Samantha Busch’s fashion line offers comfort, sense of adventure

Car parts alongside clothing racks with high-low dresses and fringe jackets is the new normal at Kyle Busch Motorsports since Samantha Busch launched her online clothing retailer Murph Boutique on Jan. 26.

With the addition of a wall, built by her father, and hot pink couch, a mezzanine at the KBM headquarters north of Charlotte, North Carolina, quickly went from stark to stylish. Busch can host photo shoots and pop-up shops in the space — just add Champagne and cake pops.

“The women who work for us, too, kind of love it,” says Busch, wife of NASCAR driver Kyle Busch. There’s one full-time Murph Boutique employee, and then a few KBM employees who help out part time.

Though Samantha and Kyle Busch are based in North Carolina now, Kyle and his brother Kurt grew up in Las Vegas and pass through every year for NASCAR’s West Coast swing, a trio of races in Arizona, Las Vegas and California.

Samantha Busch considered opening a store for years, but the timing was never right. She and her husband struggled with infertility and underwent in vitro fertilization, a process she’s been open about on her blog, samanthabusch.com. Now that their son, Brexton, is a little older (he’s 20 months), she felt she could tackle the longtime goal.

“It just seems like a really natural fit,” says the Buschs’ executive assistant, Amy Cavitch. She helped bring Murph Boutique to fruition, from shopping for merchandise with Busch in L.A. in December to designing the logo and responding to customer emails. “Everybody has really rallied behind it.”

The boutique sells casual and athletic wear in addition to showier pieces that reflect Busch’s personal style. Notably, the clothing is relatively inexpensive — many dresses cost between $25 and $50 — and ranges in size from small to 3XL. Affordability and plus-size options were two of the main requests she got from fans, both at the racetrack and on social media, where she has amassed 84,300 followers on Instagram and 206,000 on Twitter.

It was important to ensure “that nobody felt turned away,” she says.

Before the red carpets and blog posts, Busch’s late grandmother instilled in her an adventurous sense of style. Busch remembers a dress with 3-D butterflies on it and closets upon closets of clothing and shoes that Busch would try on, several pieces at a time. The boutique is actually named after this influential woman — Murph was her grandmother’s nickname.

“I was her only granddaughter, and she was super girly like I am,” Busch says.

Busch can’t pigeonhole her style, though. She wanted to walk that same line with the boutique: offering clothes many women are comfortable in as well as flashier options to inspire customers to try something new.

“Every day is something different and I think that was something I was taught by my grandma,” Busch says. “She always had taught me about fashion and kind of pushed the envelope.”

Read more from Sarah Corsa at reviewjournal.com. Contact her at scorsa@reviewjournal.com and follow @sarahcorsa on Twitter.