Imagine you are a woman in your late thirties.
You live in suburban Cleveland, Ohio. Your husband has a solid job. And you are the mother of five children.
Your reality is that you barely have time to exhale or drive through a Starbucks between groceries, laundry, meal preparation and chauffeuring duties.
So what’s your next move?
Would you believe ... start your own clothing company and launch a line of high-end, classic-looking golf apparel for women? In the spare time that you don’t have?
This is the controlled chaos that Allison (Ali) Putnam has unleashed. She founded A. Putnam, which sells the kind of classy golf clothes that women can wear to the course and then go straight to a PTA meeting or a casual dinner, and feel appropriately dressed for the occasion.
Putnam is a Syracuse University graduate who went from playing lacrosse and shifted from her initial major of ceramics to a dual major in supply chain and entrepreneurship. She is one of those rare persons who can’t stand to be idle. She’s a doer who inherited the entrepreneur gene from her serial-entrepreneur father. Her secret sauce is always-be-working-on-something, which is how she was able to dive into women’s golf apparel while herding five kids through everyday life.
"People think we’re crazy," Putnam says. "The sheer noise level in our house is like none other."
And yet her name is on a clothing line for golfers. How she pulled this off isn’t as big as the other obvious question: Why?
"Nothing in the golf space for women felt like me," Putnam says. "I couldn’t stand the patterns, the racier short skirts, the racerback tank tops that I wasn’t allowed to wear at our club. That’s when I had an ‘Aha!’ moment that I could marry my passions — golf and clothing design.
"I like a more conservative and polished style — think Parisian minimalist. My sweet spot is 35 to 55, it’s me in a nutshell. My target is who I am, a busy mom who might be working part of the day, running kids around then dabbling in activities including golf. I design versatile clothing for the casual golfer. All of my old golf clothes collected dust between the four rounds a year I had time to play and they always felt like my 'golf costume.'
"The biggest compliment I can get is if somebody picks up an A. Putnam piece and says, ‘I’d wear this all the time outside of golf.’ That’s a home run to me."
Putnam is less than two years into this enterprise and is still at the point where most new businesses are — more money is going out than coming in ... so far. It’s the challenge of capitalism. Plus, she has that important side business of being the CEO of a five-child family.
What makes her a strong candidate to succeed in this venture is her unique and varied resume:
> Logistics management trainee at Sears, starting with college internships and a first job at a fulfillment center in Columbus, Ohio, where she worked a 4 a.m. shift, wore steel-toed boots and drove forklifts.
> Footwear chain DSW in Columbus, nearly three years working on its website and learning lots of vital IT — Information Technology — while managing third-party fulfillment. It’s also where she met her future husband. "Everybody’s story turns when they meet their significant other," Putnam says.
> Crown Lift Trucks, a multi-billion dollar, family-owned company that manufactures forklifts in New Bremen, Ohio. It is where her husband was employed. But he was driving 90 miles to work from Columbus so after they married, they moved closer to work and she landed a job with Crown doing sourcing and learning about industrial manufacturing.
> A key job at Dealer Tire, a Cleveland-based tire distribution company where she was inventory manager over a brand of wheels, after the couple moved to the area to be near family when Putnam became pregnant with her second child.
> A COO role at a food startup helping some friends who started Chill Pop, which made frozen gourmet popsicles in Cleveland. Chill Pop scored a wholesale account with Whole Foods and was on the rise until COVID hit, then a lack of capital took the company down.
> Global supply chain director for North American Interconnect (NAI), one of her father’s companies. It made wire harnesses for medical devices used in hospital emergency rooms and also had a hand in telecom, producing big trunk lines for cell towers. She managed that for five years, which involved regular trips to China and Mexico. "I wish I’d taken Spanish in high school," Putnam laments.
That last job, Putnam says, was "the busiest time of my life." She was pregnant with child No. 5, two of her kids were doing remote learning from home during COVID and the other two, a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old, were doing what 4-year-olds and 2-year-olds do, which is not sit still.
Her father is a venture capitalist and he had a chance to sell NAI, so he did. She worked another year there but stepped away in 2021. That’s when dad asked her what was next for her, what was she passionate about, what motivated her to get out of bed? Besides her regular 5 a.m. gym sessions, that is.
"I was almost embarrassed to tell him clothing and fashion — I love researching and learning about those," she says. "I enjoy sketching and dreaming. We had a good discussion about this."
So it was time to start over. But the apparel field was a different challenge. Putnam had no idea how to start a clothing company. So she took an online course, "Virtue + Vice: Launch My Conscious Line" — 25 weeks worth of lessons from Melanie Wendy DiSalvo, a fashion industry veteran who developed products for brands such as Wal-Mart, Target, Ralph Lauren, Levi’s and others. The course provided important business operation information like lists of supply-chain partners, product research, scalable business plans, the works.
Putnam then discovered a company with manufacturing relationships around the world. "They had a podcast about the fashion industry, I was watching everything and reading anything I could," Putnam says. "They helped me execute this idea. They held my hand, basically."
Putnam landed a manufacturer in China. She also had some cotton-based apparel pieces made in India. Her goal was to launch A. Putnam in time for the 2023 PGA Show in Orlando, Florida. Before that show, she was nervous. She tried to book appointments with clients and prospective buyers but, she said, "I couldn’t get anybody to respond to an email and relied on a friend’s network. I was like, ‘Man, what if nobody is going to talk to us?’ I spent so much money on a 10-by-20 foot booth. We were a premium brand and we wanted to have that appearance. We wanted to look as if we belonged, like we’d been there before. We picked up 30 accounts. It worked, we were shocked."
It was a start. Putnam went to the Fall PGA Show in Frisco, Texas, paid an additional $6,500 to exhibit. New brands were guaranteed at least 10 appointments. It paid off, it got Putnam’s new line in front of a new territory of people and created traffic.
January’s PGA Show was another successful step for A. Putnam, picking up accounts such as Pebble Beach. But she knows the road to success in this business is long and competitive.
"Early in the process, I asked a mentor, 'How much does it take to get off the ground and find success?" she says. "'What do I need to have in the bank?' He said, ‘Two million bucks over the next two or three years.' That’s a reality of accelerating growth, accurate number. It’s been about a year and a half and our costs are under that, but I can see how far that amount of money can go."
A. Putnam’s minimum order from the Chinese manufacturers — she had hoped to use U.S. makers but was disappointed in the quality and the costs — is 500 pieces. Her initial A. Putnam 10-style collection cost $350,000, which she didn’t start shipping until May 2023. The company's focus is in wholesale, though the direct-to-consumer business is nice to have. She expects her sales to climb significantly in 2024.
Her business career is like a classic Beatles song, "A Long and Winding Road."
"My plate keeps getting fuller and fuller," Putnam says. "I feel less productive when I have idle time. It’s funny how it all intertwines. I learned something incredible at every job I’ve had. It really prepared me. My resume is not about where I’ve worked, it’s about what I’ve learned. And I know I’ve still got more to learn."
One thing on that list might be how to say no. Her dad purchased a large kiln. His house has terracotta roof tiles and he complained that they’re scarce, there is no place to buy them. So she’s recycling her college ceramic skills to help him make his own in what could be another startup venture.
In, you know, all of her spare time.
