CHUBBUCK — Lindsay Heyneman is on a mission to help women feel comfortable in their own bodies and look good while doing it.

She opened her boutique out of her dorm room at Utah State University in 2013. Ten years later, Lettie Boutique has blossomed into a successful business, and Heyneman is set to open the store's first brick-and-mortar location.

“I've just always loved clothes. Clothes are fun,” Heyneman said. “And I think that, as cliche as it sounds, what you put on your body makes a difference how you feel about yourself and how you present yourself to the world, and I just wanted a really easy and accessible way to help women feel better about themselves and go out into the world presenting their best self.”

Entrepreneurship runs in her blood. Her parents, Barry and Jacque Dutton, own the longtime Pocatello establishment Nel's Bi-Lo Market, which Heyneman’s great-grandfather opened in 1957. She says her sisters own businesses as well. Heyneman, who was born and raised in Chubbuck, was only 18 when the business bug hit her and she opened her shop — then called Lindsay’s Secret Closet — while she was a college student in Logan, Utah.

“I just wanted my own thing,” she said. “So I started in the dorm room and grew it from there.”

In 2016, business really started taking off, and that’s when she decided to change the name to something a bit more grown up. She stumbled across the name Lettie and it felt like the right fit.

“Lettie means to spread light and joy, and that's 100 percent what we try to do,” Heyneman said.

Then in 2017, Heyneman, her husband and high school sweetheart, Jonah, and their young daughter moved to Austin, Texas, so Jonah could finish training to become a physical therapist. They left the company based in Pocatello, and Heyneman says her team mostly ran things while she was away.

Jonah graduated in 2020, and the family moved back to Pocatello. At the time, Heyneman was trying to downsize the business. There was a lot going on globally — including the COVID-19 pandemic and supply chain issues — but it was also a hectic time in Heyneman’s life and in the lives of her employees. She gave birth to her second daughter in 2020, and her two main employees also had babies: twins and a baby born at 30 weeks.

Downsizing, however, didn’t stick.

“I really was trying to pull it back, (but) it wasn't going that way,” she said. “Honestly, I feel called to do the store. And I'm not exactly sure what the reason was, but every time I tried to drop it or leave it alone, it would just come right back around. For whatever reason, divine intervention, I just feel like that's what we're supposed to do right now. It's something that we always wanted to do. I'm so excited now. (There was) a whispering in my heart that said, ‘You need to build a store,’ and here we are.”

The new store, located at 443 E. Chubbuck Road next to Geronimo’s Trampoline Park in Chubbuck, is projected to open at the end of July, though as of publishing this story, there wasn’t a date set.

Heyneman said that at first, she was scared of opening up a brick-and-mortar store.

“It’s just a lot,” she said. “It's a lot more employees, a lot more overhead.”

Now, however, she’s excited to fill a need in the community.

“Most of my life has been spent here and we've just never had great retail here, but we're excited to change that,” Heyneman said. “I think that we can offer something a little different, and I hope that we can change that mindset that there's nowhere to shop here. As funny as it sounds, I hope more people open boutiques here. It's fun to be the first one, I guess, but I would really love to prove the concept and have other people be like, ‘Okay, let's do something here.’ I think that would be really great for Pocatello.”

While there are locally owned shops in the Gate City area that carry women’s clothing, there aren’t any that specialize only in clothes.

“My mom and my grandma lived here their whole lives and they don't remember there ever being one either,” Heyneman said. “(There are) people that will carry a handful of clothes but never just a women's store. So we're just really excited to change that and shake it up.”

Lettie Boutique mostly carries classic fashions, though they do carry some trendier pieces as well.

“We typically try to stay fairly classic and feed a few trends in,” she said. “I feel like it's a little bit more sustainable that way and trends are hard to chase; trends just turn over so quickly. So yeah, we try and stay pretty classic — things that will last you for several years — and then throw in some edge of some trendy pieces and trendy accessories and stuff to kind of upgrade your outfit.”

Heyneman said business these days is pretty solid.

“We really scaled back in 2020, 2021 and the numbers shrink with that, of course, but we're up again,” she said. “We're heading to a good spot. We do a lot of pop-up shops, and those always go really well for us. Even though it's not necessarily a proven concept in town, it's needed, and when we show up in-person in town, people show up for us and so I think that it'll be well received.”

Heyneman says she can’t wait to bring the boutique’s online community into a physical location. She has hosted in-person events in the past, and having a store will only make that easier.

“We’ve built a really strong online community and we do a lot of events,” she said. “I hosted a Lettie Disney Day. We all went to Disneyland in January. It was so fun. We haven't this summer because I've just been so busy with the store but we usually say, ‘Hey, we're meeting up at the splash pad. Bring popsicles, bring your kids. Come do a Lettie play date.’ So I'm just so excited to have a physical space to do like girls night. We're so excited about the store to provide that, but what we're really trying to provide is community and a tribe for people that don't have one or that their tribe is far away.”

Once the shop is open, Heyneman says they’d like to have at least one community event each month.

“We're just really excited to be able to bring our online community in-person and create more connections there,” she said. “We really have a place where people can come and feel loved and part of something.”

She hopes the shop will be a special place for women in the area.

“We really try to let women create a space where they can come and feel welcomed and valued," Heyneman said. "They come in, we hug them and send them out feeling a little bit better than they came in. That's the goal. I keep saying, … ‘It should feel like walking into a hug.’ That's what our company tries to do.”

For more information and to stay up to date about what’s going on at Lettie Boutique, visit lettieboutique.com or @lettieboutique on Facebook and Instagram. The shop ships nationwide and internationally.