Clare Potter was a fashion designer who was born in Jersey City, New Jersey in 1903. In the 1930s she was one of the first American fashion designers to be promoted as an individual design talent.She has been credited as one of the inventors of American sportswear.Based in Manhattan, she continued designing through the 1940s and 1950s. Her clothes were renowned for being elegant, but easy-to-wear and relaxed, and for their distinctive use of colour.She founded a ready-to-wear fashion company in Manhattan named Timbertop in 1948, and in the 1960s she also established a wholesale company to manufacture fashions. Potter was one of the seventeen women gathered together by Edna Woolman Chase, editor-in-chief of Vogue to form the Fashion Group International, Inc., in 1928.Following a six-month hiatus in Mexico, Potter returned to Manhattan in 1930 and gained employment with the ready to wear firm of Charles W. Nudelman Inc. on Seventh Avenue, a manufacturer who specialized in affordable, good-quality ready-to-wear fashion.

Unusually, at a time when designers for large companies were not acknowledged by name, Clare Potter was promoted as a named designer by Dorothy Shaver, then vice-president of Lord & Taylor department store which was headquartered on Fifth Avenue,[1] who would become its first woman president.Potter was one of the first American designers to achieve such name recognition.

In 1936, Potter was featured alongside Elizabeth Hawes and Muriel King in the second Lord & Taylor "American Look" promotion which championed home-grown American design talent.She was awarded the first Lord & Taylor Design Award in 1938 for distinguished designing in the field of sportswear for women.During the 1940s, well-known Potter designs included the two-piece bathing suit consisting of separate small top and bloomers, a sweater designed for evening wear, and a sidesaddle-draped skirt. Examples of these designs were featured in the 1998-1999 exhibition Designing Women: American Style 1940-1960 at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. Her use of colour was distinctive, with one 1940s evening outfit consisting of a pink blouse, green belt, and pale blue skirt. Other designs were made up in one single, unique shade, such as the blue wool dress worn by Eleanor Roosevelt to meet George VI and his queen consort, Elizabeth in London, October 23, 1942.Roosevelt had been a fellow founder with Potter and others, of an association of women interested in advancing elegant and fashionable clothing for women, the Fashion Group International, FGI. In 1946, Potter was awarded a Coty Award for her casual clothes and her distinctive use of colour.

In 1948, Potter launched a ready-to-wear company called Timbertop, with a former magazine editor, Martha Stout. The company shared its name with the turkey farm in West Nyack where Potter and her husband, architect J. Sanford Potter, lived. They had married about 1930.