A few years ago, Blair Hedley had never played golf, designed clothes, or run a business. Since then, she’s made a career and much of a life out of all three, and the quick transformation belies how often she thought about dropping the whole idea. “I put it on the shelf so many times,” says Hedley, 31. “But I just couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

That’s often how entrepreneurship goes: An idea leads to Googling, then doubt, then conversations with people who know the business, then investments, more doubt, episodes of anxiety, and then, eventually, if all goes well, sales. Hedley’s idea was to make and sell golf attire for women—a growing number are taking up the traditional men’s pastime—that wouldn’t require them to maintain professional athletes’ physiques or spend outlandish amounts of money.

Through her brand, Beldrie, she began to fill orders in June. It’s a simple setup: one corner of a bedroom on the third floor of a four-story Elizabeth townhome she shares with her husband, Connor (with whom she’s expecting their first child, a boy, next month). As of our conversation in mid-October, Hedley had processed about 200 orders with 600 pieces—tops, skorts, and outerwear—made from a soft, sweat-wicking nylon-spandex blend and equipped with pockets for gloves, balls, and phones. They range from $82 to $110, in line with brands like Nike, Adidas, and Lululemon, which are increasingly selling golf apparel to women. Demand has swelled since the pandemic: Last year, the National Golf Foundation reported a 15% rise since 2019 in the number of women who play, compared to a 2% rise among men.

Based on her market research, Hedley has a firm grasp of what she calls “the Beldrie girl”: a professional between 20 and 40 who wants a fulfilling weekend activity and cares about supporting local brands. “It has been really cool,” she says, “to actually see this woman come to life through my customers.”

The Beldrie girl, not surprisingly, is a lot like her. Hedley grew up in Winston-Salem, the daughter of an attorney father and a mother who works as his paralegal. (“Somehow, they’ve managed to stay married.”) No one in the family golfed. She played field hockey at R.J. Reynolds High School but didn’t play competitive sports at the University of Georgia. Hedley moved to Chicago in 2018 for a project management job with the accounting firm KPMG. She met and began to date Connor there and took a similar job with Facebook in 2021.

By then, the isolation of COVID had begun to wear on her. Hedley missed in-person interactions with colleagues, and she craved what Connor had—a hobby that allowed him to get outside and work off stress from his job in cloud sales for Microsoft. She took golf lessons and joined him on the course. “I was yearning for an outlet and a space for creativity,” she says. “I also was, at this point, around 28 and becoming less and less interested in my weekends being filled with just brunch and going out to bars.”

But when Hedley shopped for golf clothes, she found that they were either too slim-cut for athletes, like Nike’s, or too long-skirted and billowy, like some Lilly Pulitzer items she refers to, affectionately, as “my grandma’s golf apparel.” She thought she might be able to find a middle ground and maybe even make a business of it. She spent nights and weekends researching fashion and incorporation and reached out to patternmakers, fabric suppliers, and business attorneys.

The Elevated Top and Skort in dusk. Courtesy, Lindley Battle

Hedley says she struggles with self-doubt, and starting a business can amplify that for anyone. So she made sure she had a step-by-step plan. She knew it would include, eventually, a move back to her home state; you can’t exactly play golf year-round in Chicago. Facebook laid her off in June 2023 with a four-month severance package, and she used the time and money to work on her business as she and Connor prepared to move south. They settled on Charlotte rather than Winston-Salem because they figured a bigger city offered more opportunities. “For right now,” she says, “Charlotte just works.”

The final step was the brand name. Hedley originally decided on Her Clubhouse, the name she registered her LLC under in 2023. But her attorney father and others advised her that she likely wouldn’t be able to trademark it because of its similarity to other brand names. This is where Hedley started her crash course in the intricacies and obstacles of trademarking, which is particularly difficult for a new clothing brand: Your proposed name doesn’t have to be exactly like an existing brand’s. It just needs to be close enough for a lawyer to send a cease-and-desist letter. “And I’m not going to fight it, right?” she says. “Even if I won, it just wouldn’t be worth it.”

Hedley learned this when her attorney advised her not to use her replacement name, Lofted Sport, because it was too close to Loft, the Ann Taylor brand. It was the end of 2023, and Hedley had already spent about $1,500 on Lofted Sport labels. She and Connor had already settled into their townhome in Elizabeth. Hedley plunged into a dark weekend of the entrepreneur’s soul.

“I think I literally cried for, like, a whole day,” she says. “I just felt so beat down by the whole thing, and then I woke up on Monday, and that’s when I told myself, ‘Blair, you have to emotionally detach from this name. Just pick a name.’”

Beldrie, she admits, is “a completely made-up word.” During her research, she says, she learned that women respond well to brands whose names end with vowel sounds. “Beldrie” sounded vaguely Southern, she thought. And if you say it aloud, it sounds like a phonetically altered version of her name.

Clients occasionally ask about it, but apparently choosing a made-up word as a brand name isn’t a big deal. How many customers care what “Nike” means? “For the most part, it really doesn’t seem to matter, which is what people were telling me all along,” Hedley says. “I just was so stubborn. I wanted it to be, like, the perfect name. In today’s day and age, I don’t think you can have the perfect name.”