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Jenny Davis Clothes Aspiring Foodies

When Chicago-based freelance food and wine writer Jenny Burg Davis was on maternity leave after the birth of her first child in 2003, she found herself daydreaming about ways to stay involved in the culinary world she had temporarily left behind. She decided it might be fun to create gourmet-themed clothing for her new daughter.
Davis found an online T-shirt design site that allowed her to experiment with baby-sized apparel. She set up a shop on the site, calling it Ellie’s Party! in honor of her daughter Eleanor. “I just sat down at the computer and started typing things up,” says Davis, a 1992 ASU alumna with a degree in German. “Mostly I thought I’d buy them for my own friends.”
The resulting tiny tees, onesies and bibs sport slogans such as “food critic in training,” “aspiring foodie” and “I’ll have the domestic white.” Davis’s deliciously clever shower gifts were a big hit, and on a whim she put a couple of shirts in a mailer and sent them to The New York Times. That’s when things began to get interesting.
“I got a call from a fact checker at The Times,” she says. “I thought it was one of my friends playing a joke.” The Times eventually featured her T-shirts in its FoodStuff column, and the response was immediate. As soon as readers
opened their papers over morning coffee, thousands of dollars in orders began pouring in.
“Every time I refreshed the page on my computer there were dozens of new orders,” Davis says. Soon, her designs were also featured in the Chicago Tribune, Food Arts Magazine, Budget Living Magazine and other publications. When it became clear her business was taking off, Davis joined the Chicago Fashion Foundation to learn more about the business end of design.
This past summer, the foundation selected Ellie’s Party! to be part of the Chicago Indie Designer Shop at the Macy’s department store on State Street in downtown Chicago. Davis says the experience of seeing her designs on display in the world’s second largest department store was “surreal.”
Through her experience at Macy’s, Davis learned much about marketing her products and now hopes to sell her most popular designs through gourmet food stores and gift shops. Although she has resumed her freelance writing career and returned to her day job as an assistant managing editor for the American Bar Association’s ABA Journal, Davis hopes for a bright future for Ellie’s Party!.
“Being an entrepreneur is scary,” she says. “You don’t know if your investment is going to come back.”
But Davis cites her undergraduate experience at ASU with instilling the inspiration needed to move forward with her business.
“At ASU, I had the opportunity to meet really motivated people,” she says. “I saw people achieve and succeed. I decided I could be one of those people.”

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