By Best Shift Hockey | Founded by a Mom Who Couldn't Find the Right Shirt
It's November 2015. I'm a healthcare professional, sitting at my kitchen table, laptop open, scouring online shops for my kids' Christmas gifts. My two kids — ages four and six — were just going all in on their hockey journey, and I wanted to find them some fun gifts to support their new obsession. Something that actually says hockey in a way that felt connected, and would make their faces light up when they unwrapped.
What I found instead? A whole lot of nothing.
I could find football gear everywhere. Basketball? Covered. Soccer? A million options. But hockey — the fastest-growing youth sport in North America at the time — had an apparel gap so wide you could fit a Zamboni through it. The licensed stuff was fine if you're ok with your kiddo spilling ice cream on a $50 NHL shirt 5 minutes after they put it on. But unlicensed, lifestyle-driven, personality-forward hockey clothing for families? For kids? For moms who actually wanted to rep the rink life without looking like a walking team catalog? Something that didn't use "puck" as an innuendo on it?
Nowhere. Absolutely nowhere.
So I did what any completely rational person would do. I called my dad.
The Phone Call That Changed Everything
My dad has always been my business mentor. He's the kind of person who tells you the truth even when you don't particularly want to hear it, which — spoiler alert — is exactly the kind of person you need in your corner when you're about to make a very large life decision.
I told him what I'd found. Or rather, what I hadn't found. I told him I thought I could do better. That there was a real gap in the market, that hockey families were hungry for it, and that I had no idea how to actually make it happen but I was pretty sure I should try.
He didn't hesitate. He told me I had something, and he told me to go explore it.
That was all I needed.
The Terrifying Part (A.K.A. The misconception of job security)
Here's the thing nobody tells you about leaving a corporate job to start a business: the scariest part isn't the idea. It's not the execution. It's not even the unknown.
It's the paycheck. Or should I say the lack thereof.
I had a good job. Solid salary. Benefits. The whole package. And while I was genuinely unhappy in it — had wanted to start my own business for years, honestly — there is something uniquely sobering about the moment you realize you're about to voluntarily walk away from financial stability to sell hockey t-shirts on the internet.
I think too many entrepreneurship origin stories gloss over the fear part. And honestly, its was the single most influential thing that slowed my success. I was scared. The [false sense of] security of that job felt very real, and giving it up was a real sacrifice. But I'd been waiting for the right idea for years, and I knew — somewhere deep in my gut — that this was it.
So I didn't quit. Not yet. Instead, I did something that in hindsight was one of the smartest decisions I've ever made.
Seven Months of Saying Yes to Everything I Didn't Know
For seven months, I kept my corporate job and built Best Shift Hockey from scratch in every spare hour I had.
I learned manufacturing. Design. Screen printing. What makes a fabric actually worth wearing. How to find ethical, environmentally conscious production partners. How to build a website from zero. How to source. How to price. How distribution actually works. How to identify the brands that wanted to partner with you versus the ones that wanted to use you (spoiler: you don't always know the difference until after).
I held inventory in my basement. I packed every single order myself. I excitedly signed contracts with partners that lost me money - a lot of money. I hired people to do work that I eventually had to learn and redo myself.
I want to say this clearly to any other parents or entrepreneurs reading this: I did not have a clue what I was doing when I started. Not one. Everything I know about running this business — and I know a lot now — I learned as I went. (and you can too - but that's a blog for another day)
It took five years. Five years of building, breaking, learning, pivoting, and pushing. Five years of borrowing, panicking, scraping, believing. Five years that amounted to the equivalent of an entirely new education. And somewhere in year five, I started to see what meaningful success actually looked like.
What Best Shift Hockey Is Today
I'll save the full ten-year retrospective for another post, but here's the arc in brief: I started with a t-shirt and a basement full of inventory. Today, Best Shift Hockey has customers in all 50 states.
And we didn't stop at clothing.
We built a training facility right here in Minnesota that offers comprehensive hockey skills development. We run travel camps and clinics around the world. And in 2025, we launched The Bandits — the only MN based travel roller hockey program with teams ranging from 6U all the way through adults — who have already brought home six championships from national tournaments across the US. In their first year.
The clothing started everything. And today, the clothing is what ties all of our hockey life together.
What I'd say to the 2016 version of me:
People ask me this a lot, and I've thought about it more deeply as we hit our ten-year mark. Here's what's interesting: I'm a completely different person than I was in 2016. Not just in business, not just as an entrepreneur — literally. Science tells us that every cell in the human body is replaced over roughly a ten-year cycle. So the person writing this blog post and the person who made that first frustrated holiday shopping trip in November 2015 share a history, but not a single cell.
That's kind of wild when you sit with it.
I'm an entirely different person than I was in 2016. For me, that is true in such a multifaceted way. However, in 2016, and in 2026, my consistent advice to myself is simply to "keep going"
That's it. That's the whole advice. Keep going when it's hard. Keep going when you take a loss. Keep going when you're packing orders at midnight after your kids go to sleep. Keep going when year one looks nothing like you imagined. Keep going when year five looks nothing like year one. Keep going when it starts to get good. Keep going no matter what.
The hockey community showed up for Best Shift Hockey in ways I couldn't have predicted. And the least I could do was keep showing up for them.
So that's what we do.
Best Shift Hockey was founded in 2016 by a mom of 2 new youth hockey players who couldn't find a single T shirt she was looking for. Ten years later, we're still here — and we're just getting started. Shop the collection at bestshifthockey.com and follow along for more stories, behind-the-scenes, and everything hockey family life.
Keywords: hockey mom entrepreneur, women-owned hockey business, youth hockey clothing brand, hockey family apparel, hockey lifestyle brand, best shift hockey origin story, hockey clothing company, unlicensed hockey apparel, hockey mom small business