Growing up in Greenville, Morgan Grandy Hunt’s creative juices flowed into fashions she’d design and stitch together with her grandmother.


When Hunt left Greenville for Dallas after high school graduation, she set aside that creativity.


She earned a business administration degree in finance and went to work as a financial analyst.


This month, Hunt officially returned to her creative roots by launching her own clothing line, Morgan James.


The 2004 graduate of Christ Church Episcopal School will formally introduce that line on Aug. 9, at a Southeast Launch Trunk Show in Atlanta.


Hunt, now married and a mother, told The Greenville News in a phone interview from her Dallas home that she’s doing what has come natural.


But to get where she is today, an entrepreneur living her passion, has been “a pretty neat ascent over the past year and a half,” she said.


“I definitely doubted myself a lot and wondered why am I doing this?,” Hunt said. “Once I was in the process and seeing it all come together, I was proud of what I was doing.”


Hunt’s Morgan James line features “menswear inspired jackets, leather leggings, flirty dresses and maxis, breezy blouses, and tailored basics.”


For now, the items are for purchase primarily through the web site http://ift.tt/1k7izzw.


“Hopefully, we will get a good result and be able to keep going,” Hunt said. “Who knows if going into retail stores is in our future? We’ll see how it unfolds.”


As a youth, she would be the one to “find a cool scarf” to make new sleeves for a plain T-shirt.


She was also “always that person” who would have in her head what she wanted her prom dress to look like, but could never find it in the stores.


So, she’d sit down with her mother, Megan Turbeville, who now lives in Charleston, and grandmother, Patricia Hartley, “a wonderful seamstress,” to draw the dress, pick out the fabric, and make it.


She was also influenced by her father, Matthew Grandy of Greenville. He ran the family-owned, Greenville-based business that produced the Michael Thomas and Snake Eyes golf apparel lines.


Hunt considers it “kind of random” that she ended up in finance after her 2008 graduation from Southern Methodist University in Dallas.


In 2011, she married Casey Hunt, who works in the oil and gas industry.


Pregnancy sparked her passion for children and re-ignited Hunt’s flame of creativity.


She quit her corporate job and became a nanny. After her son was born, she became a stay-at-home-mom.


“I was able to devote myself not only to my son, but to thinking about what I wanted to do,” she said.


She started sketching and found someone in Dallas with a design background “to help me get it all out on paper. Then, I found contacts in New York. All of a sudden, a clothing line was born.”


The clothing line bears Hartley’s maiden name is Morgan and the first name of her first son, 22-month-old, James.


“The two of them were my inspiration and fueled my creativity, so it felt only fitting for the name to be in honor of them,” said Hunt, who is eight months pregnant with her second son.


Hunt’s dream is to someday see someone in a restaurant or some place wearing her articles of clothing.


“You’re always a little nervous when you put yourself out there, especially when it’s something creative because while I think it’s pretty and I like it, who knows if the rest of the world is going to think that,” she said.


“So, it’s definitely a little nerve wracking. But the process has been fun and fulfilling, said Hunt, 27. “Seeing it all go from from a sketch on the back of a receipt to a made garment that someone can actually purchase is pretty neat. It certainly has been fun and a dream come true.”


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