Mothers of Invention : Fashion: The Bay Area is home to about two dozen children’s wear companies producing sophisticated styles by fashion-forward designer moms.
They say necessity is the mother of invention. But with Bay Area children’s wear it seems to be more a case of mothers inventing necessities.
The last decade or so has given rise to a gaggle of kidswear companies started out of frustration by Bay Area moms who wanted more for their children than basic, boxy, polyester styles in pink for girls, blue for boys.
Along with MTV, these designing women have helped change the dress style of the nation’s children forever.
Take Josie Jurczenia, who started sewing clothes on her dining room table in 1978 while pregnant with her first child. This year, she and partner Anna Sala project $7 million to $10 million in sales for their Berkeley-based Sweet Potatoes, a sportswear company.
Or Andrea Rachels, who four years ago tired of the cutthroat women’s wear business after her daughter’s birth and shifted her sights, designing her first clothes for toddlers in a basement. She and Marjie Graham, her partner at NiniBambini in San Francisco, foresee more than $2 million in sales this year.
The Bay Area is home to about two dozen children’s wear companies producing everything from funky sweat shirts to the daintiest flower-splashed dresses. Most of the clothing is made in small factories close by.
The labels--Mousefeathers, Pattycakes, Biscotti, Spumoni--speak of fun and frolic. Spotting a lucrative market, big Bay Area guns such as Esprit, the Gap and Jessica McClintock have also gotten into the children’s wear act.
Often influenced by European styling, the designers’ sophisticated or whimsical fashions are rapidly becoming staples from coast to coast in the closets of well-heeled youngsters with indulgent relatives.
In describing the San Francisco approach to children’s wear, Jurczenia suggests that designers here tend to be much more conservative than those in Los Angeles.
“We follow more of the European trends,” she said. “Southern California designers are a little more out there, with more glitter and glitz.”
Although sophisticated styling seems to be the norm, Rachels of NiniBambini acknowledged that some of her designs have proven a bit too sophisticated for the market. Negative feedback from stores prompted her to eliminate an adaptation of a Matisse design with stylized nudes.
Children’s fashions made here often sport fanciful motifs--cacti and coyotes, or reprints of poems by E.E. Cummings. Yet, however mature the imagery, colors tend to be Popsicle shades of orange, fuchsia, blueberry and cherry. They’re enough to turn yuppie mothers chartreuse with envy.
“Children’s wear has just gotten more fashion forward,” said Christina Gruber, editor of Earnshaw’s Review, a children’s wear trade publication in New York.
These days, Gruber noted, it seems that “children have an influence on what they want to wear, starting in the womb. Instead of mama and da-da, their first word is Weebok (Reebok’s children’s line).”
For the young Bay Area companies, the timing was terrific. Many two-income couples are waiting longer to have children and are better able to provide for them when they do come along.
Nevertheless, the price tags on some of these clever concoctions can be heart-stoppers. A holiday dress covered with ribbons and hydrangeas, by Mousefeathers, can run $120. For boys, a coordinated NiniBambini set of striped pants, shirt and tennis sweater sells for $110.
Although many of these companies are thriving, they account for a minuscule portion of the overall market. Retail sales of children’s wear nationwide have climbed steadily in the last few years. In 1989, they reached $19.6 billion, up about 6% from the year before, according to Earnshaw’s Review.
Even so, children’s wear designers are well aware that much of the retail industry is in tatters now, thanks to costly and, in many cases, ill-advised buyouts and takeovers in department and specialty stores. Customers are feeling increasingly shaky about the economy and less willing to spend on non-essentials. And some old-line children’s wear companies, notably Health-Tex, are losing market share because they have failed to adapt to the changing market.
For the hot designers, however, “it’s a tremendously expanding market,” said Paul Gill, a partner in Berkeley-based Mousefeathers, a dressmaker that sells mostly to children’s boutiques. “I have the same anxieties everybody else has, but we haven’t seen the effects yet.”
The back-to-school shopping season will tell the tale, especially in the Northeast, Mousefeathers’ biggest market. In the meantime, a cautious Gill has lowered his sights for the holiday/early spring season by about 10%.
Like so many others, Mousefeathers got its start because a talented mother saw a void in the market. Stephanie Upham, a commercial art major, began making dresses at home for her daughter, Sasha, in 1979. A friend suggested that she try to sell them to local stores.
By 1981, the company had $100,000 in sales, with Upham initially doing much of the work in her garage. In the last five years, Mousefeathers has seen sales grow to $7 million, Gill said.
Sweet Potatoes also started as a cottage industry. Jurczenia, 41, now the mother of three children, began by silk-screening designs onto vibrantly colored baby jackets. She drummed up business by taking her wares around to local stores. Now the clothes are featured in Nordstrom and I. Magnin, among others.
“We sold everything COD in the beginning and cut fabric on the dining room table,” she said. At one point, she had 150 yards of corduroy under the table.
Bill Kahn, president of the San Francisco Children’s Wear Assn., a trade group, credits Sweet Potatoes as “one of the revolutionary companies” that led the charge into comfortable cotton children’s wear that was “cute and had a sense of humor.”
Today, the company, which also designs a S.P.UDZ collection for boys and Yazoo for older girls, makes coordinated backpacks, hats, shoes, socks and purses for the child who favors the totally put-together look.
Rachels, 37, of NiniBambini, contends that she was hoping for a quiet life when she and Graham, 39, started the company in 1986.
“We never had it in mind that it would grow,” she said. So far, the partners, who have two children apiece, have had to pump most of the proceeds back into the company to finance the growth. They recently moved to a 5,000-square-foot office and warehouse in an industrial part of San Francisco, where the children spend many a day playing and napping.
The children also serve as models. “They’re very reasonably priced, about the cost of an ice cream cone,” Rachels joked.
Some of the designers admit to concerns that they’re helping to create a generation of clothes horses.
“I wonder what the heck I’m doing to her,” said Gill of his daughter Alison, 3 1/2, who delights in wearing Mousefeathers dresses. “She is very clothes-conscious.
“But if she wants to look pretty, that’s OK. And it’s great advertising at the preschool.”
