Nov. 9, 2022

A lot of businesses are born out of unmet needs.

For Erica Feige Anderson, the need was clothes. More specifically, clothes for boys. Hers are age 9, 6 and 1, and shopping has never been easy.

“I have, for a long time, struggled to find clothes for them,” she said. “I have long been jealous of the girl moms that have all the options and the huge section in Target. I never have had that.”

With Untamed Threads, she’s hoping to offer more options and a boutique-style feel for boy moms.

Anderson launched the business in June after a decade in financial services, most recently in human resources where she worked as a talent coach with executive leadership.

“I have always had this entrepreneurial side of me, and I was just ready for something new and different and something I could grow and learn from,” she said. “We’re strictly e-commerce, but my hope in the future would be that we would eventually move to more of a brick-and-mortar format, hopefully in Sioux Falls.”

Her inventory includes 13 brands with apparel, outerwear, hats and socks, with an eye toward both the style and the functionality.

“The fact that I’m a boy mom is huge. My kids come home at the end of the day and they’ve got holes in their knees, so (quality) is huge for me,” Anderson said. “And light colors most of the time don’t work for boys, so I stray away from that, and stylistically we go with bold, simple, modern, which is darker and more boy colors and patterns. I stay away from too much of the neutrals, because the market is also saturated with that when it comes to baby and kids clothes.”

And unlike some boutiques that only size up to age 5, Untamed Threads aim to serve kids through youth sizes. There also are options for moms.

“We’ve had a lot of really good support locally,” Anderson said. “And we have done business in South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa and Arizona, so we’ve started to get some people through word of mouth.”

A pop-up shop in Madison also provided good feedback, she said.

People said “what a good idea, it’s so niche, this stuff is so cute,” Anderson said. “So that definitely tells me we’re headed in the right direction.”

Find Untamed Threads by clicking here.