Story by Kimisha Chambers

It has been four years since Glenda Elliott’s mother died of breast cancer. After a seven-year fight, the cancer spread to 67-year-old Marge Trask’s liver and was too strong for her to combat.

“She passed away two months before my daughter graduated from high school, which was really sad because they were such great friends,” Elliott says. “And my mom lived just a couple of blocks from me—we saw each other everyday.”

In honor of her mother’s memory, Elliott and her family began participating in the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure, doing what they could to raise awareness of the disease that took her mother’s life. It wasn’t until a group of women asked her company to design a T-shirt, though, that Elliott found a way to put her talents to use in the fight against breast cancer.

A few nurses in Waterloo, Iowa, were doing a mammogram on Mary Seitz, a co-worker, when they found breast cancer. They contacted Elliott asking her to design a T-shirt that said “Fight Like a Girl” for them to sell to raise money for their friend. The nurses ended up raising over $20,000 for Seitz’s hospital bills, donating the extra money to the American Cancer Society. Seitz is now cancer-free.

After hearing about how successful the T-shirt sale had been, nurses at Boone County Hospital, Manchester Regional Medical Center, and Humboldt County Memorial Hospital called Elliott to start fundraisers of their own. As the T-shirts became more popular and requests came rolling in, people began asking Beth Cross, Elliott’s boss and president of Sigler Companies, where they could buy their own “Fight Like a Girl” shirts. Elliott and Cross decided to make these shirts part of the company, launching the line under the name “Signify Pink.”

Since then, Sigler Companies has supplied T-shirts to over 350 fundraisers throughout the country. “I didn’t know a lot about breast cancer until I started working on ‘Fight Like a Girl’ and hearing all these stories,” Elliott says. “Because my mom passed away from breast cancer, it’s very personal for me. I wish I would have been doing this when she was still alive.”

In one short year, Signify Pink raised $350,000 from fundraisers, their online store, and direct sales in their 500 retail stores. With Signify Pink into its second year, Elliott hopes it will continue to grow until there is a cure for breast cancer.