Active women need the proper gear to match their lifestyles — and that includes their clothing. No one knows this better than North Lake Tahoe resident Emily McAllister who recently launched her swimwear line Junipers, The Do-It-All Hybrid Bikini. Made of eco-friendly material, Junipers are designed to be dry 15 minutes after leaving the water, so you can pull on a shirt or dress.
“I kept finding myself in situations where I was holding back from doing things I wanted to do because I was just in a typical string bikini.”-Emily McAllister
McAllister lives the quintessential Tahoe lifestyle, biking, hiking, backpacking, paddleboarding, waterskiing, et cetera. She has always wanted to end her day in comfortable clothing. However, she has always had the problem that many women do of finding someplace to change out of a bathing suit at the end of the day or end up spending an evening out on the town or on a bike ride home being cold and wet. That’s why McAllister created Junipers.
“I kept finding myself in situations where I was holding back from doing things I wanted to do because I was just in a typical string bikini,” McAllister says. “My husband and I lived in New York and I remember we went on a 30-mile bike ride one day to Rockport Beach and jumped in the ocean. I had to bike back wet and salty, so it wasn’t as fun for me.”
Once she says she was at a restaurant on the lake in Tahoe City with friends and the guys wanted to go for a swim, but the girls didn’t want to jump in because none of them had brought an extra change of clothes. These types of situations prompted McAllister to create a versatile swimsuit that worked for her and her fellow adventurous female friends.
In 2017, McAllister put together a sketch and went online to find a manufacturing partner who could help her make a prototype. Even though McAllister admits that she doesn’t have any kind of background in apparel, she has always had a creative side.
“I just kind of went for it and found this awesome factory in Minnesota,” she says of the clothing manufacturer who helped her come up with the quick-drying fabric and material design for Junipers.
During the testing process, McAllister also looked at existing brands of men’s bike shorts and asked her outdoorsy male counterparts what they liked and didn’t like about certain brands. The final result was to use RecoTex, a fabric comprised of 91 percent post-consumer, water-bottle polyester and 9 percent spandex with a water-repellent finish.
“A big part of the reason why regular swimsuits take longer to dry is because of the amount of spandex used, the material that creates stretch. So, I found a fabric that has less give but it dries quickly,” McAllister says.
Whether floating the Truckee River, hiking out and back to Aloha Lake in Desolation Wilderness or climbing the rocks of D.L. Bliss State Park to jump into the water, it’s nice having full coverage and protection in any kind of situation.
After two years of testing Junipers while enjoying her active lifestyle, McAllister reached the point where she felt like it was ready to be worn by others. She manufactured it in a variety of sizes and reached out to active women across the country, asking them to try the Junipers and share their feedback. Over the last few months, Junipers started spreading on a grassroots level and she launched a Kickstarter campaign on July 7 to raise money for more testing and development. In one day, she reached her $10,000 goal.
“I had a waiting list of people who wanted Junipers and have been getting requests to add additional sizes and colors,” she says.
As far as where McAllister came up with the name Junipers, she says that she wanted something that portrayed extreme adaptability and hardiness like the juniper trees that can be found thriving in the Himalayas, Death Valley and the Sierra Nevada.
“I also wanted it to be this fun thing to say as you’re going out the door: ‘Hold on, let me grab my Junipers,’” she says.
She explains that Junipers clothing is meant to do all the work for you in absorbing water, drying quickly and providing maximum coverage. They should be considered a technical piece of clothing to complement the rest of one’s technical outdoor gear. | Junipers on kickstarter.com
