The Start of Something Big

The landlord wasn’t too pleased, but what could Jack Denny do?

He had to do his tie-dyeing somewhere. And the communal washing machine in the garage of his Laguna Beach apartment complex was convenient.

“The landlord hated me,” says Denny, founder of World Jungle Clothing Co. in Costa Mesa. “He liked what we were doing, but he wasn’t happy that the washer was ruined.”

Garage beginnings. In Southern California they’re almost a rite of passage--and, for a growing number of apparel makers, the humble first step on the way to riches.

Before Mossimo Giannulli became Mossimo, he was just a beach-loving dude with an idea for better volleyball shorts. Looser cut in the leg, with more room in the seat, his trunks--fashioned with his signature M on the rear--made it easier to dive for digs and shake out the sand.

Giannulli set up shop in 1987 in the garage of his Balboa Island apartment. He sold $1 million worth of product the first year. Today, Mossimo Inc. operates out of a massive building in Irvine. It had sales of $24.4 million in the first quarter of ’96.

Joel Fitzpatrick and John Chase started Pleasure Swell in 1992 out of a one-car garage in Hollywood, selling anti-George Bush T-shirts. “We were just making a political statement,” Fitzpatrick says. “The next thing you know, we’d sold 10,000 T-shirts and 20,000 bumper stickers.”

Today, Pleasure Swell sells men’s and women’s club wear out of its 4,000-square-foot store, Swell, on La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles and is scheduled to open a bigger store and showroom in New York’s SoHo district this fall. Sales last year were “easily over seven figures,” says Fitzpatrick.

But making it big in the garment business isn’t the dream of every T-shirt entrepreneur. Mark Price, founder of Tavarua Island Surf Co., which recently moved from a converted garage to a warehouse, is determined not to let the San Clemente company outgrow its “pure surf” identity.

So he limits distribution to specialty shops and donates 1% of sales--Tavarua did $1 million wholesale last year--to the villages surrounding the tiny Fijian island that is the company’s namesake.

“This island, Tavarua, actually exists,” Price says. “It gives us a degree of authenticity, which is a key in our market.”

He says surfwear powerhouses like Quiksilver have nothing to fear from tiny Tavarua Island Surf Co.: “We have much more humble aspirations.”

But, like the five apparel makers profiled here, he knows that every company’s next big competitor is out there somewhere, probably behind a garage door.

REDSAND / ‘It’s Been a Pretty Amazing Ride’

Volleyball player Steve Timmons could have sat around and moped. After all, he was an Olympic gold medalist sidelined with a serious knee injury.

Instead, Timmons started brainstorming, thinking of ways to support himself. His answer--an optic-yellow ball--would quickly change his life.

Volleyball’s version of the fluorescent tennis ball ultimately led to Redsand, the apparel company Timmons founded in 1985 with partners Jim Austin and Robert Lusitana in Austin’s Spring Valley garage.

The sporting goods manufacturer Timmons had hooked up with in South Korea needed a logo for the ball, so he connected with Austin, a graphic designer. They met at a San Diego burger joint, where Austin scratched out a cartoon profile of Timmons with his then-distinctive flattop.

Once the volleyballs were selling well, Austin suggested T-shirts. Redsand sold nearly 20,000 of them in the first year.

“Jim was printing all day long in the garage,” Timmons says. “His arms were huge that year from pulling the squeegee across the screen.”

The Encinitas-based company now offers a wide array of casual apparel, from knit shirts to jackets to jeans. Last year, it posted domestic sales of $20 million.

“You have to have something to fall back on when your athletic career is over,” says Timmons, 37, a three-time Olympian. “The injury forced me to look at myself. It opened my eyes to the real world.

“Our dream in the beginning was competing against the bigger companies, like Quiksilver and Stussy. Now we’re battling for store position with these guys. It’s been a pretty amazing ride.”

ROBIN PICCONE / ‘All Our Equipment Was Whatever Other People Could Spare’

Some writers work in their pajamas. Some artists paint in the nude. Early in her career, swimwear designer Robin Piccone spent many creative moments in heavy rubber rain boots.

She wasn’t peculiar--just practical. With the slightest drizzle, her garage / design studio in Venice Beach would fill with water.

“Venice is built very low,” Piccone says. “Whenever it rained, it would flood. We’d put the sewing machines on cinder-blocks. There’d be 6 inches of water on the floor and we’d be standing there in rain boots.”

That was 10 years ago. Today, Piccone, president of L.A.-based Piccone Apparel Corp., works in much more comfortable environs: an 8,000-square-foot factory in Culver City and showrooms in New York and Los Angeles. The swimwear line did $18 million in domestic sales last year.

The designer, 34, got her first job in the industry while still in high school, cutting spaghetti straps for the swimsuit manufacturer Cole. At 22, she started her own company, along with her mother, Rita, and the man who is now her husband, Richard Battaglia, out of the one-car garage of her tiny 1920s cottage.

Economy was key.

“We would get all our pencils from home,” says Piccone, who gained fame in the mid-1980s by designing the Body Glove neoprene swimsuit. “We would have old ledger books that we’d turn upside down and backward. All our equipment was whatever other people could spare. . . . We didn’t waste anything.”

Inviting clients to the garage was unthinkable, Piccone says (though the studio did get routine visits from local ducks and geese). Once, a pair of bank executives showed up unexpectedly. “Here were these two guys in business suits, all corporate looking, sitting on these little stools,” Piccone recalls. “After they left, my mother and I just about died laughing.”

Interactions by phone--without a receptionist or even a hold button--made for light moments as well.

“We wanted to sound corporate,” Piccone says, “so I always answered: ‘Piccone Apparel . . . please hold.’ Then we’d put the phone down on the table, pick it up and say, ‘Oh, Robin will be with you in a moment. . . .’

“I’m sure we fooled no one.”

RUSTY / ‘I Miss the Simplicity . . . How Each Day Held Only a Few Options’

It was a big decision, one Rusty Preisendorfer had to make every day: Should he shape surfboards? Or ride waves?

That was 25 years ago. Today, the founder of Rusty surfboards and apparel can’t help but laugh. The decisions are a bit more daunting, what with a company that clocked $42 million in domestic sales last year.

Preisendorfer was a freshman art student at UC San Diego, sharing a house in La Jolla with eight roommates, when he started shaping surfboards in the garage. “The guys whose parents owned the house were shaping their own boards on sawhorses,” Preisendorfer says. “I said, ‘Hey, I know a better way. We can have a factory in the garage.’ ”

Starlight Surfboards--precursor to Rusty’s signature R. label--was born. Word of his shaping skills began to spread among hard-core surfers. But it wasn’t until 1985 that Preisendorfer, working out of a small space in a San Diego industrial park, really tested his reputation. He started hand-screening T-shirts with his R., and they went fast.

“I distinctly remember thinking [that] if I could ever get to 100 dozen T-shirts a month, I’d be killing it,” says Preisendorfer, 42, whose apparel division now sells more than 100 times that.

In January 1987, Preisendorfer and a few partners introduced a 14-piece line--walk shorts, trunks and casual shirts. “Some of the big companies sort of laughed,” he says, “probably because they knew how hard it was to break into the market.”

But within a year, Rusty apparel was very hot, and Preisendorfer hired a contractor to take over apparel production so he could continue to shape surfboards.

“I still love what I do, but I’m tugged in so many directions,” says Preisendorfer, whose company recently expanded into wake boards, snowboards and snowboard apparel. “I miss the simplicity . . . how each day held only a few options: surf or shape.”

CLUB SPORTSWEAR / ‘We Used Volleyball as Our Vehicle to Get to the Beach’

Tom Knapp, USC business student and struggling entrepreneur, didn’t count on being evicted. But the manager of his Hoover Street apartment had other ideas.

You can’t have UPS coming here every day, she told him. You can’t run a business out of your apartment and that’s final. Knapp was shown the door.

So he moved his small inventory of volleyball-influenced T-shirts and shorts into a maintenance shed deep inside a Fullerton parking garage. Club Sportswear--complete with couch, four desks and an old Macintosh 512 computer--now had a home.

It looked like a carnival fun house, Knapp, 31, says. A roll-up steel door served as the entrance, and the ceiling sloped to the back. The walls were cinder-block, and a scrap of ugly green carpeting covered the concrete floor. Whenever clients made appointments to stop by, Knapp gave the street address of the parking structure--and little more.

“I’d say, ‘Oh, and our office is in the back,’ ” Knapp says. When they finally found the place, “people got a chuckle out of it.”

Knapp, who started by designing a sweatshirt with a “Club USC” logo and selling it on campus, figured a volleyball-inspired line would do well in the aftermath of the 1984 Olympics. While the market for surf-influenced apparel seemed saturated, pro beach volleyball was just getting hot.

“We used volleyball as our vehicle to get to the beach,” says Knapp, whose company, now based in Irvine, posted about $10 million in domestic wholesale last year.

“I miss the early days,” Knapp says. “There’s a lot more self-fulfillment. You have no idea if it’s going to work.”

GOTCHA / ‘. . . In This Country You Can Actually Get an Idea and Make It Happen’

Michael Tomson knew he wasn’t going to be a professional surfer forever. Start a clothing company? Yeah, that sounded kind of interesting.

Tomson, of South Africa, was doing design work in the late 1970s for his corporate sponsor, Quiksilver, when he decided to start Gotcha. He joined up with college buddy Joel Cooper, who was working in his father’s dressmaking business in South Africa.

They designed a few pieces--trunks and corduroy walking shorts--and, in 1980, moved to the States to set up shop.

Their headquarters: a tiny two-bedroom rented house and garage on Laguna Beach’s Park Avenue.

Their address: a local post office box titled “Suite 38.”

“We used a P.O. box because we didn’t want anyone coming to the place. We were too embarrassed,” Tomson says. “It was just chaos. Clothes all over the place. It was a total mess.”

But it was profitable. Gotcha--Tomson came up with the name after hearing the word in a TV commercial for razor blades--sold $1 million worth of product in its first year.

Sometimes the inventory overflowed from the garage into the garden. Neighbors on the narrow street complained about the traffic, especially from UPS.

“Although we operated from a house in Laguna Beach, people [in the industry] thought it was a much bigger company,” Cooper says. “By the end of that year, though, it was impossible to do business.” Gotcha relocated to a 3,000-square-foot building in Laguna Hills.

And that space didn’t hold the company for long. A 100,000-square-foot facility in the Irvine Spectrum now serves as headquarters. Gotcha, which had nearly $60 million in domestic sales last year, recently unveiled two new lines--Girl Star and MCD. Next up: footwear, sunglasses and watches, as well as surf-styled clothing for infants.

“It’s true that in this country you can actually get an idea and make it happen--on a scale that can’t be matched anywhere in the world,” says Tomson, 40. “I know it’s a cliche, but I was an immigrant. It was the American dream.”