It began with some household cloth, Barbie-outfit stencils and a few Barbie dolls. Years later, her passion for hand-sewing dresses has become a business.
In three years, Natalie Kim, a UF English senior, has transformed a hobby into a successful clothing line, Game Day Couture.
She can usually be seen in class - knees up, notebook in lap, sketching out her next dress idea.
Kim designs and sews dresses for all ages. She sells her dresses in LaLa in the Tioga Town Center, which she supplies with 10 to 12 new dresses each week and sells an additional 10 per week to individual women.
The prices range from $75 to $80.
Kim came up with the idea for Game Day Couture four years ago when she couldn't find an outfit to wear to her first Gator football game.
She whipped up a dress for herself in about three hours.
"Everyone wears the same Forever 21 blue dress with an orange belt, and it gets repetitive," she said
Aside from the dresses she sells in LaLa, Kim works mostly by appointment. Her clients can choose their own design styles and pick from more than 20 fabrics with the knowledge that their original dress won't be duplicated.
She never recreates her customers' original designs, and she only makes three dresses of each style.
The dresses include halters and tube tops, cotton and seersucker fabrics, and solid and polka-dot designs.
"Short or low-cut styles sell the best," she said. "Everyone wants to look sexy on game day."
In a bedroom-turned-workshop, Kim becomes a factory worker.
Her beige carpet now looks orange and blue from all the string she tosses around.
She sometimes has two dresses going at once on both her sewing machines.
"I sew every stitch, every ruffle of every dress," she said.
Each dress takes her about three or four hours from start to finish.
Kim's expertise lies in designing dresses for football game days, but she also has a spring and summer line of sundresses.
Her spring line is coming out in March with similar cuts to her game dresses, only the styles are made of bright and vibrant colors other than blue and orange.
Her career goal is to eventually design dresses for women at every university in the Southeastern Conference.
Kim said the most rewarding part of her job is to see people walking down the street in her dresses.
Karley Croton, a UF interior design senior, has been buying dresses from Kim since last football season.
"The dresses give the girls their own identity on game day," Croton said.
Kim is also starting a new line, Mommy & Me, with matching designs for college women and their dogs.
The designs are exact replicas of each other, she said, just in different sizes.
She also designs smaller versions of her popular dresses for young women, so little girls no longer feel forced to dress as mini cheerleaders, she said.
"Every dress has its own set of memories," Kim said of her work. "If only the dresses could talk."
