Carole Little Is Moving--to a Bigger L.A. Site : Apparel: Firm, which weathered riots and now faces more trauma, says decision reflects its commitment and success.
Los Angeles-based garment maker Carole Little first considered leaving the city after its headquarters and factory were heavily damaged in the 1992 riots.
Now, as police investigate the brutal slayings and assaults of executives and contractors associated with the company, it is making a move after all--to a larger Los Angeles site to accommodate its recent successes.
Carole Little executives say the move is both a testament to their civic loyalty and a sign of their financial growth. While other women’s-apparel companies are falling victim to flagging consumer sales and a retail retrenchment, Carole Little has fared well enough to opt for a facility that will double its production capacity.
“There’s a malaise in women’s apparel,” said Leonard Rabinowitz, co-chairman of Carole Little. “However, there is also pent-up demand. We feel very good about our prospects over the next year or two.”
That optimism is sustained by the company’s recent sales record, Rabinowitz said. Revenue from deliveries to stores rose from $285 million in 1993 to $372 million in 1994, the company said.
The privately held firm does not disclose earnings. However, Rabinowitz said Carole Little has been able to expand sales by adapting to the demands of retailers who have eliminated other vendors in a search for more efficient, more productive suppliers. In turn, Carole Little has responded by making similar demands and reducing its contractor network--the businesses that sew garments and provide material.
Police are investigating whether Carole Little’s consolidation--and its negative impact on some contractors--might have prompted the violence now traumatizing the company. One former Carole Little executive who survived attempts on her life in 1993 has claimed there is such a connection.
Two Carole Little executives have been killed in the past five months, and a company contractor was killed in 1993.
The cutbacks in contractors begun in 1992 helped the company achieve its best earnings year ever in 1993--despite the fact that sales were sharply higher the following year, Rabinowitz said. He said the company engaged in heavy price cutting to generate its 1994 sales, and earnings that year actually tumbled 50%, he said.
Carole Little’s financial success has occurred amid hard times in the apparel industry nationwide. The Southern California industry went through its worst period in 1993, though it actually added employees last year and in the first quarter of 1995, said Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Economic Development Corp. of Los Angeles County, a private jobs-promotion agency.
“A lot of the action is in the contemporary and juniors market, which is quite strong,” Kyser said. Southern California manufacturers have also benefited because they produce less-expensive clothing.
Analysts credit Carole Little with prospering amid the industry storm.
“The company has continued to make progress as far as the sales side is concerned in a very difficult environment for manufacturers,” said New York-based apparel consultant Alan G. Millstein. “I suspect that their business was OK, but it can’t have been on fire, because last year was the toughest year for apparel manufacturers since World War II.”
The company is named for Carole Little, who co-founded the firm 20 years ago with Rabinowitz, her husband, with $20,000. A graduate of Los Angeles Trade Technical College, she co-chairs the firm and oversees the design of the clothing, which ranges from casual to career to dressy wear. The Carole Little label is well represented in major department stores, and its overruns also find their way into increasingly popular outlet malls.
The label is “well respected” and Little herself “is a very clever designer . . . enormously talented,” said consultant Millstein.
The company will be plowing some of its profits into the construction of a new headquarters at the old May Co. distribution facility at South Grand near the Harbor Freeway and Exposition Park. It will cost $15 million to $20 million to alter, build and equip the new site, Rabinowitz said.
In turn, the company will donate its current headquarters complex at Martin Luther King Boulevard and Main Street to a nonprofit group that will build a charter school, a public school facility with chartered permission to establish education innovations.
Carole Little is in the process of moving to its new headquarters and the school is expected to open in about a year.
The company had considered moving to Nevada in the wake of the riots. However, Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan helped persuade the company to stay.
