The Loop
Girl, 11, starts own business, Goodie Girl Golf
By John Strege
Golfers, as we know, seem to be getting younger (Lydia Ko, Jordan Spieth), and now golf entrepreneurs apparently are, too. Meet Hannah Dupay, a precocious fifth-grader, 11 years old, who has started her own business.
Goodie Girl Golf, which will have a booth at the PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando, Fla, later this month, features ball marker hair accessories (in the photo above, Dupay is on the left, wearing one of her products).
The idea for Goodie Girl Golf began with an inconvenience. "I wanted to find a way to have cute hair and stuff but also have my ball maker with me," Dupay, an avid golfer from Boise, Idaho, said. "I don't like hats and ball markers were always falling out of my pocket."
"I told her she couldn't keep losing ball markers or I was going to take it out of her allowance," her mother, Lisha Southern-Kelly said. Dupay wondered about a headband that came with a ball marker. "'Great,' I thought. 'I'll just go on line and buy her one.' I saw that there wasn't anything like that out there."
So Dupay came up with the idea of developing her own and "I decided to turn it into a business," she said. The products can be purchased through at GoodieGirlGolf.com.
"She is such a special little person, really, really ahead of her time," said her father, Teddy Dupay, a prep basketball legend in Florida who played collegiately at the University of Florida. "She loves this product. She's a very competitive kid, in school and golf."
Hannah, whose favorite golfer is Phil Mickelson, began playing golf about three years ago and twice has finished third in her age group in Idaho Golf Association Junior State Championships. She hopes to attend Pepperdine Universitiy on a golf scholarship, "because it's by the beach," Soluthern-Kelly said. If she doesn't play professional golf, she wants to be a doctor or a research pharmacist, Dupay said.
As for the business, "at some point I would like to expand it to becoming a junior girl clothing line," she said.