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Created for NASCAR's curves

TrackCouture offers a line of fan clothing fitted to the female form, from miniskirts to tiny tanks.

By MICHAEL KRUSE
Published December 24, 2006

You might want to read this if you're a woman who likes NASCAR but does not like T-shirts that come in garish airbrushed hood-cover colors and hang on your body like an extra large trash bag.

You might want to read this if you're a man who is dating or married to such a woman, or who wants to be either of the two here on the last day of Christmas shopping, hint, hint.

You also might want to read this even if you don't understand the fixation of many, many folks with stock cars making three to four hours of left-hand turns but generally are aware that NASCAR contends it is no longer only for guys with pickups and beer guts and names like Billy Bob or Jimmie Ray.

Here's the deal:

This is a story about two young women from Memphis, an idea had in Vegas and then taken to Charlotte, N.C., and a business plan that has gone nationwide.

Kathleen Smith and Lisa Heros, longtime friends, both 27, are the co-founders of TrackCouture, which started this past February and sells NASCAR-themed, driver-specific tight-fitting tank tops and hoodies and baby-doll T-shirts to women 13 to 40 years old.

NASCAR by now isn't just yee-haw, paint-swapping fun, and hasn't been for a good long while. It is the second-most watched sport on TV behind the NFL, and has tracks not just in Georgia, Alabama and the Carolinas but in California, Arizona and Illinois. Merchandise sales have gone from $600-million in 1996 to about $2.2-billion last year.

But that growth has started to slow in the last year or so. So NASCAR looked for the next group to which to sell stuff.

The results have gone kind of like this:

NASCAR bikinis.

NASCAR purses and "shoulder clutches."

NASCAR high heels with checkered-flag patterns.

NASCAR-licensed Harlequin romance novels. For real. And a book called The Girl's Guide to NASCAR came out in May.

Five years ago, NASCAR did $84-million of sales to women, vice president of licensing Mark Dyer told USA Today earlier this year, and in 2006 the sport expects that figure to be roughly a quarter of a billion bucks.

Enter TrackCouture. Smith and Heros, former Catholic schoolmates who liked having slumber parties and going to the mall, now are big on appletinis and the colors purple and pink. Their "lifestyle brand," it says on TrackCouture.com, is "fun, flirty, and feminine."

All of this started in April of '04 when Heros was in Vegas with two college friends and ended up getting tickets to the race out there. If she was going to go, she wanted to wear a NASCAR shirt, something cute, so she started looking around: men's shirts, boxy, black, "horrible."

So Heros made her own. She ironed a small number onto the front of a tight-fitting T with little yellow sleeves. At the track, she said, folks were walking up to her, asking her where she had gotten it, if they could buy it, like right there, right off her back, for $100.

Heros has an MBA from Ole Miss. She started thinking.

This is where Smith comes in. Smith and Heros always had talked as girls about growing up and owning a fashion company together. Never, not ever, not even for a single sec, did they think it also would involve lug nuts and pit stops, but hey.

So Smith talked to her dad about the idea. Maybe you've heard of him. Fred Smith. Started FedEx. Now chairman, president and chief executive officer. Anyway, he made some calls - FedEx sponsors driver Denny Hamlin's car - and in August '05 the 20-something tag team of Lisa Heros and Kathleen Smith were in a boardroom at NASCAR headquarters in Charlotte.

The meeting took an hour.

TrackCouture left with an official license to sell.

"NASCAR is trying to get in with the younger crowd, the teen crowd, the Hollywood crowd - sort of that pop culture image," Heros said the other day on the phone.

"It's growing," Smith said. "It's not really slow, ever, with NASCAR, I don't think."

"Our stuff," it has sold all over the country, Heros said. "People say NASCAR is biggest in the South. Well, our apparel has sold all over the place - Canada, Michigan, Washington state, California, Hawaii."

Tony Stewart, the gruff, confrontational, 5-o'clock-shadowed driver of the No. 20 Home Depot car, is TrackCouture's biggest seller so far. His gear comes in, among other styles, "I Heart Tees," "I Heart Tanks" and pink "Miss" tops.

Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or 352 848-1434.

. ON THE WEB

www.trackcouture.com

So it's too late to get the pink NASCAR glitter pants wrapped and under the tree. But you can print out a Web page of clothes featuring your sweetie's favorite driver and ask her to pick any item. (Tip: Now is not the time to balk at that $27.99 T-shirt.)

. ON THE WEB

[Last modified December 24, 2006, 11:09:01]