California Apparel News

To wander through the studios of Los Angeles’ designers during these taxing economic times is to see creativity working in overdrive.

The doyens of some of Los Angeles’ best-known labels are sitting in their ateliers, crafting ways to make up for lost revenue now that retailers are keeping tighter inventories and buying closer to season, leaving designer product sitting longer in the warehouse rather than hanging on a rack attracting a customer’s eye and wallet.

What many are taking from these challenging times is this: Those who are willing to venture into uncharted territory will have a better chance of survival.

That’s true for Randa Allen, chief designer and president of Notice Inc., whose two contemporary labels are Curtsey and Notice. “We are thinking of everything outside of the box right now,” said Allen, who last November had to slash her staff from 24 to 14 people.

In October, when Allen realized her Spring ’09 orders were about half of what they had been the previous year, she scampered to find ways to use up her excess European fabric destined for her Spring collections. Many times, excess fabric gets sold to jobbers for pennies on the dollar.

So she took 50 to 100 yards of fabric from each of her two contemporary lines, applied them to her best-selling bodies and created a new line of tops and dresses called Sass Me. The line, which started shipping in January, wholesales for $18 to $34, compared with her normal wholesale price range of $39 to $119.

“It satisfied a lot of my sales reps looking for lower price points,” she said. “It’s a great outlet.”

In addition, she is now sharing her office building with designer Carilyn Vaile, whose Carilyn Vaile label once occupied 8,000 square feet in Torrance, Calif. Vaile has retooled her label, now called Vaile Couture, into a more focused, succinct collection. With only 1,500 square feet of work space, Vaile is saving $5,500 a month in rent and sharing resources while Allen brings in more rent money. “Hopefully we’ll be more profitable,” Allen said.

With retail-sales declines in all but a few categories, everyone is feeling the fallout. Even though Easter fell during the first week of April, retail sales for that month fell 1.7 percent over the same period last year. Apparel sales slipped 3 percent in year-over-year terms. And March was even worse, with retail sales declining 3.7 percent over 2008.

The most affected have been high-end stores that have been walloped by price-conscious consumers. In April, Saks Fifth Avenue saw a stunning 32 percent drop in same-store sales. Neiman Marcus had a 22.5 percent slide.

“The customer is really seeking out value, no matter what demographic you have,” said retail analyst Jeffrey Van Sinderen of B. Riley & Co. in Los Angeles.

With that in mind, Los Angeles designer Rami Kashou—a runner-up in the fourth TV season of “Project Runway”—has been selling some of his goods on the HSN Inc. home-shopping network. In March, Kashou made two appearances on “Curations,” a new show hosted by Stefani Greenfield, co-owner of the upscale contemporary Scoop boutiques, which were started in New York City.

Kashou designed a strapless jersey jumpsuit for one show and a one-shoulder jersey dress for another show. Both were reasonably priced for a designer item and made of comfortable fabrics that wouldn’t wrinkle.

Kashou appeared on the show, discussed his creations and inspiration, and then allowed the ordering to begin. “I came on for eight minutes the first night to push the jumpsuit, and the next day was to push the dress,” said Kashou, a Palestinian native of Israel who migrated to the United States in 1996. By day two, Kashou had sold 600 jumpsuits at $185 each and 500 dresses at $138.80, a bargain compared with his $450 to $600 ready-to-wear prices.

Last year, when he appeared on HSN for the first time, his size-forgiving Grecian goddess dress, priced at $280, sold out in 3frac12; minutes.

“In three minutes, you sell what you would sell in five months,” Kashou said.

Now the designer is developing an exclusive collection for “Curations.” Instead of appearing for just a few minutes, he could have his own segment.

“This is something I would not have thought about four or five years ago,” Kashy;shou observed. “But it is putting a smile on my face.”

Not all designers believe home shopping is the way to go. For Kevan Hall, a Los Angeles designer known for his red-carpet dresses, the latest route to prosperity has been to travel down a number of roads.

Earlier this year, Hall revealed he would be designing a new collection, called Kevan Hall for Paul Stanley, reviving the name of a high-end Los Angeles women’s suit maker that closed its doors years ago. While Hall’s cocktail and evening dresses under his Kevan Hall Signature label normally wholesale for $600 to $3,000, the Paul Stanley assortment is selling at a more modest sum. With the sophisticated working woman in mind, tops wholesale for $50 and jackets for $180. The label is now selling at Bloomingdale’s.

With that project well on its way, Hall has turned to developing a price-reasonable secondary collection of evening gowns and cocktail dresses called Kevan Hall Studio. Wholesale prices would be relatively modest for a designer label, ranging from $200 to $450 but still offering fine fabrics and Hall’s signature saturated color schemes.

He is currently negotiating with a major upscale retailer to carry the collection. “We’re working on that now and trying to finalize the deal,” said Hall, a one-time designer for Halston.

And in April, the Los Angeles designer launched a bridal line called Kevan Hall Esposa, which wholesales for $1,400 to $3,000. “We have been doing bridal all along for special orders,” he said. “But this is a small, cohesive collection that has more to do with destination brides who are flying to Jamaica or Hawaii or Mexico to get married. hellip; It was a way to find additional stores.”

While many designers have been working to retool collections that fetch lower prices, Los Angeles designer Trina Turk is adamantly opposed to dropping numbers to sell more. “I think that would be a mistake right now because things are bound to come back,” she said. “We have spent 13 years establishing ourselves in this particular niche. Once you lower your prices, it is difficult to get them back up.”

Not that retailers haven’t taken their markdowns. When Turk’s goods arrived at the stores for the holiday season, she fought to avoid 40 percent markdowns, which occurred as soon as her styles hit the racks at stores such as Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s and Neiman Marcus.

Her tactic has been to concentrate on product and add to her lineup of Trina Turk stores, which have been slowly unfolding in California and New York. On May 22, she is debuting a pop-up store in the East Hamptons that will remain open until at least Labor Day. “Usually space in the Hamptons is hard to come by and expensive. But this year there was more space available than normal,” she said of the 1,100-square-foot boutique that will have no retail frills, just plain white walls and vintage furniture. “Because our collection is very colorful and resort-oriented, people have always said, ’You should have a store in the Hamptons.’ So we are going to give it a go.”