On Solid Footing : It once was one store. Then it became six. Now, Na Na,<i> the</i> mecca for fans of the hippest shoes around, aims to make bigger strides with its own lines.
As a drama major at the University of Missouri, Nancy Kaufman was, well, dramatic . She was the campus weirdo who wore flamboyant clothing and called herself Na Na, after Emile Zola’s heroine.
Two decades later, the weirdness and the drama continue--in the form of merchandise. Along with husband Paul and former college chum Lynn Tyler, Nancy owns the Na Na Trading Company, an “alternative fashion” source headquartered in Santa Monica.
The multimillion-dollar company--spawned in a tiny store without plumbing that Nancy and Tyler opened in 1976--encompasses six retail stores, a mail-order business and an international wholesale operation. Na Na advertises, but it hardly needs to. Sassy, Harper’s Bazaar, Rolling Stone, Esquire and other publications frequently splash its big, clunky boots and shoes across their pages.
Hipper-than-thou customers shop Na Na for everything from work shirts and overalls to flared cords, crooner-style cardigans, cropped “baby” Ts, plaid pantyhose and trucker-inspired wallets on long zoot suit chains. But the retailer’s main attraction has always been outrageous footwear, including English-made, industrial-strength Dr. Marten shoes and boots. Na Na’s own concoctions are even more outlandish: boots with wide, upturned toes; shoes and boots atop mile-high striped platforms; thick-soled, no-shine Mary Janes for adults, and work-weight boots with lug soles so thick and grooved they could move a tractor.
For 11 years, Na Na and Dr. Marten were joined at the ankle. Six months ago, at the height of the Doc Marten-grunge frenzy, Na Na was distributing about 25,000 pairs a month. But late last year, the companies parted over their distribution deal. And without the Docs to drum up business, Na Na is taking strides to stand on its own.
As part of an expansion and reorganization plan, the company has put more emphasis on its own footwear designs, including the new Blue Plate Shoe line. The $60-to-$80 collection features knockoffs of such Na Na originals as the $160 pole climber boots worn by Naomi Campbell and the dancers in Madonna’s “Girlie” show.
Production of the menswear collection, for which Paul won a California Mart Rising Star nomination last year, has been scaled back to free funds for the shoes. And three unisex utility-clothing lines have been consolidated into the strongest one, Welt Ware.
Na Na’s newest store opened last month in the Lab, a so-called anti-mall near South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa. Tenants include the first Tower Records alternative store; Urban Outfitters (a Na Na wholesale account); Collector’s Library, specializing in comic books; and Taxi Taxi, dealing in vintage clothing and guitars. The setup is “so cool,” Nancy says. “Even the bathrooms are cool. If I were really young now, I would move in next to this place.”
Every Na Na store has its own ambience, starting with the neighborhood: SoHo in New York, the Castro District in San Francisco and 3rd Street in Los Angeles, site of an outlet store scheduled to become a regular retail operation next month.
In Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, Na Na’s headquarters and store fill a space formerly occupied by a Thrifty drugstore and a Hallmark card shop. The “post-mortem” interior, as Paul describes it, contains a huge plywood torso above the dressing rooms, a giant abstract face with one gold and three white teeth, two moving mirrored globes, a half-finished inverted boot and a phallic symbol, which, he says, “isn’t as obvious as we could have made it.”
His office near an interior staircase is decorated with a hodgepodge of shoes (antique inspirations and production prototypes), sequined Haitian voodoo flags, and childlike artworks with moving parts made by a friend in England.
Nancy’s office resembles a tastefully cluttered Victorian sitting room, down to the ornate bottles of potpourri and antique love seat. Above is a walkway and miniature office for the progeny: 10-year-old Mae Elvis Erin Kaufman, an actress and model whose credits include a commercial for Fuji Film and an appearance in Italian children’s Vogue, and Bix Nathaniel King Kaufman, 6, also a professional model.
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The foursome--plus a menagerie including two white rats that recently surprised the family with a litter--live in a small Santa Monica house crammed with memorabilia, much of it from the ‘50s.
Nancy says neighbors and passersby call it “the Elvis house,” because the display-case front window (“part of the reason I wanted to buy this house”) is devoted to oddball arrangements. One featured “Elvis laid out in a coffin with money around him.”
Antics like this keep Paul and Nancy, who hover near 40, in sync with their hard-core, youth-culture customers. “Na Na is an institution among young people, who are really hip and who really work at it,” says Ty Moore, 30, co-designer of the Los Angeles-based Van Buren clothing collections.
Moore grew up in New York, with Na Na combat boots on his feet. “They captured the whole rebellion thing for anyone who was a teen-ager. It was like what Levi’s did for teen-agers in the ‘50s. It was that basic necessity in your wardrobe. At first they came in black, then they went into full-blown colors. It was really funny. You could have lime-green hair and lime-green combat boots.”
The Kaufmans try to avoid fashion labels such as punk , new wave or grunge . But Paul sees at least one connection: “We do have the sensibility that made punk such an influence--meaning, you can do it yourself, you can think independently. You don’t have to accept the status quo, or what I see as the corporate view of the world.”
Tall and prematurely gray, he typically wears multiple silver rings--on his fingers and in his earlobes--striped Na Na trousers, a plaid Na Na shirt over a white T-shirt and a prototype of the leather “patchwork” boots that will soon be in the stores.
A Cal Arts graduate, he designs the shoe lines, creating what he calls “our version of classic styles.”
“I think I can take credit for pole climbers even though they existed. It was an obscure style that one or two factories made for no reason. I recognized the value and gave them a distinctiveness.”
He is also a founding member of the band Los Rock Angels and plays the washboard (“if only he would do the washing on it,” Nancy remarks). Combining zydeco and nortena with a bit of jump blues, the group tours nationally and plays locally in such clubs as Santa Monica’s Alligator Lounge.
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Nancy--tall and taut with flame-red hair--teaches aerobics six times a week at the Santa Monica YWCA. She is also the “PTA Mom” who takes the kids to acting, piano, gymnastics, hip-hop and tap-dancing lessons, as well as to their modeling gigs.
Within the company, the three partners have their roles. Nancy says she is the “public outreach.” Paul is the creative arm, and publicity-shy Tyler tends to business.
Nancy learned to sew in high school and made clothing for the original store, where she met Paul. He was an irksome customer who commented about “overpriced” ceramic pins. Three years later, they were married.
Now, in addition to bringing in unusual accessories--such as chokers with miniature photographs of tombstone angels, and encouraging talented employees to make jewelry, hats and candles for the stores--Nancy continues to sew. She whips up pillows (Elvis and Martin Luther King are favorite motifs) in the basement of the Santa Monica location, near the two Na Na-shod operators who take telephone orders on the 800 line.
Despite Na Na’s growth, Nancy says: “We are still a mom-and-pop operation.” Their goal--to be the first with affordable street fashion--means Na Na is not cheap. Says Paul: “You can’t be, if you want to be first.” By his calculations, a man can be “pretty well outfitted” in Na Na style for $250 to $300, which would include two pairs of pants, two shirts, shoes, a baseball cap, a couple of T-shirts and a trucker wallet.
“Most of the people we create for don’t have a lot of money. We didn’t--and we still don’t,” says Nancy, referring to a broad customer base, ranging in age from 13 to 50.
Elisabetta Rogiani, 37, a Los Angeles designer of her own clothing line, has sold to Na Na and shops there, buying what she calls “young pocket” items to mix with more expensive European merchandise.
“Through the years, it has managed to have its own look--a filtered kind of English funk for America,” she says. “Their approach is very young fashion; it’s street for sure--and strong. But anybody can shop there. You will find the best necklace or stockings or plaid shirt. To me, it represents an independent spirit.”
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Eric Berg, a video fashion stylist and hat designer, began buying Na Na boots 10 years ago in Eugene, Ore. Now in Los Angeles, he shops the 3rd Street outlet and the Santa Monica location for himself and his clients.
“They’ve always had a reputation for being on the outer limits of fashion to some degree,” says Berg, 28. “They started out with Doc Martens. But they’ve evolved to include a lot of other fashion elements, so there’s a smattering of everything. But they will never be like Bullock’s. That’s what I love about Na Na.”
The music--an eclectic mix supplied daily by employees from their personal collections--is another plus for Berg. “It’s really great in all the stores. And the salespeople are pretty wild.”
So is the customer mix: “I’m always so surprised to see the people who shop there. You know, like yuppies still exist and it’s fun to see them in Na Na, and to see them shopping side by side with people who used to be singing against them, people who used to listen to the Dead Kennedys.”
How the scene will change without Dr. Marten is hard to predict. For Nancy, the Na Na credo remains: “To stay ahead, be ourselves and stay in business.”
And Paul will continue “to take risks,” he says. “The band was one. I’d never performed on a stage before. I was nervous, but if I hadn’t, look what I would have missed. I just think, if people don’t take chances, what’s the point of being here?”
