In celebration of National Women-Owned Business Month, we’re taking a closer look at the women behind Save the Girls.
This summer, I had the pleasure of interviewing founder Tami Lange about the business she launched on her 50th birthday. Her story offered a look at the experience, determination, and follow-through that helped turn an idea into a growing company.
This time, we’re exploring the women helping her build it. Elizabeth Lange, Tami’s daughter and Director of Sales and Marketing, gives us a closer look at the women behind the business, what it means to work alongside her mom, and the fresh ideas a new generation brings to its growth.
It’s also a chance to see what happens when a daughter comes to know her mother as a business partner, and they discover what they can build together.
An unexpected invitation
Elizabeth Lange did not grow up imagining she would work alongside her mother.
After college, she was a cruise director and tour guide. She loved traveling, meeting people, and working in tourism. Then COVID brought her home, interrupting the life she had been enjoying.
As her mother’s business began picking back up, Tami offered her a different reason to travel: come do it for Save the Girls.
They thought it would last about two years.
Five years later, Elizabeth is the company’s Director of Sales and Marketing. The work has grown well beyond that original invitation. So has her relationship with her mom.
“It has been just my absolute joy to be able to work alongside her for these past 5 years,” Elizabeth says.
Working together has given her the chance to recognize strengths she did not fully understand as a child. She has come to know Tami as a business partner, a leader, and an adult whose energy and determination she admires.
There is something familiar in that shift. We can spend years knowing someone through their place in our family. Then a different season gives us a chance to see more of who they are.
For Elizabeth, that season arrived through work she had expected to be temporary.
A new chapter at 50
Tami launched Save the Girls on September 1, 2017, bringing years of marketing experience and the experience of raising five children into that next chapter.
The idea grew from an everyday frustration over lost phones and a moment in Branson when her sister-in-law, a breast cancer survivor, pulled her phone from her bra. Tami saw an opportunity to create a better way for women to carry and use their phones.
Turning that idea into a business took persistence. In our earlier interview, Tami shared that the company brought in just $590 in its first month. The growth Elizabeth describes today came after years of developing the product, finding customers, and following through.
Her daughter has now had a front-row seat to what that determination looks like.
“I have learned what true grit looks like and that overnight successes are far from overnight.”
Finding her place as the business grows
Elizabeth’s title covers sales and marketing, but her responsibilities have stretched wherever the business needed her.
She films content, works with the social media and email teams, helps align photography and the website, and meets customers at wholesale trade shows. She also takes on new programs, builds the systems to support them, and helps bring in someone to manage them as they grow.
At one point, that meant figuring out shipping and the company’s backend operations. Once the operation was established and had grown beyond what she could manage alongside her other work, the company hired a dedicated Director of Operations.
More recently, she helped build and train teams for the Costco Roadshow program, where Save the Girls sells its products during events lasting five to ten days. As that program expanded, a Costco manager came aboard, allowing Elizabeth to return her attention to sales and marketing.
“Being in a small business, and especially when that business is yours, you end up wearing lots of hats,” she says.
Being able to pass one of those responsibilities to someone else has become its own kind of accomplishment. It means something she helped build can keep moving, while she returns to the work she is most passionate about.
She has brought her own perspective to the company, too. Elizabeth points to social media as an especially significant contribution. What began with questions about whether the business needed those accounts has become, she says, its main traffic driver, with content and advertising playing a major role in sales.
Learning each other beyond mother and daughter
Ask Elizabeth how her strengths complement her mother’s, and she offers an honest answer: they share some of the same strengths and weaknesses.
Both can charge into a new idea. Both feed off the other’s enthusiasm. That is where Angie, the company’s Business Manager and first employee, helps bring detail and perspective to their plans.
The family relationship brings its own learning curve.
At home or during family gatherings, conversation can naturally drift toward work. Elizabeth and Tami are still learning how to let family time remain family time, especially when other relatives are there.
Elizabeth does not present that balance as something they have mastered. It is something they are practicing.
Alongside that challenge is the pleasure of getting to know her mother in a deeper way. Watching Tami lead has helped Elizabeth recognize qualities that were there throughout her childhood, but that she can now appreciate differently.
“But now as an adult, I can see these different strengths that she had throughout my entire life.”
Having worked for a family-owned business for the past eight years, I found myself thinking about the relationships behind Elizabeth’s answers. At McCullough’s Flooring, I’ve seen how different generations bring their own experience, ideas, and perspectives to the same business. That made me especially interested in what Elizabeth is helping build alongside her mother, and how working together has allowed her to see Tami in a new way.
The women behind the work
According to Elizabeth, Save the Girls reached $10 million in sales in 2025 with a core team of 21 people.
Behind that figure is a business that remains hands-on. Elizabeth films much of the content herself. Customer service staff respond personally to messages. Customer feedback helps shape new designs.
“What looks like a big brand is really a handful of people who care a lot.”
Its five-woman leadership team includes Tami, Founder and CEO; Teri, Director of Operations; Angie, Business Manager; Elizabeth, Director of Sales and Marketing; and Nadine, known as Dede, Wholesale Manager.
The customer service team has its own nickname: the A team, made up of Anne-Marie, Anna, and Angel. Elizabeth credits them with continually finding ways to help customers and improve their experience.
She also describes a workplace where people celebrate personal milestones as well as professional ones, pray for one another, and offer support through illness, injury, and difficult seasons.
They can stress each other out, she acknowledges. They also find their way back together.
That combination of care and candor makes her description of the team feel human. There is work to accomplish, and there are people carrying their lives into that work every day.
Returning to where it began
To celebrate reaching $10 million in sales, the team finished early on a Thursday this summer, closed the shop on Friday, and went to Branson.
The destination held meaning. Elizabeth says Branson is where the idea for Save the Girls began.
The trip brought the team back to the place that helped inspire Tami’s idea. Elizabeth also emphasizes that supporting breast cancer causes has been part of the company from the beginning.
Returning to Branson gave the team a way to celebrate how far that idea had traveled.
Now the company is expanding its sales team across the country through the Costco Roadshow program and introducing designs such as Nova. Elizabeth says the goal is to become a household name while preserving the close relationships and faith that shape the workplace.
“We’ve had plenty of moments where we didn’t have it all figured out, but we figured it out together, and that’s what got us here.”
For Elizabeth, these five years have brought a career she did not anticipate and a deeper understanding of the woman who raised her. She has learned from her mother’s determination while contributing ideas and building programs of her own.
