For this golfer, style is in the details
For years, no one thought of fiddling with golf-course style. Throw on a Polo shirt or some madras pants, and you were good to go. Lately, though, the fairway has become a bit more fun, with Ian Poulter sporting his tartan trousers and Michelle Wie teeing off in her famously short skirts.
Brookline golfer and entrepreneur Amye Kurson, meanwhile, is dressing up the details: the head covers that slip over the clubs, shoe bags, keychains that do double duty as tee holders. Her company, Ame & Lulu, has found a niche among 20-something females, who compose the fastest growing segment of women's golf, according to Nancy Berkley, a consultant who works for the National Golf Foundation.
"I was at a tournament with my mom six years ago, and there were all these very fashionable ladies decked out in their outfits," Kurson recalls. "You could see all their carts lined up, and there were no cute head covers. And I thought, if these ladies couldn't find them, there must not be that option."
Now, Kurson's making sure there is. Toile, seersucker, and ticking-stripe fabrics are rendered in bold color combinations, with pink and green amply represented. The result is, as Chloe Tupper of the North End boutique Shake the Tree puts it, "preppy with a twist."
"[The products] let you feel fashionable, fun, and cute somewhere you don't always feel cute," says Elizabeth Kimmell Snyder, 27, a development officer at the Boston Public Library Foundation and recreational golfer who lives in the Back Bay. "If you're at a country club, there is an appropriate way to dress, a standard outfit you don't divert from. They let you add personality to the uniform."
Kurson says Ame & Lulu has doubled its sales every year since its launch in 2003 and has expanded into tennis and yoga apparel. ("Lulu" is the nickname of a founding partner who left the company shortly after the business took off.) The company's products are now in pro shops and boutiques in all 50 states and as far away as Australia and Japan. Closer to home, they're carried at Shake the Tree, Flat of the Hill on Charles Street, Queen Bee on Newbury Street, and the Belmont and Charles River country clubs, a list that speaks to the line's blend of functionality and chic.
"It's a very Beacon Hill line - bright colors and patterns you don't see everywhere else," says Katherine Morse, owner of Flat of the Hill. Ame & Lulu shoe bags and duffel bags are big sellers among her athletic and non-athletic clients alike, she adds.
Though Kurson, 34, is thrilled by the response to her company, she doesn't come across as one who merely stumbled upon success. After graduating Union College in upstate New York, she worked as a media buyer at J. Walter Thompson before returning to Massachusetts to head up the network broadcasting group at the Wenham advertising agency Mullen.
In 2002, Kurson found an old tartan head cover in her mother's garage that served as the prototype for Ame & Lulu's first product. She began poring over fabrics and making contact with mills, and found a manufacturer. She worked up designs for shoe bags, tee bags, and golf belts. As demand for her products grew, she expanded further still.
"There are only so many golf-related tchotchkes you can make, so we came out with a cosmetic bag and said, 'Here, you can have a head cover, you can have a golf belt, and you can have a cosmetic bag and stick it in your golf bag,' " she says.
With her business in full swing, Kurson left Mullen in 2005. Today, her spacious Audubon Circle apartment serves as corporate headquarters. Her younger brother Rob is her business partner and oversees finances. They have a full-time office manager, 10 interns, and boxes upon boxes of goods from which orders need to be filled.
"I like having everything done from here and being able to see what goes into the boxes," Kurson says.
Three interns watch MTV in the living area as they ready head covers for shipment. One stuffs the head covers with paper so that they don't lose their shape, another ties a pink ribbon around sets of four, and another boxes them up. As many as 40 shipments leave the apartment each day.
In the workspace Kurson shares with more interns, shelves are piled high with fabric samples. Framed magazine covers - InStyle, Golf for Women, and Travel + Leisure Golf, all of which have featured Ame & Lulu products - hang on the walls, along with a note from actress Courteney Cox, who's a fan of the line. Kurson studies an order from NBC, which wants nearly 400 shoe bags, tee bags, and duffel bags, all in seersucker, for a women's golf event.
On top of everything that's going on, Kurson is thinking ahead. She's looking for a second manufacturer to keep pace with the growing number of orders. The company will soon roll out a children's line and introduce stain- and water-repellent fabrics.
"People tell me what they want," she says, "and we try to incorporate their ideas."
The practice, it seems, has gotten Kurson to the green.
