together with her husband Jason Clewell, she founded Hipstick Legwear in 2016 to overcome these problems.
They hit a surprising challenge along the way. Despite innovating in this product category, they found that their biggest hurdle while building the business was women’s negative perceptions of traditional legwear.
Still, they managed to gain some traction, and eventually sold the brand to a private buyer.
The inspiration for Hipstik Legwear
McGuire met her husband when they were both working at a marketing agency, so they knew they had relevant skills to launch their own brand. In 2016, they set to work on McGuire’s idea of creating hosiery so comfortable that women actually want to wear it.
The germ of the idea first came to McGuire when she was working in the hosiery department at Dillard’s department store way back in 2003.
“I remember on my first day I asked a woman, ‘Well, it says here for this brand, what’s your weight?’ And she gave me this stare like, ‘Why are you asking me for my weight?’ So I had to backpedal off of that. Working in that section made me realize that there’s some big room for improvement,” she told the Impact Fashion podcast.
Not only was asking women their weight to help them find the right size intrusive, it also wasn’t effective. Women carry their weight in many different ways, so just knowing a number tells you very little about how a pair of tights or pantyhose will fit. McGuire herself routinely used scissors to cut open the control top of her pantyhose to make them more comfortable.
Once McGuire decided to help women with their legwear woes in early 2016, she and Clewell moved quickly to develop a business plan — “My husband jokes that it’s the length of War and Peace,” McGuire told Thrive Global — brand name, logo, and website. Their complementary skillsets helped them bootstrap the business and get these fundamentals nailed down quickly.
“My husband is a designer, he’s a creative director, and he has helped design many grocery brands in his career. He was able to bring to the table the design aspect of what we needed to build a brand. So he was able to design the packaging and design our e-commerce presence and all of the materials that you need,” McGuire told the podcast.
To support themselves as they grew Hipstik, they simultaneously offered marketing services through Fifty Fifty Consulting, an agency the couple also founded together.
Finding the right manufacturer for this e-commerce brand
Another essential part of the process was finding the right manufacturer for the product. In the case of Hipstik, that turned out to be a factory just 90 minutes from their home in North Carolina. Hopstik located the factory with the help of the Manufacturing Solutions Center at a local community college.
“There are a ton of great resources out there especially connected to community colleges and universities to help get you started in your industry. They are all excited to help,” McGuire told They Got Acquired.
A local factory turned out to be a huge advantage for the company. “It was so easy to be able to have conversations with them, to be able to take a look at different samples, go there, talk to them, be in person with them versus making it in another country or in another state,” McGuire explained on Thrive Global’s podcast.
Being close to her manufacturer allowed her to tweak the design as she talked to more women about their needs and tested initial designs.
The product she ended up settling on had a lower waist than many traditional pantyhose. Rather than reach nearly to a woman’s bra to prevent rolling, McGuire outfitted Hipstik tights and pantyhose with a comfortable wide lace waistband and silicon strip to affix them in place.
Hipstik also developed an innovative approach to sizing that reduced return rates for online orders from an industry standard 40% down to just 1% of new customer orders.
By September of 2016, everything was in place and Hipstik Legwear began shipping products to its first customers.
Battling old assumptions about pantyhose
The company’s tights and pantyhose were out there, but now it faced the challenge of making sure customers knew about them — and were willing to give them a try.
Their biggest hurdle, according to McGuire, “was changing women’s negative perceptions.” Traditional tights and pantyhose were so uncomfortable and ill fitting that many women had given up on the category entirely, either opting to wear other types of garments or resigning themselves to never finding a better alternative.
“We don’t compete with other brands like us. We compete with women’s negative perceptions of hosiery,” McQuire said.
Hipstik tried a variety of marketing approaches to counter this resistance, but found there was no silver bullet.
“What [marketing tool] may work last season fizzles and a new winner takes its place,” she told Thrive Global. “Facebook advertising was working well for the aspects of the peer to peer review, or digital word of mouth. Then we discovered Yotpo: a platform to harness reviews… Marketing (and the way consumers want to receive information) is constantly changing, so we don’t get complacent.”
Affiliate marketing was a particularly effective approach for Hipstik. A strong affiliate marketing program delivered 40% of revenue, as well as e-commerce diversification for the company.
Traditional public relations efforts helped the brand grow and reach potential customers as well. Hipstik pitched and landed the top placement in New York Magazine’s Strategist hosiery shopping article. Real Simple named Hipstik a Best Product of 2018 and Good Housekeeping named Hipstik one of the Best Tights of 2019.
In fact, figuring out how to“earn your social proof,” was one of McGuire’s biggest tips for other founders, she told us.
Selling Hipstik to a private buyer
By 2021, all these efforts paid off in consistent growth. Year-over-year sales doubled and the business generated a Trailing Twelve Month (TTM) Revenue of more than $112,000 with a returning customer rate of 23%. Thanks to a significant investment of effort into SEO, monthly website page views averaged 20,000.
McGuire and Clewell had always thought they would sell the business one day and started considering whether the time might be right. They heard about Flippa, a marketplace for selling e-commerce businesses, both through a podcast and from a fulfillment partner and decided to look into it.
“As a founder, you’re really close to it and you think you have to be making millions before anyone would be interested in buying, but that’s not the case. You’ve built something of value and there’s a buyer out there who will recognise the value,” Laura explained in a Flippa blog post.
The co-founders launched the sales process at the beginning of winter in 2021, their busiest sales season, to show growing revenue and help attract a buyer. “We imagined that our buyer would be e-commerce focused and would want it turnkey and we made sure to position our company ready to go,” explained McGuire. Through Flippa, they found a private buyer who agreed to pay $200,000 for the business.
Then the lengthy process of due diligence and hammering out the details began.
“It is an exciting process that goes very slow. It’s a mental exercise in patience. There are a lot of questions to answer — a lot of paperwork,” McGuire told They Got Acquired.
To speed things along, she recommends founders “write down all your wins (especially the stats) in one place so you can easily refer to it. During the due-diligence period, there are so many questions, and if you don’t have the info handy, it is painful.”
Having mentors also helps. “This local entrepreneur support center of seasoned professionals helped get us set up with the right information we would need to position the business to sell it. I bet we would still be running the company today had they not helped us see the potential,” McGuire said.
Life after Hipstik for these two founders
After the sale, McGuire and Clewell moved to working on their marketing agency full time.
What’s McGuire’s top advice for other founders considering selling?
First, remember networking is a long game. That’s why she’s a member of the Female Founders Collective and nationally certified Woman-Owned by WBENC, she said.
But most of all, don’t be afraid of taking risks and trying out-of-the-box ideas. McGuire put confetti into sample boxes to attract the attention of department stores (that failed) and even lifted up her skirt at parties to show other women her product’s innovative design.
“I’d say out of 10 bold things, one thing worked, and that’s what I look back on and say, whoa, that was a success. So you’ve got to do 10 bold things to just get that one thing,” she said.
