The Hoff family has many fond memories of visiting the nearby Black Beach in Silver Bay. Now they're hoping to provide beach visitors with a piece of clothing to remember their visits to the North Shore.

"We realized that more and more people were coming down there as the years went by and they didn’t really have anything," said Livia Hoff, 15. "If you go other places, they have stuff you can buy to remember your trip. Here they don’t have much to remember our beautiful beach, so we wanted to give people a memory."

Livia and her mother Lisa Hoff started Black Beach Company, a clothing company which sells Black Beach apparel such as t-shirts, sweatshirts and hats. The mother-daughter team worked with fellow Silver Bay resident Megan Timm to create their website and find a graphic designer from Duluth to create the logo.

"Our designer came up and visited the beach, then talked with us about our vision of the beach," Lisa Hoff said. "It was really fun to create the logo and see how it turned out."

Once the logo was created, next came picking the apparel. Livia wanted to make sure the clothing they chose represented the beach and only picked items that kept with the color themes of gray, blue and black.

"The blue represents the clear water, the black and gray, the taconite washed beach," Livia said. "And we wanted to make things like sweatshirts and jackets for people who weren't' expecting the cold weather down by the lake."

The company officially launched over Bay Days, with a booth at the community event. Since then, the company has mainly taken orders from its website, but items will soon be found in a few locations around Silver Bay. Most recently, the apparel can be found at the AmericInn near Black Beach.

"While I was setting it out there, people were already buying it," Lisa said. "So it’s pretty exciting, as a business owner, to see that people really do care and want something to remember Black Beach."

To read the original article and see related reporting, follow this link to the Lake County News Chronicle.  https://www.lcnewschronicle.com/business/small-business/4636340-Silver-Bay-family-starts-clothing-br...