Uniformity Sells, One Family Finds : Clothing: With the return of standard dress, back-to-school business swamps an O.C. company with customers, some reluctant.

It happens every year, Sherry Smith said last week as she gestured toward the waiting room packed with weary parents and antsy children making a last-ditch bid to get school uniforms.

Despite months of planning, when schools reopen, chaos erupts.

It’s like “they’ve waited until Christmas Eve to buy their gifts,” said Smith, whose family runs Vicki Marsha Uniforms, a Huntington Beach company that outfits children from 84 schools in Orange and Los Angeles counties. “

Reigning over the confusion is Smith’s mother, Camille Kennedy Crook, 88, who bought the business in 1947 when it was located in Long Beach.

Now, the company--which didn’t even have a hold button on its telephones until 1990--is riding an economic wave that has swelled in recent years as more schools are demanding that their students dress uniformly.

Last year, the Long Beach Unified School District became the first public school district in the country to demand that its elementary and middle school students wear uniforms. Following that decision, Gov. Pete Wilson signed a bill authorizing California school districts to implement dress codes.

More than one-third of the 600-plus schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District now require school uniforms. In Orange County, 50 elementary schools have experimented with uniforms on a voluntary basis.

But if family members driving Vicki Marsha Uniforms have entrepreneurial instincts, they are well-hidden on this, one of their busiest days of the year. They nearly shudder at the suggestion that the time is ripe to open a second outlet.

“No way,” Crook said from across a cluttered desk, as outside her office parents took numbers.

“It seems like it would just be more headaches,” Smith said. “Can you imagine four more locations with this going on? There’s enough business out there for everybody.”

If Crook seems resistant to change, her company has in fact undergone a slow but dramatic transformation since she and her husband, Wallace, bought it 48 years ago--from a woman whose daughter was named Vicki Marsha. Though the company was then only about a year old, Smith said it already had a favorable reputation so her family kept the name.

Originally, the company made frilly party dresses for high-end department stores such as Neiman Marcus and I Magnin.

But the seeds of change were planted in 1952 by nuns from St. Philip Neri, a Catholic school in Lynwood, who asked the Crooks to make prettier jumpers for their students. The bright plaid outfits, cut from a nubby gingham, created a stir at other private schools, which placed orders of their own, Smith said.

By 1972, Vicki Marsha Originals was calling itself Vicki Marsha Uniforms. No-nonsense had edged out high fashion.

While public schools are increasingly warming to uniforms, and this company provides clothing for about a dozen of them, Vicki Marsha’s orders come largely from private schools.

The company makes girls’ jumpers and skirts on the premises and warehouses and retails most other items, including shorts, slacks, socks, jackets and headbands. The 10,000-square-foot factory includes a no-frills waiting room, warehouse, shipping department, and manufacturing and fitting areas.

“It’s not pretty down here,” Smith said, “but it doesn’t have to be.”

In the early years, Wallace Crook handled the finances, shipping and ran the button hole machine. His wife was on the move, meeting with buyers and ordering fabrics, zippers, thread and buttons.

After their father died in 1976, Smith said, her brother Buck, 47, assumed his duties. And she has taken on some jobs that were once her mother’s.

“Everybody does what needs to be done,” Crook said.

All the while, the company has grown, although its owners won’t discuss profits or revenues.

In 1987, they supplied uniforms for 50 schools and had 13 full-time employees in the busy summer season. This summer, 42 employees helped provide clothing for 84 schools. At the height of the back-to-school crunch--which stretches from mid-August to mid-September--they fit hundreds of children a day.

Word-of-mouth has made the difference, Smith said.

“We have never, ever called on a school. They always come to us,” she said. “We don’t even have a brochure.”

Business gears up in April when company fitters descend upon campuses to measure students and take orders. By June, the shipping department is humming. In mid-August, the procrastinators start banging at the door.

As the weather cools, employees begin preparing contracts for the coming spring and trying to interest customers the new touches to the coming products--fleece on next year’s sweat shirt, or maybe a hood.

“You have to sort of perk up the uniform every few years,” Smith said. “Offer something new that the kids will be excited about.”

Excited is not the word for some of the teens who are grudgingly fitted for such finery as plaid skirts, white Oxford shirts and khaki walking shorts. Teen-age boys are among the heartiest grumblers.

“All summer they’ve been wearing these baggy things, but the schools don’t want baggy. And the mothers are just beside themselves,” Smith said. “They want them way down on their hips and cinched with a belt. We have to fight that battle almost every day with the older boys.”

And the slacks? Forget it.

“Kids in Southern California, they don’t care if it’s 40 degrees,” Smith said, “they want to wear their shorts.”

With girls, the warfare is often waged over the length of the skirt, a seemingly ageless struggle.

“All the girls put our skirts on and they say, ‘Ooooh, it’s too long,’ ” Smith said. “They want to roll the skirts up and make them real short, and the school wants us to measure it to the knee.”

With the increasing appetite for sameness in school dress, Vicki Marsha Uniforms faces ever-stiffer competition as more companies hustle to meet the demand.

“Everybody,” Smith said, “has decided to go into the uniform business.”

Industry insiders say the increased demand has given some small businesses a boost.

“We don’t have the figures because everybody’s privately held and it’s very difficult to get the numbers,” said Jackie Rosselli a spokeswoman for the National Assn. of Uniform Manufacturers and Distributors, a trade group representing the industry. “One of the ways to survive now is to have a niche market, and school uniforms can be that niche market.”

To keep pace with the times, Smith said they have tried over the past eight years to modernize their operation, sometimes against matriarch Camille Kennedy Crook’s intuition.

In 1987, they bought a computer to keep tabs on an ever-expanding inventory. In 1990, they upgraded their telephone system. And three years ago, a new fax machine was delivered.

Still, they use the same button machine Smith said she operated in 1954 as a teen-ager, and “it was not new then.”

Sometimes, Smith admits, she has been frustrated in her efforts to nudge the business toward the future, or at least the present. But her family’s frugality has its upside.

“We don’t owe anybody anything,” she said. “We have not made the mistake of being greedy.”

And now her face is serious.

“We know how much we can do and do well,” Smith said. “If it was this swamped all the time, we’d go crazy.”