State & Liberty, with dress shirts designed for hockey players, now open in downtown Oakville

Designing clothes for athletes and men who lead active lifestyles has proven to be a winning strategy behind State & Liberty, an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based company who opened their second Canadian location in September in Oakville.

Founded by Michigan University grads and hockey players Steven Fisher and Lee Moffie, who both played for the Wolverines under hockey legend Red Berenson, State & Liberty was launched in 2014 because the business partners couldn’t find a professional-looking dress shirt to fit their athletic bodies.

The Oakville store, which followed the first Canadian store on Queen Stret in Toronto, is located at 181 Lakeshore Rd. E in downtown.

Moffie and Fisher tried hundreds of prototype fabrics and dress shirt fits before coming up with a material – a mix of polyester and spandex – that was ideal for hockey players and their ‘V’-shaped bodies.

With Fisher’s business analytics background (he worked for the Detroit Tigers for a time) to help guide them, State & Liberty was launched in 2014. Former Wolverines captain Mac Bennett, who played for the Hamilton Bulldogs in the American Hockey League in 2014-15, was added as Vice-President of Marketing in 2017.

The company added other clothing items to the repertoire in subsequent years but the dress shirt for the athletic build is still the heart of the business, with the company’s product line centred on athletic-fitting, moisture-wicking and wrinkle-free dress shirts.

The company now has more two dozen locations and client list that reads as a who’s who of professional sports, including hockey players Mitch Marner of the Toronto Maple Leafs, James van Riemsdyk of the Boston Bruins and Steven Stamkos of the Tampa Bay Lightning, golfer Grayson Murray, Trevor Plouffe of MLB’s Minnesota Twins and dozens of NFL players, including Jarrett Stidham of Denver, Blake Cashman of Houston, Aidan Hutchinson of Detroit and Frankie Luvu of Carolina.

The secret of the fit? The shirts have an extremely tailored waist to provide more room in the upper body, and darts in the back of the shirt to pull in the excess fabric “creating a fit that rewards those men that take care of their bodies.”

State & Liberty, named for an intersection in Ann Arbour, specialize in creating premium menswear – signature dress shirts, suits and blazers -that combines the elegance of custom tailoring with the ease of athletic wear.

Steven Stamkos of the Tampa Bay Lightning rocking a State & Main heathered stretch suit on game day