DESIGN : Rhinestone Cowgirl : Nancy Heller and the Birth of the Elegant T-Shirt
TWO DAYS BEFORE the awards ceremony honoring the California Designer of the Year, the presenters discovered that their honoree, Nancy Heller, was in Paris on the first leg of a three-week, three-continent business trip. They panicked. We can’t give the award to a no-show, they thought. So they broke their secrecy rule and told Heller’s boyfriend, Art Snyder, the news. He tracked her down, and, 20 hours later, she arrived in Los Angeles in time to accept her Rudi, named after the innovative California designer Rudi Gernreich. Still surprised and delighted, the 38-year-old designer told the sold-out crowd at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “I’m real proud. I’m going to cry.”
Fifteen years ago, Nancy Heller bought a Carter’s undershirt. She took it home, dyed it, embroidered flowers along the neckline and, using a hand tool, studded each sleeve with 300 rhinestones. When she wore the shirt to a Bette Midler concert, several people who saw her wanted to know where she got it. The next day, a girlfriend borrowed the undershirt and wore it to a party where one of the guests happened to be Herbert Fink, owner of Theodore’s, a boutique on Rodeo Drive. “I’d never seen a T-shirt with rhinestones on it before,” Fink says. He called Heller the next morning, introduced himself and asked her to make 50 of the rhinestone-studded undershirts for his store.
“I’m sure Herbert Fink thought he’d never see me again,” Heller says. With the help of a company downtown specializing in rhinestoning and embroidery, she appeared a couple of weeks later with 50 shirts. “I charged Herb $28 for each one, and he priced them, I think, at $58. I was only 21, but I knew this was major.”
Fink put the shirts in his store on Friday. On Saturday, he called Heller to announce that the shirts had sold out. Then he gave her an order for 500. Those sold out in two days. Fink says he asked Heller to give him an exclusive. When she refused, he placed an order so big that she wouldn’t be able to make the shirts for anyone else. “I wanted to help her,” he says, “but I’m a businessman, too. The best way to prevent her from selling to other people was to make her too busy.” He placed an order for 7,000 shirts, and Nancy Heller was in business.
The idea for the rhinestone T-shirt and its subsequent success came as no surprise to anyone who knew Nancy Shapiro as a child. At 8, she was already begging her parents for a sewing machine. “My mother didn’t sew,” she says, “but my father was a big coat manufacturer. He was my idol. When he gave me a Singer, I took six lessons, and then I just started making and sewing clothes all the time.” So engrossed was she in turning out A-line skirts for all her 14-year-old girlfriends that her studies suffered. As soon as she qualified, she signed up for the work/study program at Fairfax High, which allowed her to split her school day into four hours of class and four hours of work. At noon every day, she headed downtown to a job in the garment district.
After graduation, Nancy continued her fashion education under the tutelage of Mary Louisa Maison, an 88-year-old French designer then living in Hancock Park. Before she died, Mlle. Maison, who had worked for many of the top Parisian couture houses in the ‘30s and ‘40s, taught Nancy everything she needed to know about pattern making.
In 1970, Nancy married Robert Heller, a Hollywood agent who was the older brother of a high school friend. It was only a year later that the two of them agreed that Fink’s huge order might be the start of something. At that time, Nancy called Joanne Malouf, her best friend. “She’s very creative and was working for Young Edwardian as a designer,” Heller recalls. “I asked her to be my partner, and she said yes.” Nancy, Robert, Joanne and her husband pooled their savings--$5,000--and formed a company called Tea Shirts.
Nancy and Joanne came up with a line of six T-shirts and then drove from store to store, making cold calls and selling T-shirts to several boutiques, including Judy’s. That first year, 1973, Tea Shirts turned out about 140,000 T-shirts. Nancy, Robert and their 1-year-old son, Jonas, lived in a duplex with a live-in housekeeper who helped sew labels onto the T-shirts. When they needed more room, Jonas was moved into his parents’ bedroom and the apartment was converted into a warehouse. Then they took over the upstairs unit, and four months later Tea Shirts moved downtown and opened a warehouse.
Donald Klein, owner of the Right Bank Clothing Co. in Beverly Hills, gave Nancy the name of a source in France from which she could get good-quality cotton undershirts. Nancy and Joanne bought short-sleeve and long-sleeve T-shirts in 11 different colors. Heller’s idea was to “warehouse” undershirts--not only to sell what they made but also to have the goods on the shelves and gamble that customers would come back for more. They did.
Tea Shirts expanded, and both husbands went to work with their wives. “About three years into the business,” Nancy says, “we made so much money that our partners bought a big house with a swimming pool, two Mercedeses, and they retired.” The company continued to grow, but two years later the Hellers’ marital problems led to a divorce and the dissolution of the company.
On their final day in court, Robert told Nancy that he was about to become president of JAG. He asked what she was going to do. “Well,” she told him, “I’m going back into business.” Even as she spoke, trucks were moving all the merchandise from their old business into her present house, a sprawling, two-story hacienda that once belonged to Howard Hughes. She converted the living room into a warehouse, the den became an office, and she operated the Nancy Heller Co. that way for a year and a half. All her old friends who had worked for her at Tea Shirts came back. “I’ve got friends who’ve been working for me for 13 or 14 years,” she says.
Heller also has family working for her. Five years ago, her brother, Ron Shapiro, who’d worked with their father for 14 years, joined the company. “Our father gave us three months,” Shapiro says. “He thought we’d never get along.” Shapiro, who at 42 is the oldest person at Nancy Heller, handles the company’s business, including domestic production, but his role covers indefinable areas, too. “I’m Nancy’s blocker,” he says. “I try not to let anyone lean on her because I want to keep her as fresh as possible.” Once Shapiro suggested to his sister that she run her more popular styles two seasons in a row. “I told her to save some ideas for a rainy day, but she wouldn’t hear of it,” he says. “I’ve got better ideas,” she told him.
When Shapiro joined the company, a three-year plan was worked out. After the first year, they hit their three-year target of $12 million. Although there are now too many employees to fit around the kitchen table for a lunchtime schmooze, as in the old days, the company retains a familial atmosphere. Shapiro says that when Heller walks through their West Hollywood offices, it bothers her if she doesn’t know everyone’s name. Lee Shapiro, mother of Nancy and Ron, oversees a company boutique in which surplus Heller designs are sold at a discount to employees, their families and friends.
The company that started out selling only T-shirts now sells casual and dressy wear for men, women and large sizes to the tune of about $32 million. Heller’s tailored designs rely mostly on classic lines and natural fabrics--linen, cotton, wool--in either a variety of stripes or solid colors (black, white, navy and peach are among the most popular every year). The T-shirts that started it all are more popular than ever and are now imported as underwear from China. Heller still originates all design ideas, which are often inspired by her frequent travels. Regular family trips include Hawaii and Cabo San Lucas. About four times a year, she goes to Europe to visit factories and to consult with free-lance designers to whom she airs her latest ideas. She likes working with Europeans, she says, “because they’re on the streets and they have a different kind of flavor in how they design and in the way they look at things. Europeans have a wonderful sense of style. They’re brought up surrounded by so much beauty. They’re raised in the Louvre! Americans have to create their own style. Look at what we’re brought up with--the Beverly Center and McDonald’s.”
Heller lives with her 15-year-old son, Jonas, and, for the past nine years, Art Snyder, her boyfriend, who runs his own advertising and architectural agency. Lately she puts in fewer hours at the office. “I get away with that because I have great people working for me,” she says. “The secret of a successful business is to hire people that are smarter and better than you. And I have 46 people like that.”
Nancy Heller thinks big. “I ultimately want the company to go public,” she says. “In a while, I’ll be tired of doing just this.” She’s undaunted by the knowledge that both Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren went public and ultimately bought back all their stock.
In the next two years, she hopes, the company will reach profits of between $40 million and $45 million. At that point, she’d like to branch out into the junior-clothing business. “I want to make my clothes for the kids, like Jonas’ friends, who can’t afford them now. I’d do washed cottons, stuff a little bit younger than what I’m doing now. I’ve noticed that as I get older, my clothes are getting a little bit more sophisticated. My fall line is for someone with money, no doubt about it.”
The story of Heller’s success seems so struggle-free that it’s surprising to hear her say: “If I had to do it over again right now, I couldn’t do it--not at my age. Even with the luck and the breaks I had, it was a lot of hard work. I was under so much pressure. It was also very tough coming from California and trying to be accepted in New York as a big fashion designer. I got burned when I was young by giving credit when I shouldn’t have and by trusting people I shouldn’t have. But you don’t want to get burned when you’re older. I learned real young how to take punches. Now I know how to duck. While I was doing this at 22, everyone else was running around being hippies and having a great time--not that I disapprove of that, but I wanted to make money. That’s what my goal was. I wanted to be real rich and real successful.”
Nancy Heller has achieved her goal. Even so, occasionally, she has to pinch herself. “Sometimes,” she says “I’m sitting around with my friendss, whom I’ve known for 25 years, and they say, ‘Do you believe what you’ve done?”
And she’s not through yet.
