A Law Student Noticed the Dearth of Professional Clothing for Women. She Created Her Own Company To Fill It.

Second-year Harvard Law School student Logan E. Brown recently launched professional pantsuit company Spencer Jane after cross-enrolling in courses at the Harvard Business School and working with the Harvard Innovation Labs.

Spencer Jane — whose site went live this January — sells a signature Ultimate Work-From-Home Blazer, as well as sweatpants and masks.

“We reinvented the blazer with the modern woman in mind,” the website reads, touting their flagship product’s versatility, practicality, and sustainability.

Brown said she was inspired to create the company when she was a first-year student at the Law School and experienced the difficulty of finding comfortable professional clothing for interviews.

“I wanted something that would last me well into the beginning of my legal career and also made me feel good,” she said. “I was going to all sorts of malls all over Boston.”

When she texted her friends to ask where they all tended to purchase their professional attire, Brown said she identified a dearth of clothing options for women in their position.

“That’s when I realized that this was a common frustration,” Brown said. “There are plenty of places that sell pantsuits, but none that really made what I was looking for. And so that was the original idea — or where the original frustration for Spencer Jane came from.”

Brown said she initially circulated a survey asking respondents where they purchased their pantsuits — and how much time they spend searching for suitable attire — with the intention of writing a paper on the topic for a Business School course, Field X.

“As I was getting all of this information and talking to more and more people, I decided that I was going to actually just fix the problem,” she said. “That’s whenever I had the idea to create Spencer Jane, and create a pantsuit based off of all of the survey data that I had collected.”

Matthew F. Sutton, a teaching assistant for Field X, the Harvard Business School course Brown took to develop her personal brand, said that the class is popular among students enrolled in other Harvard schools.

“There’s an increasing number of cross registrants that come over,” he said. “We work with them to try to help them ideate, and then form a business idea that they can build upon.”

“The students develop great ideas, and we’re just there to help any way we can. Sometimes that’s with suggestions, sometimes it’s with introductions,” Field X instructor and Business School Professor Randolph B. Cohen ’87 said. “There’s about 60 teams in the class that are building businesses, so they’re really the key motivators and the idea generators.”

“All businesses in this pandemic environment — [especially] startup businesses — face enormous challenges, and Logan’s is certainly no exception,” Cohen said. “She wants to sell workwear in a time when a lot of people aren’t going into the office, and she came up with a very clever solution to that challenge, which I really admire.”

Cohen touted Brown’s innovative entrepreneurial spirit — particularly her decision to launch Spencer Jane’s Quarantine Collection.

“It’s a real credit to her how far she’s come while taking a full course load at Harvard Law School,” he said.

Brown has amassed more than 67,000 likes on TikTok as of Wednesday and uses the platform to promote her clothing brand. A fan of the canonical 2001 film Legally Blond, she has also publicly offered to make a pink version of the pantsuit for Reese Witherspoon, whose character makes a splash at Harvard Law School.

One customer has even purchased the blazer to wear at her wedding, something Brown says is “the most exciting thing” that has probably ever happened to her.

Marisa M. Peebles, who attended Vanderbilt University with Brown, said that she and their other friends from college are “never surprised” by all of the “crazy brilliant” endeavors that Brown takes on.

Peebles said that she believes Spencer Jane is very “up with the times,” and embodies a “new mold” that synthesizes professionalism with comfort — particularly in the pandemic, when most people are working from home.

“With Logan’s brilliance, she’ll be able to lead the company in a way that will continue to stay up on the trends, regardless of whatever 2021 throws at us,” she added.

—Staff writer Emmy M. Cho can be reached at emmy.cho@thecrimson.com.