SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ENTERPRISE : Clothed in Ambition : Clotee McAfee plans to turn her garment manufacturing firm into a powerhouse--and create hundreds of jobs in Los Angeles.

Clothing designer Clotee McAfee can barely contain her excitement as she describes a pocket-making machine she will install in the new, fully automated garment plant she plans to move into by the end of the year.

“It can set a pocket in three seconds,” McAfee said. “Right now, with a single needle, it takes three minutes” for one of the 25 sewing machine operators she employs to make a pocket and sew it onto a shirt.

McAfee, a graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, is the owner of Deljah (pronounced “deal-yah”) Simone Inc., a small garment manufacturing plant just south of downtown Los Angeles that she started with $1,500 after the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

Now, with the help of $730,000 in loans and grants from RLA’s Community Lending Corp. and the federal Health and Human Services Department--in addition to a $500,000 contract with the Southern California Gas Co.--McAfee is embarking on an 18-month project to transform her company into an automated powerhouse 30 times its current size.

The new factory--a site has yet to be chosen--will feature a half-million-dollar manufacturing system and a computerized clothing design studio and will employ as many as 800 people.

That’s an ambitious plan for a company that recorded less than $300,000 in sales last year and now has only 2,000 square feet of production space in its factory on East 15th Street, west of Alameda Street. With about 20 sewing machines lined up in neat rows, Deljah Simone (named after McAfee’s 10-year-old daughter) looks more like a tiny schoolhouse than a factory.

But McAfee, 40, is used to thinking big. She has sewn clothes for such top fashion designers as Carole Little and ABS, and has designed lines of clothing under her own label, Clotee.

After the riots, McAfee was inspired to build a business that would create opportunities for people she calls “troubled kids.” She dreamed of building a garment factory full of modern equipment that would capture their imaginations.

“The automation is essential,” she said. “I don’t think kids will come into just a factory. Kids are fascinated by computers. They love to design on computers and move through that world.

“The environment has to say ‘upward mobility,’ not ‘dead end.’ ”

Through a program at her church, McAfee enlisted the help of the Gas Co., which saw in her the potential to become one of its regular suppliers. The Gas Co. helped her apply for the RLA loan and federal grant--seed money so she could upgrade her capital.

Then the Gas Co. awarded McAfee a $500,000 contract to sew its uniforms, guaranteeing Deljah Simone a steady source of income and a reference that shows the company can compete in the big leagues.

Peter Wiersma, the Gas Co.’s community involvement manager, said the utility decided to back McAfee because her business plan “made a lot of sense.”

McAfee hopes to install enough computerized equipment to hire 480 sewing operators and a cadre of designers and other workers, bringing total employment as high as 800. McAfee hopes the jobs can lead to careers in clothing design and product development.

Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Economic Development Corp. of Los Angeles County, said apparel manufacturers here cannot continue to depend on the low labor costs that helped build this city’s $8-billion garment industry. Instead, they must automate to improve efficiency and preserve apparel jobs in California that are quickly moving overseas.

The mainstay of McAfee’s automated factory will be a $500,000 production control system that loops around the factory floor carrying pieces clothing to 66 sewing machine operators along the conveyor until a completed shirt or pair of pants emerges at the end of the production line. Each workstation is equipped with a computer that keeps track of the amount of work the operators do.

The system will allow Deljah Simone to increase production fivefold, McAfee said. Not only do the automated machines work faster than the current equipment, but because the system is designed for mass production, McAfee can add a second shift.

“It will finish a product in the time it takes you to walk from where the line starts to where it finishes,” McAfee said.

The factory will also have the automatic pocket setter, as well as machines that will spread out the fabric and cut it according to patterns, press the finished products and sew buttons and button holes at the same time, plus a “really awesome” machine that bags clothing to be shipped, McAfee said.

Altogether, McAfee’s business plan calls for spending almost $1.5 million on equipment to set up the factory. By the end of 1995, she hopes to have two more sets of the production system equipment and a $41,000 computerized clothing design system. That will bring the total to $5 million worth of automated manufacturing equipment.

And that means she needs more long-term contracts to guarantee steady income.

With the Gas Co. contract in hand, McAfee is soliciting major department stores and clothing manufacturers with a history of community involvement, seeking similar deals to sew mass-produced garments and private label merchandise.

Wiersma said that strategy has worked for other small companies the Gas Co. has backed. Some of them have parlayed their contract with the Gas Co. into deals with giants such as American Honda and Rockwell International.

McAfee says it would have been tough to create this type of automated factory without the help of RLA and the Gas Co.

When she talks to loan officers at local banks about financing her automation, they “cut me off before I can even get started,” McAfee said. “It’s been very difficult getting people to buy into the vision.”

But Al Osborne, director of UCLA’s Entrepreneurial Studies Center at the John Anderson Graduate School of Management, believes McAfee is on the right track. Osborne helped her develop a business plan for Deljah Simone, and he said only efficient, automated firms will be able to compete for the manufacturing contracts McAfee needs to meet her job-creating goals.

“Her plans may appear ambitious due to the size of her company, but it’s clear she needs to think that way and get those technologies adopted and introduced,” Osborne said. “Otherwise she won’t survive.”