In the late 1990s, Linda Hipp took a gamble by leaving her secure job to start a women’s golf fashion company. That gamble paid off big time as Hipp’s Lija has become the pre-eminent women’s line in Canada. The ever-busy Hipp continues to roll out successful fashions and is selling around the world. She sat down with SGW to talk about her life and her company.

SGW: In the spring of 1997, you were working in sponsorship and business development for Vancouver’s Orca Bay Entertainment, then owner of the NBA Grizzlies and NHL Canucks. But you quit and formed your own women’s golf fashion company. What inspired you?

Hipp: I realized that there was absolutely nothing out there for fashion-conscious, style-conscious women to wear on the golf course. When we started, golf fashion was an oxymoron for women.

SGW: For men too, to be fair. That’s all changed though, especially for women.

Hipp: When I started out, the majority of women’s golf apparel was still cotton based and very traditional and conservative because the majority of women playing golf were older. As the influx of younger women came into the game, the market changed. There was a need for more fashionable apparel, more ‘streetwearish’ looking. And golf clubs were allowing women to broaden their horizons with what they were wearing on the course.

SGW: And you started in the basement of you and your husband’s (Andrew Nasedkin) Vancouver home. Ten years later the new home of LIJA by Linda Hipp is an 11,000-square-foot office and warehouse south of Vancouver and your designs are sold around the world. What a difference a decade makes.

Hipp: I can’t believe it. It’s just bizarre how time flies. I’m already working on our Spring 2008 line; that’s why my life goes by so quickly, I’m always looking a year ahead.

SGW: First as Hyp Golf and since 2005 as LIJA by Linda Hipp you’ve won a lot of awards and have survived in a very competitive industry.

Hipp: There are competitors out there now in our more fashionable niche, but there was no one else when we started. When they did come along to compete with us, they tried so hard to get their businesses growing so quickly that we’ve seen them fold around us left, right and centre. I feel pretty good about that.

SGW: What has been your key strategy?

Hipp: We’ve been conservative in our growth, and that has really helped. At this point, I think we can now take a little more risk here and there. But when you’re starting out, and still trying to get the revenue in, you’ve got to think ‘safety first.’ That’s always been our motto.

SGW: Your Spring 2007 line (Spring 2008 will be Hipp’s 10th line) is typically innovative but also your most extensive line ever — five ‘Collections’ with names like All over Olive, Green with Envy, and Sweet like Sangria. What has allowed you to develop the larger line?

Hipp: Technical fabrics got very important on the men’s side, and women’s wear followed. But the technical style was still very sporty, very athletic as opposed to fashionable. What I like now is that there is really a melding of technical fabric with style. I don’t think the technical is going to take over the more cotton-based fabrics, but the technology is changing faster and faster. Tech fabric used to look so synthetic; now it feels like it has cotton in it, allowing so much more opportunity for different types of fabrications. That’s really exciting because it’s giving us more options, more latitude in our designs.

SGW: You’ve added a line of accessories including hats, belts, socks and bags.

Hipp: We now see LIJA as a lifestyle brand. So many people wear it not just golfing, but out for dinner, to meetings, at work. You can really wear it at home, work, or play, whatever you want to do. We’re really focusing on adding styling into the collection that is lifestyle driven, almost weekend wear. It’s going to be an expansion of our line, but really pieces that take you off the golf course. That’s where we’d like to go.

SGW: Any hints about your 10th line coming next spring?

Hipp: It’s so hard to find a women’s rain suit that isn’t, well, dodgy, that doesn’t look like an old sack. So for next spring we’ve got a really cute rain jacket that is seam sealed but it’s almost an A-line — really melding style with function, the technical with fashionable.

SGW: Here you are doing an interview at 8 a.m. Is there such a thing as a typical day for you? If so, when would it start and when does it end?

Hipp: Well a ‘typical’ day would start at 6:30-ish. I come in to the office and get a good hour and a half, two hours in before the day starts buzzing around here. Then basically from 8:30 through to 3 p.m. I’m having a lot of meetings these days on marketing, branding and with the design team. I spend a lot of time in development and planning. Then it’s back to my office until around 6. It’s a good 11, 11-and-a-half hour day. I do some planning on the weekends, but I try to keep it to five days a week.

SGW: You decided to get into the fashion business 10 years ago. Has it turned out to be anything like you thought it would be?

Hipp: Well, yes, because I’m such an eternal optimist. I was hoping that I’d still love it 10 years down the road and I do. I still have such a passion for what I do. One thing that’s different in the last year or so is how much time I have to spend on HR [human resources]. There’s 21 staff here now. It’s amazing how much time you have to spend on staff issues, jobs moving around, that sort of thing. That’s the only thing that I never anticipated starting out.

SGW: Along the way did you ever get a so-called big break, a breakthrough moment?

Hipp: When we changed out name from Hyp Golf to LIJA we had 117 per cent growth that year [2005]. That was a big break for me, a breakthrough year.

SGW: How did you come up with LIJA?

Hipp: It was amazing how many names we went through, pages and pages. We had over 1,000 names. We really had to think about our end result. We couldn’t have too feminine a name: what if we wanted to broaden our horizons into men’s wear? It finally came down to us being always on the leisure side of sportswear and design so LIJA was a spin on the word ‘leisure.’ Then we had to come up with the unique spelling, and I think that LIJA really depicts what we’re all about.

SGW: Who was the ‘we’ involved?

Hipp: We did it in-house.

SGW: So you didn’t go to some big, famous branding company?

Hipp: No (laughs), we came up with it. It took us a few months, but we were really happy because we feel it can appeal to men, women, children, different sports markets. And we felt it was a first step in the right direction of developing our line into more of a lifestyles brand. Origin Design and Communication in Whistler did the font and icon design.

SGW: But you did hire Buffalo Communications out of the United States.

Hipp: We hired them around the same time as the name change. So many people take a negative view of change. We were worried that with a name change people would think that we went bankrupt or that we sold out, something like that. We wanted to make sure that there was a positive spin on the name change. They helped us with that.

SGW: Your spring line of 2008 will be your 10th. What has been the biggest challenge you’ve faced in the business?

Hipp: Well, when you have a young business and you’re trying to grow your sales you really have to watch your expenses or you’ll run yourself into the ground. We were being run ragged. We had a small staff and they were being run ragged. The toughest challenge was when we had to decide to invest more to make more, deciding what was the point when we had to start hiring more staff and taking a hit on the expense side. Salaries are such a large line item in the budget. So we started hiring and it sort of snow balled. In the past three years we have gone from five staff to 21. It gets to the point where sales are increasing and if you don’t start hiring it starts to hinder the process, you can’t provide service to the customers anymore. So that was difficult, reaching into the pockets again. But it has worked out in the end because our sales keep growing.