Her boyfriend wanted one.
In the middle of the summer in 2011, Aubrey Hord’s boyfriend asked her if she could make him a bowtie. She examined, she experimented, and she sewed. She tweaked her design, changed her stitching, used different fabrics until a few weeks later, she presented him with her very first homemade bowtie. And then another. And then another. And then another. Six bowties later, he gently told her that, while her bowties were great, he simply didn’t want any more. To this Hord exclaimed “But I want to keep making them!”
Thus, BroTies was born.
Hord, a third-year psychology major from Franklin, Tennessee, had no formal bowtie training when she started the company. In fact, she had no intention of starting a company when she started making bowties. But after figuring out a system, she had “so much fun,” she couldn’t stop.
While at first sales were done on in person, and advertising was entirely word-of-mouth, last December Hord moved to an Etsy site, and uses Facebook and Twitter to advertise her product. And it has worked. This summer, Hord sold over 70 bowties, including outfitting multiple wedding parties. She’s shipped as far as England and Australia, though she still gets a significant number of orders from the Rhodes Campus. Even President Troutt wears a burgundy BroTie, a Christmas gift from Hord last year.
Last spring, Hord used BroTies help the first ever Relay for Life at Rhodes. According to Hord, “Rachel [Schmelzer, coordinator of Relay for Life] asked me to get involved, and the only way I really thought I could get involved and be good at it was to make bowties. So I made a lower-priced bowtie range, all in purple seersucker, solid purple, or purple pinstripes to go with the Relay for Life theme, and I sold them to people in hospitals, online and at the Relay for Life event. All proceeds went directly to the cause.” In total, BroTies raised over $350 dollars for cancer research.
When asked about the future, Hord says with a smile, “I just want to keep making bowties!” On average, she spends between 3-10 hours a week crafting; each bowtie takes about an hour of labor, depending on style and monogramming, and she recently added pocket squares to her repertoire. Eventually, she would like to move off Etsy and onto her own website, though has no plans in the immediate future. She is, of course, still a full time student at Rhodes, something that sets her apart from others in her field. She explains “I recently met someone in my hometown to deliver a bowtie order, and when I came up to the customer all he could say was, ‘You’re really young! I thought you were forty.’ I don’t know if that means I’m professional…or like a granny.”
After Rhodes, Hord hopes to become a Child Life Specialist. When she’s not going to class or making bowties, she can be found playing with or searching for puppies. To order a BroTie, go to http://www.etsy.com/shop/BroTiesNeckwear or find Aubrey on campus! Custom bowties are available and large orders are welcome.