Teen-Ager’s Designs Bankroll Special Dream

Nobody would have guessed, least of all 14-year-old Jamie White.

But as it turned out, her keen eye for casual fashion has brightened the lives of thousands of deprived American youngsters, and will, apparently, for years to come.

She was with her father and a church group on a trip to Antigua in the West Indies in 1987 when she saw some simple cotton shirts and shorts fashioned from flour and sugar bags fluttering from a clothesline. She liked them so much she bought them from the woman who made them.

“On the plane back home, she began discussing making and selling flour sack clothes,” her father, Joe White, says. “By the time we got back home, we’d carved out a lot of ideas.”

White and his wife, Debbie Jo, operate four Christian, nondenominational sports camps in the scenic Ozark Mountains of southwestern Missouri that each summer attract 5,000 children ages 8 to 18 from 44 states and 11 other countries.

The family decided that any clothing profits would go toward their dream of opening more camps, solely for inner-city and mentally handicapped children from across the nation.

A nonprofit foundation has purchased 150 acres on Table Rock Lake for the new camps, which the Whites hope to open in 1991.

Jamie, a sandy-haired 14-year-old with braces, has seen her simple idea grow into a line of cotton T-shirts, tops, shorts, sweat shirts, sweat pants and denim vests. They are marketed for girls ages 13-16 under the White Sands Clothing Co. label.

White says the family-run business has sold about $200,000 worth of clothing in its first year, mostly to Little Rock, Ark.-based Dillard Department Stores. The Nordstrom chain also carries some White Sands garments, and Macy’s has expressed an interest in next year’s lines, White says.

Orders for next year are rolling in, and White expects business to at least double in 1990.

“This is a Cinderella story, all the way. We’re David competing against the Goliaths, like Esprit and Guess,” he says.

A benefactor of the camps put the Whites, who had no previous experience in the garment industry, in touch with Mike Dillard, president of Dillard Department Stores.

The chain liked Jamie’s designs for a line of shorts and tops like the Antigua flour and sugar bag garments and featured them in last spring’s line.

Jamie also sold Dillard’s on about 25 varieties of neon T-shirts, shorts and tops for summer, along with knit jerseys and denim vests adorned with dozens of costume jewelry pieces, buttons and beads for fall.

For Christmas, Dillard is carrying a line of White Sands sweat shirts with holiday themes.

“We’ve just now gained the respect of stores and they’re saying, ‘Hey, these guys are a real company, they can really produce clothes,’ ” White says.

His soft-spoken daughter admits she doubted the business would get off the ground.

“I thought it was going to be something we’d try to do but wouldn’t really get started,” she says. “It’s really done well.”

Jamie, the oldest of the Whites’ four children, “has an incredible knack for seeing what will sell in department stores. It’s a sixth sense,” her father says.

Jamie does the designing but relies on Rick Mumford, one of 1,000 camp counselors and an art major at Southwest Missouri State University, to actually put her ideas on fabric.

“The kids at camp also help me design and tell me what they like and would buy,” she says.

The clothes are cut, sewn and screened at factories in Ozark, Ava and Shell Knob, Mo. The fledgling company employs three people full-time and has about a dozen part-time workers, including a saleswoman.

Jamie attends trade shows in New York, where the new White Sands lines are exhibited to buyers from major clothing companies.

She says she gets a thrill every time she’s in a department store and sees the clothing she has designed for other teen-age girls displayed next to big name lines.

“I’ll see people looking through the racks and it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, they’re buying my clothes!’ ” she says.

But that’s not the greatest thrill.

For the last 10 years, about 400 inner-city and mentally handicapped children have spent a week each August at Kanakuk Kamps, which were begun by White’s father, Spike White, in 1954. Children can participate in 30 sports, including baseball, horseback riding and water skiing.

“It’s just a joy to see those kids having so much fun doing things they’d never get to do otherwise,” Jamie says. “And they get a chance to know Christ and develop everlasting friendships.”