After playing college ball for four years at Syracuse University in New York, in 2013 I was drafted into the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) – a dream come true. I played five seasons for the San Antonio Silver Stars, and an additional three seasons moving around with other teams in the league. This past summer, I played for Team Canada at the Paris 2024 Olympics. Like many basketball players, I now play professional basketball overseas during the WNBA off-season, currently for Valencia, Spain, but I’ve also played for teams in Novosibirsk, Russia; Braine-l’Alleud, Belgium; Bourges, France and South Adelaide, Australia.  

In 2020, I was living in Belgium, playing for BC Castors Braine, chatting on the phone with my childhood friend Nicole. She and I share something in common: we’re both really tall. She started venting to me about how wearing clothes that were too short for her 6 foot tall frame left her feeling frustrated and cold on her walks with her dog. As a 6 foot 4 woman with the same struggles myself, I said, “Girl, welcome to the club.” 

Over the following weeks, we kept the conversation going, eventually realizing there was a gap in the market we could fill. We began to explore the idea of launching our own clothing brand for tall women. While my only entrepreneurial experience at that point was creating and selling customized illustrations, as well as publishing a children’s book with my sister titled ‘The Magic of Basketball,” Nicole had a decade of experience in marketing working for start-ups, providing us with the confidence to pursue a business together.

After doing some research, we discovered there was already an abundance of tall clothing brands on the global market, but because the majority were small businesses and didn’t have the advertising budgets of big brands, it was hard for customers to find them. When customers could find them, high shipping costs and duty fees discouraged shoppers from buying international brands outside of Canada, leaving tall women to settle for whatever they could find that fit, even if it meant shopping in the men’s section. We decided to pivot our business plan and created Tall Size, a one-stop, direct shipping platform that exclusively houses quality tall women’s clothing brands. 

On our site customers can shop for clothes from all the tall women’s brands we host, filtering for the products and sizes they wish to buy. When it comes time to place an order, customers place a single order and pay only once, avoiding the separate shipping fees and multiple check out processes that would apply if they bought from each brand individually. In the back-end of the site, our platform shoots out the orders to each individual brand and the brands ship out the order directly to the customers. The inventory is synched in real time, so everything listed on our site is in stock. To become a part of our site, brands are required to meet certain sizing criteria: Clothes need to be made with high-quality fabrics, pants need to have an inseam starting at 32 inches, shoes need to be a minimum women’s size 9 and above, and sleeves need to be long enough to fit our target demographic of women 5 foot 8 and above. 

Nicole and I pooled our own money to get the business up and running. Starting Tall Size involved a lot of trial-and-error. We began by begging tall clothing brands to join our new marketplace—our first real challenge. We had to prove to established brands why they’d want to work with such a young company. To raise awareness for the brand in the early days, we hired a public relations person, but ended the contract after a few months when we didn’t get any returns on the investment. Instead, we put a lot of work into our on site experience and social media platforms to grow our following and attract our customer base. We eventually rallied six brands to come on board, including The Elevated Closet, founded by a former teammate of mine on the Canadian women’s national basketball team. 

In 2021, we launched our platform through Shopify. We were excited to have the site up and running, but we also received countless customer emails asking if our website was a scam: People were hesitant to shop with us because our platform seemed too good to be true, and they were more comfortable buying from individual brands, even if it was less convenient. However, with time, we were able to build trust and prove ourselves when people began discovering new brands on our site, all the while saving time by shopping multiple businesses. Our store expanded to include a “Pre-Loved” section, where tall women can sell clothing they no longer wear to other tall women.

As Tall Size grew, Nicole and I participated in a few start-up innovation programs that hooked us up with mentors. We won a couple grants that helped us fund the business, eventually securing a couple angel investors. We knew things were starting to go well when brands began reaching out to us to be on our website, as opposed to us having to beg them to partner with us. We now have almost 30 brands on the site, including Stand Tall Jeans, Canadian shoe brand Poppy Barley, big brand Alloy Apparel and The Sixes, a high end tall fashion brand. We don’t charge the brands to be on our platform, but Tall Size earns a commission for every sale made. 

After a few years of running the online business, we started hearing tall women wish that they could have a normal in-person shopping experience, where they could walk into a store and try on clothes before buying them. So in 2023, we tested out the idea with two pop-up shops, the first in Los Angeles and the second in Chicago. They were both a big success. This year we expanded to an eight city pop-up tour across the USA and Canada that included: Austin, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Chicago in the spring. Followed by Toronto, New York, Atlanta and Orlando in the fall. At our pop-up, shoppers can find a sample size run of carefully selected items available through Tall Size. Each item has a QR code tag that our customers could scan and check-out with their phone directly after trying it on. The pop-ups have proven to be great for brand awareness, as well as for community building among our shoppers. It’s always fulfilling to see women walk into our pop-ups and have their eyes widen like they’ve just stepped into a candy store. We also host VIP nights where a stylist is hired to give styling tips and expertise, take measurements of our shoppers and help them pick out the right clothes for them. Not all tall girls are made the same: I have a 38 inch inseam and Nicole is all torso. For many tall women this is the first time they are walking into a store with options designed for them, so sometimes getting professional help is necessary. 

Three years in, Nicole and I are still very hands-on when it comes to the business’ day-to-day, to ensure it continues to grow. We’ve hired two new people to support the merchandising and operational tasks, but she and I are still the ones answering all the emails from customers. In the last year we quadrupled the number of pop-up stores and have sold over 10,000 pieces to thousands of customers across North America.

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We’re proud of the success we have experienced—the community we have built, the brands we have partnered with, and the lessons we have learned along the way. I would not want to be on this journey with anyone else. Nicole is not only an amazing friend, but an amazing business partner and CEO for Tall Size. It’s been incredibly fulfilling to create a marketplace for women who in the past may have felt defeated when shopping. In the long run, we hope to continue to expand, and become the go-to shopping destination for all tall women across the globe.

—As told to Tara DeBoer