Will Tall Clothing Brands Survive Long-Term? | The End of The Elevated Closet & The Truth About Running a Tall Brand

Shopping for clothes as a toll girlie can be an absolute nightmare. Honestly, we've been over this who knows how many times. At this point, we go in store and we can't find much in our size or length. There's tall washing and online shops where brands say that they sell tall sizes or hint at selling toll sizes, but they actually don't. There's also tall options, but only for the short tall girlies, the ones who are like five nine up to six feet. It can be frustrating, and this frustration has led to many tall women starting their own tall Girl brand. But what isn't really spoken about enough, or at least shown enough, is the behind the scenes and the struggles of actually owning these brands. So today we are talking about the difficulties of owning and scaling a tall specific brand, as well as the unfortunate closing of a very popular toll Grol brand. So, without further ado, let's get into it. Good morning, everybody. You are currently listening to a Tall Girls podcast hosted by a tall girl named India. I hope everyone who is tuning in today is doing super fantastic. Before I get into this episode, I do want to say, make sure you're following me on my socials at a Tall Girls podcast on Instagram, TikTok, and PingER so that you can stay up to date on all of the latest podcast episodes and catch a glimpse of my every day life. Also, feel free to leave my review and let me know how tall you are. I'm genuinely curious. I also have a monthly newsletter, make sure you subscribe to that. Everything is going to be linked in the description. I hope everybody is doing super super fantastic. Maybe noticed, maybe you didn't. I kind of missed like two episodes. The last episode that I did was with a guest that I filmed. Wow, like it's I filmed this like almost a month ago by now, honestly, and summer was just summering, y'all. I mean it all started when I went on a trip. I went on a week long trip to Switzerland to of course see the sites and visit family, of course, so I didn't do an episode. Then then when I came back, that's when I edited the guest episode that I filmed before the trip, and then you know, there was just a lot of things going on. I mean, I'm preparing to go back to school soon. I'm helping out orientation at school. I'm transitioning between freelance jobs. Like things have been a little bit kookie, and so I just needed that extra time to just rest and kind of get it together. And yes, I know, I don't necessarily need to explain myself and explain why I kind of like miss two episodes, well why I missed two episodes and so forth, but I kind of wanted to talk on that because that's also gonna it's also kind of gonna be the I'm gonna be missing like future episodes for a little bit, like for the next month. I'm probably gonna follow and every other week episode as I get settled into school. As I said, I'm transitioning between freelance jobs, so after that transition, after I settle, after that, along with a bunch of other things because orientation is coming up and so forth. So I just wanted to let you guys know ahead of time. And then once I get settled, especially in school, and you know, it's going to be fall I'm not I'm literally just gonna be locked in for the next ten months, oh dear. Once that time period comes, it is going to be so much easier to do the weekly episodes again, So I just wanted to say that and keep y'all updated on what's happening. Anyways, we are starting this episode with very unfortunate news a very popular Tall Girl brand. I mean, it was very popular within the tall community. They are unfortunately shutting down. Shout out to the Tall Girl brand to the Elevated Closet. The owner, Jordan, who is six four herself, has recently announced that she is closing her doors after almost seven years. The work that she's done for the tall girly community through her content and her brand has been absolutely amazing. Jordan, you will not be forgotten. Now. Her site is still up and active at this point that I am recording, and she is running a massive sale. Definitely go check that out at Elevated Closet dot com. She actually posted a social media video announcing her clothes, which we're going to take a look at in a second. But I also think that this video kind of shows the struggles that many tall clothing brand owners face when trying to run and grow their business. So let's check out this video. Tall Sisters. It is with sadness that I'll let you all know that the Elevated Closet will be closing down. After almost seven years of blood, sweat and tears of putting my all into this business, it's time for me to step away. I started this business pre COVID in the guest bedroom of my house, and I really didn't even know the capabilities of where this business would go, and it actually exceeded my expectations. But it is time for me to move on and focus more on my family and being there for my girls. I'm so so proud of the community that has supported this business and me. I am so so appreciative not only people who have bought from the business, but shared the business. I've had so many people who aren't even tall constantly tell me, oh my gosh, I told my friend about the Elevated Closet. So I'm so grateful for the people who have shared the business, who have bought from the business, who have commented in our posts and just really helped us. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And for every email, private message comment of women telling us their feedback and how much they love our brand, the messages of women literally crying when they put on a pair of our pants that our jeans are their favorite genes. Ever, you guys have no idea how much that means to me and how much that helped drive me in this business. As you can imagine, being in a niche market is really difficult. Being in fashion retail is difficult anyways, and then make it a niche market. So thank you, thank you, thank you for everyone who has ever supported us. Starting Friday, we will be having a liquidation sale. I'll put some more details in the caption for you. Every Friday, we will be increasing the sale. But don't wait because we're already low on a lot of our popular sizes. Some of you who say that these genes are your favorite genes, they'll be gone forever. So if you see something in there in your size, I would grab it because it's going to be gone soon. Again, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for your support. I really do appreciate every single one of you, and I'm not going anywhere. I'm a tall woman and i have two future little six foot daughters who need clothes as well. I plan to make these pages resources for tall women, so stick around again. I cannot thank you guys enough for helping make this dream come true on being able to provide clothing options for women like me. Love you all and make sure and take advantage of this locudation sale. You're going to be getting steals of some really amazing products. Bye. Now for some context, The Elevated Closet is a brand that sells clothing for tall women, specifically. The founder's name is Jordan. She is a fellow tall girlly herself standing at six to four, as I mentioned earlier, and she's a former professional Bastota player, and you know, she faced the struggles that many of us face to this day, you know, trying to find clothes in store, trying to find clothes in general, because I'm pretty sure back then, especially when she was younger, like, there weren't as many options as there are today, and she struggled with finding clothes that fit her length, especially being at six four. So she started this brand to you know, not only be able to provide those clothing items for herself, but also other too, women who faced the same struggles that she faced. And as you probably heard in the video that I played earlier, she said, the reason behind the closing of this brand is so she can focus on her family, especially her beautiful daughters. And it really seems like this brand is like for real, for real clothing, because I took a look through the comments and somebody asked if she's ever considered selling the business instead of shutting it down, and she responded, yes, a few buyers actually reached out to her, but she doesn't know that if it's going to work out. I honestly wonder who reached out to her and how much they were offering her. I wonder if it was like another Tall specific brand that reached out to her or maybe I don't know. I'm just curious about that. But obviously she's not obligated to tell us everything that's going on behind the scenes. And it's so sad because I've actually thought for a very long time about inviting her as a guest onto the podcast and just never did. I don't know why, And now she's like shutting down her doors. Like what do you do? You guys think that I should invite her onto the podcast to kind of like speak about this and speak about her journey. Would you guys be interested in that? You can let me know in the comments, or you can send me a DM letting me know. Now there are a lot of layers to unpack here, and the elevated closet is a perfect example to use as well as other conversations I've had with other tall clothing brand owners. Many tell women who struggle to find clothes that fit their length often talk about starting their own tall clothing brands. But what often isn't spoken about enough is how hard it is to actually start them and grow them. As Jordan said in her video announcement, having a business that's in retail is extremely difficult, especially when you're in a niche market. I actually search this up. Tall women make up about zero point one to zero point three percent of the global female population. Zero point one to zero point three percent of billions of women out there. Okay, so yes, that's in the millions, But that's still a small number compared to the amount of women that you can actually market towards, right, And that's if you even ship globally, let alone, if you're only like in Canada, or only in the US, or only in the US in Canada, so you're already catering to a small group of people. Then on top of that, geographically, you're catering to even smaller group of people. And on all of that, many of these brands have small business owners, like there's only one or two people behind the scenes actually running things without upfront investors. Costs are very high, and entrepreneurship, I will say, is definitely glamorized on social media. Right You hear people saying, oh my gosh, like I make ten, twelve, twenty thousand dollars a month, and many people watch these are like, oh my gosh, like these people are rich. They're making so much money without actually thinking that, yes, this is the money that's coming in, but they're not really talking about the money that's going out. You have to take out business taxes, You have to pay manufacturers, suppliers, vendors. If you have like a physical office, you have to pay for that, You have to pay rent for that, you have to pay for digital and physical tools. Maybe if you have employees, you have to pay those employees as well. And after everything comes out of that, like twenty thousand and thirty thousand a month amount or whatever, then you have to see what's left over for yourself and you yourself, you personally also have especially if you're living by yourself, you yourself personally have bills that you need to pay, so you on a put a lot of this money back into the business, but then you also have to make sure you have money to pay for your actual existence as well, and that's if you don't have a full time or part time job. But then that's a whole separate situation. Let's listen to a tall clothing brand owner talk about this in. This world of like over glamorizing entrepreneurship and like living in perfectionism. Like I'm totally okay saying that I'm a small business owner and it's been steady growth and like we have grown, but I don't think I'm like on celebrity statuge just shit, and I'm totally okay with it. Just the other day we had like. A little over sixty orders in one day, and then today I'm literally going to FedEx with three and I'm grateful each and every time. We've been around almost six years. We've been steadily growing and we're profitable. And I invested my own money. I took my full one K out and I invested my own money and it's been growth and this is exactly what I wanted to do with my life. So I hope someone el sees this and understands that, like everybody's not out here just like go on viral all the time, and it's totally okay to like be in this space too. I've also spoken with a co founder of Tall Size at one point, this was a while ago, and she was saying that there are some months that they don't even have enough to pay themselves, like they break even, but they don't have enough to pay themselves because it's two people running this business. I also did an episode interviewing the founders of Amali Tolly and they actually once had a physical store, but they weren't bringing in enough money to actually keep that physical store up, so they had to let that go. While yes, they were earning money, they weren't earning enough to where they can keep the business going as well as keep that physical store, so they had to move online. Because yes, like you can have the ten twenty thousand dollars a month, and that's if you earn it consistently, because you can have like over one hundred orders in a day, then for the next three weeks you only have three orders. Like the consistency is like it is inconsistent, is what I'm trying to say, but it's not always all about money, right, because yes, you have that side, but as I even mentioned before, some people have full time jobs, part time jobs on top of this, like Jordan was talking about her family, Like having a family, especially having kids, takes a lot of time out of you on top of trying to run that business. And it's like, if you don't have enough money for employees, you're doing all of this or most of this by yourself. Running a business takes a lot. You're going to be in meetings, you have to do the negotiations, you have to do the legal stuff. Well, you obviously like outsource some of these things, but you have to be very involved in these processes. If you want to do marketing, you have to show up in social media and do your email marketing SMS, marketing ads and so forth, on top of the day to day logistics of having the brand and admin as well, and that takes so much time out of the day. And if you're not careful with making sure that you schedule breaks, taking breaks, going on vacations and so forth, and really just balancing your time, it's so easy to lead to burnout because yes, you could be earning all of this money, but is it worth it if your mental health is in the gutter, because in the end, you're also going to be spending that extra money that you may have left over at the end of the month on trying to stay afloat mentally because you're only one person, and people humans cannot like they should not be working twenty four hours a day, but when it comes to owning a business, sometimes you have those days. So when Jordan was talking about really wanting to focus on her family, it makes a lot of sense, Like her daughters are growing up and I'm sure she wants to cherish those moments. And I mean even I don't know fully behind the scenes, but even looking at her or social media, like she was pumping out several videos like per week, several videos a day even most likely like she was really really really going in and trying to do like the marketing, the social media marketing for that and honestly, like it shows because she grew a lot in followers. But me being like having this podcast and doing social media also working in like marketing and brand management, it can be a lot. It could be a lot of stress sometimes. Okay, I know I'm like talking a lot about this, but I'm not I'm trying my best to not deter Like, if you're watching this or tuning into this and you want to start your own tall clothing brand, definitely go for it. Okay, I'm not trying to deter you from that, But I don't know. Hearing a brand I wouldn't say necessarily as big, like let's say as American Tall and so forth, but she was pretty up there. She was she had a lot of growth, you know, and hearing her say that she's closing her doors, it was just like wow. You know, all of the conversations that I've had with like the Tall clothing brand owners and them talking about some of the struggles that they had with managing their businesses and so forth, is just like some people reach a point where they have to put a pause or they just have to walk away from it completely. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. You know, we have long lives. Things happen in phases and so forth. But to hear that, it's like wow, you know, especially because we don't have a lot of brands that are specifically for us, and seeing these brands pop up, it's like, oh my gosh, Like there's more options for us, more options for us, more options for us, but what's going on behind the scenes that you know, it's kind of hard to scale. You know, time and money has to be put into this, and not everyone is able to do this for a very long time, you know. So it's just it's very interesting to hear that and kind of like, I don't want to say like a wake up call, I guess, because I'm not really starting my own toll girl brand, but it's kind of like, wow, like these tall women, these amazing toe women, go through so much to give us options that we have never had before, and it kind of makes you appreciate it a little bit more, especially when you see like extremely high prices. Obviously it's easy to complain about that, especially in this economy, but when you think about the time and the effort and the money and the investment that goes into these things, like into these brands, it's kind of like they do so much for us, They do so so, so, so so much for us, and you just you never know what's going on behind the scenes and if they're going to be shutting down. But honestly, I admire Jordan's courage and she's amazing. She's done so many amazing things, and I'm excited to see what the next steps are for her. Anyways, I would love to know have you ever supported or bought from a Tall specific clothes brand? If so, which one is your favorite? Which one is your go to? Anyways, I think I'm going to end the episode here. Thank you so so much for tuning in. I really appreciate it, and I appreciate you. Of course. I always feel free to hit me up on my socials at a Tell Girls podcast and let me know what you thought about this episode. Did you know that the elevated closet was closing their doors? Did you see the announcement video? Have you ever brought from them? Is it a surprise for you? Like? What do you think about the discussion of how it can be a struggle for many Tall brands to really just grow and scale, Like I would love to hear your thoughts on that, Like, have you ever thought about starting your own brand? Like? Have you ever tried? What was that? Like? I want to hear your thoughts on this. Send me a DM or you know, let me know in the comments of wherever you're tuning in. You know, I feel like there are so many that there's not like so many I which there are more, of course, but there are a lot more tall brands, tall specific brands out there, especially for the Tell Girl least. And you know, a lot of the the content that we see is like what they want to show us, you know, the glads, the glam the fun parts, the pack, the orders with me and so forth, and also showing the real and raw could also be like well, not to say that the good parts aren't real, but also showing the other side, to be able to learn more about what it's like running this brand, and more about their story and their perseverance and so forth. I think that seeing content like that could definitely be very eye opening. But that's just me. You let me know if you agree, and until then I will catch you in the next one. Good night and goodbye.