As a student at the University of South
Carolina, Allen Stephenson (Rho – South Carolina ’02) had given serious thought to becoming a doctor until his junior year. That’s when a six-month trip to Italy, where he was exposed to a world of men’s clothing that featured a design expertise and attention to detail completely different from what he was accustomed to, changed his mind about his career path. When he returned to the States he knew that he wanted to do something creative that would make a statement in the apparel industry. So, with virtually no experience in the clothing business, Stephenson decided to build a better polo shirt, and his company, Southern Tide, was born. Stephenson started out with the Skipjack polo, a shirt that featured a Skipjack fish emblem that started out as a drawing on a napkin. Less than five years later, Southern Tide designs, manufactures and markets a growing line of clothing for men, as well as a few women’s apparel items. Stephenson said that his initial idea for the Skipjack polo came from always, it seemed, being surrounded by people wearing polo shirts. “There were at least 80-100 guys in my KA chapter and we all wore polos like crazy,” Stephenson said. “And it seemed to me that there was always something with my polos that wasn’t quite right, something that needed to be improved. So I set out to see what could be done to improve the polo shirt.” Stephenson went from designing shirts in his dorm room to founding a company that, in August 2011, was ranked as the fastest growing apparel company, and number 73 overall, on Inc. magazine’s 30th annual Inc. 500 edition, an exclusive ranking of the country’s fastestgrowing private companies. Then, in November 2011, Forbes magazine ranked the company number 27 on the
Above: Southern Tide founder Allen Stephenson, wearing one of his company’s Skipjack polos.
Making
Waves Southern Tide Founder Clothes Success in Kappa Alpha by Rick Moore
Spring 2012
24
The Kappa Alpha Journal