The year was 2004, and Suzanne Hess was a stay-at-home mom who had recently contracted the golf bug. I fell in love with the game but not the clothes. She couldn’t find a golf game she liked. Fashionable in her daily life, she was upset that what was available on the golf apparel market at the time was what she described as “disturbing and very unfashionable”.
Hess took matters into her own hands, and thus Golftini was born, a pioneering women’s clothing brand that Hess started and continues to lead today.
Hess lived in New Jersey at the time, and found a sample maker in New York City’s Garment District. She made a Skort, then two, then 20 and then 50, all sold out of her house. She concluded that enough women liked what she was doing, “so I decided to go for it and start a business.”
Hess needed a name for her nascent project. So I went to a martini bar with a friend to plan. Looking at a huge neon martini behind the bar, she wrote the word “Golfettini” on a napkin and drew a martini glass. It took, and to this day, …