The Story of Top Shelf Trends

In October 2022, I was hiking alone in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, fresh out of graduate school, trying to solve my newest challenge — finding a black-tie-appropriate dress that didn't drag six inches on the floor behind me for the wedding I was attending the following weekend.

I was 26 years old, had just taken on tens of thousands of dollars in student debt to get my MBA, and had been quoted over $100 the day before to do a simple hem on a $40 dress I'd bought on sale at Lulus.

Then, as being in nature tends to do for me, I had a mind shift. I stopped stressing about the problem and started obsessing over the solution. I've been 5'1½" my entire life, and that wasn't changing — sure, there were stores that catered to petites, but I had long felt overlooked by the fashion industry.

Could I start a petite fashion line?

God no. As clothing-obsessed as I could be at times, I was no fashion designer, certainly not a seamstress, and some of my fashion choices could be described as questionable depending on which early 2010s Facebook album you looked at (why did I love bright turquoise jeans so much in 2012?).

So I tried to think about how else I could solve my own problem. I had just spent a year at The University of Vermont in their Sustainable Innovation MBA program, learning how to use business as a force for good. Maybe I could approach this through a sustainability lens.

And that's when the ideas started flooding in. I took my phone out of my backpack and started a breathy voice note as I continued my ascent up the mountain, and Top Shelf was born: a peer-to-peer marketplace designed specifically for petite women.

I kept thinking back to that $100 hem quote — suddenly it didn't sound so outrageous if I could then resell the dress to someone else who was my height. If my friend group was any indication, a huge percentage of the female population was actually petite. (It turns out there are more than 43 million petite women in the U.S. alone.) So what if we all banded together to share a closet?

And it would promote a circular fashion economy — reusing and reselling clothes rather than always buying something new. Bigger dreams started piling up, too: compostable shipping bags, donating a portion of profits to environmental causes, and helping educate a community about the harmful environmental impact of the fashion industry. Those are still goals I hope Top Shelf grows into. The business plan was unfolding with each step I took, and by the time I reached the top of the mountain, I was sold that this was my calling.

Over the next week I brainstormed potential names. Top Shelf stuck immediately — a nod to every time a short girl has had to flag down a stranger in a grocery store aisle. But it's more than a joke about our height. It's a promise: the best things in life should never be out of reach.

Fast forward 4 years

So that was fall of 2022, and now it's fall of 2026. What's happened over the past four years?

Lots of cold-start attempts, interviews with petite women to see if this would be something they'd use, one pop-up clothing swap party, emails and texts to friends and family asking them to set aside a bag of clothes to sell on our website. And also a few years of nothing — real jobs had to be prioritized, summers full of weddings chewed up my free time. I could make a million excuses, but the truth is that Top Shelf never really left the back of my mind. Every so often a friend would ask, "Whatever happened to that business you were trying to start?"

Which brings me to last weekend. The University of Vermont brought 10 years of Sustainable Innovation MBA graduates back to campus for a "Learning and Connection" summit. In his keynote, Kyle Clark, founder and CEO of Beta Technologies, a company building electric aircraft, shared that he'd had the idea for Beta more than a decade before he actually started it. It was a good reminder that it's never too late to go back to a good idea, and that more experience just means you'll be able to build it better.

I also got to reconnect with some of my old professors who are deeply committed to rethinking business models for a more environmentally sustainable economy — which was always central to my vision for Top Shelf and its role in building a community around circular fashion.

I knew coming out of that weekend that I needed to get serious about Top Shelf again. I hope it becomes the go-to marketplace for the 43 million petite women across the U.S. — and I hope my vision for it helps influence others along the way.

So, here we go again. If you've found my petite little corner of the internet, I hope you feel inspired to join me as I restart the journey up what's sure to be a beautiful, winding mountain trail called starting a business.