Fashion dreams often come true in Paris. It happened there for Shannon Savage – except it wasn’t on a runway.
It was a hot August afternoon and the Canadian women’s beach volleyball team strode onto the Olympic court wearing new team swimsuits designed by Left on Friday, a small but ambitious swimwear company co-founded by Shannon.
Watching her designs appear on the world’s biggest sporting stage was more than a career milestone for Shannon, it was the ultimate validation of everything she’d been working toward up until that point.
“It was the best experience,” she says. “As a designer, as a business owner, these things don’t come around very often. It’s every four years, and it’s the best athletes in the world, competing at the highest level. To see them wearing something we created – it was incredible, the ultimate achievement.”
Paris is a long way away, geographically and psychologically, from Ashcroft, B.C., the small town near Kamloops where Shannon grew up. There, her entire worldview revolved around sports, playing on every team that she could. Early on she realized that none of the activewear was designed for people like her – small, athletic, and, you know, a girl.
“You’d buy unisex shorts or track pants, or the women’s gear was just the men’s stuff made smaller and dyed pink,” she says. “Nobody was really designing with women in mind.”
Shannon was also a creative kid. She often watched her mother make clothes at home and fashion intrigued her, though she never imagined it could be a career path.
That changed when her mother stumbled across the fashion design and technology program at KPU, just as Shannon was trying to decide where to go for her post-secondary education.
“It was a revelation. I didn’t even realize you could get a degree in fashion design, let alone one that prepared you with practical skills for the industry,” she says.
She left home and moved to Vancouver, commuting to the KPU campus by bus every day. The program was rigorous and difficult, challenging her in ways she never knew were possible.
It was gruelling, in a good way, the program pressure-tests you for the reality of the industry. If you weren’t passionate about it, you wouldn’t stick it out.
Shannon Savage — Left on Friday
What stood out most were the instructors, many of whom came directly from the fashion world and taught with that experience rather than from abstract theory. Students leaned on each other as much as their teachers, building the tight-knit relationships that make up the backbone of a notoriously small and interconnected industry.
“It was like summer camp, but four years long,” Shannon says. “You come out with deep bonds. My best friend to this day is someone I met there.”
Shannon’s academic path wasn’t entirely straightforward. She transferred credits, delayed a course, and technically took four years longer than expected to complete her degree. Not that it mattered, though. She landed her first real job as a designer at a snowboard apparel company straight after she finished the program.
But the defining move came in 2005, when she joined lululemon, just as the brand was on the cusp of explosive growth.
“When I started, they were a $30-million company. When I left 11 years later, they were at $2.5 billion,” she says. “It was like Woodstock for designers. The whole industry of athleisure didn’t exist yet. We were inventing it.”
As one of lululemon’s early designers, Shannon helped establish the foundational products and drive innovation that made the brand a global phenomenon. E-commerce was still new, the U.S. market was just opening and every day felt like uncharted territory.
“It was the perfect storm,” she says. “We were constantly creating from scratch, redefining what women’s activewear could be. I don’t think you get opportunities like that more than once in a lifetime.”
By 2016, lululemon was a massive global corporation. Shannon, now a mother, took stock of her role during maternity leave and realized the parts of the job that once energized her – the ground-floor creativity, the innovation – had given way to corporate scale.
“I wasn’t doing the work I was most capable of or lit up by,” she explains. “And in a company that size, those roles just don’t exist anymore.”
So, she struck out on her own. Shannon teamed up with her former lululemon colleague Laura Low Ah Kee to launch Left on Friday in 2017. The idea was simple but radical – create a swimsuit that did it all.
“Most swimwear is either purely for lifestyle or it’s purely on the performance side,” she says. “So, you’re either wearing a Speedo or you’re wearing a string bikini. There’s nothing in between, for women of any age, who are living an active life. We identified that and went after it.”
Shannon developed the products, focusing on research, development and athlete testing. The company had little money in the beginning, but plenty of grit. They built relationships with elite athletes, offering sponsorship through product and photoshoots when cash wasn’t available.
That grassroots strategy paid off. Canadian beach volleyball players began wearing Left on Friday suits, which eventually caught the attention of the national team. When lululemon stepped away from sponsoring the team at the Olympic level, Left on Friday was already on the athletes’ radar. So, they stepped up to the net. Eight years after launching, Left on Friday made its Olympics debut.
For Shannon, her experience at lululemon was the perfect training ground for Left on a Friday’s current growth phase – like a PhD in business expansion.
“It’s identical in a lot of ways,” she says. “What I learned during that crazy growth phase at lululemon is exactly what we’re applying now – building something from the ground up, scaling it, creating a category. It feels familiar, and it’s wildly exciting.”
KPU, too, continues to shape her perspective. When aspiring entrepreneurs reach out for advice on breaking into the industry, she tells them bluntly: get an education. “Most of the time, people have no training. I tell them I can’t help until they do,” she says.
Fashion is a specialty like finance or engineering, and there are hard skills you have to learn. That’s what KPU gave me, and I wouldn’t be here without it.
Shannon Savage — Left on Friday
Today, Left on Friday employs around 50 people, with its Canadian base in Victoria and a U.S. presence in Los Angeles. Shannon oversees product, while her partner manages the brand side. Together, they’re plotting the next chapter, including sponsorships in multiple sports and a presence at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
But it was that first Olympic moment where the dream became the reality. It was the proof of concept of what she was trying to achieve, both for her business and her belief in the power of design.
“You can’t recreate that feeling,” she says. “Seeing those athletes, at the very top of their sport, in something we created – it was everything. And it makes me excited, because I know we’re only just getting started.”
Read the original article here
