My name is Dana Michelle, and I'd like to introduce you to a shirt we named the "Finesse Tee".

I designed this shirt to deal with my daily "what to wear" dilemma.
But before telling you about the shirt, I want to tell you the story behind it.

Prior to Alex + Abby, I spent more than 20 years working with various brands to outfit athletes and teams. Much of my design work was focused on men's clothing.

Early in my career, women's activewear was very different than it is today. At the time, clothing brands used an approach I called "Shrink it and Pink it" to make active clothing for women. They didn't design activewear specific to a woman's body. Instead they repurposed existing men's designs and just made them in smaller sizes and different colors (like pink).

As you can imagine (or perhaps you remember), those clothes were ill-fitting and certainly were not very flattering. I hated the way those clothes looked on me and on other women. So I began to design active clothing specifically for women. This was a revolutionary concept at the time, and my women's designs became popular at the brands I worked with.

Then I decided it was time to stop designing for other brands. So I brought my knowledge of performance clothing and fabrics to Alex + Abby and began to create clothing I wanted to wear and knew my friends would also want to wear.

For inspiration I began to look through my own closet to find the pieces I was missing. As I went through my drawers I realized,

"Wow, I have a lot of tshirts!"

• I had tshirts for working out. They were performance pieces, but were too clingy and fitted to wear outside the gym.


• I had dressier tees for going out. They were beautiful and silky, but looked out of place for everyday.


• I had lounge tshirts. These were my most comfortable pieces - the ones I would wear around the house, but wouldn't dare wear in public.


• I had casual tshirts that I would wear under sweaters or jackets.

Why did I need so many tshirts?

It would certainly make getting dressed each day easier if I had a few go-to shirts that I could throw on without rummaging through drawers for the right shirt or thinking too hard about my activities for the day ahead. I wanted a basic tshirt, but one that looked good on me and was nice enough to wear anywhere - even for an impromptu workout.