Lingerie Maker Tries to Slip Comfortably Into 2 Closing Plants

Officials of a Van Nuys lingerie maker met with Warnaco Inc. on Monday in an attempt to wrap up negotiations for the purchase of the Warnaco-owned Olga lingerie factories in Santa Paula and Fillmore.

If the deal goes through, the 250 workers who would be out of work with the plant closures later this month would be retrained and rehired by AFR Apparel International almost immediately.

The Olga Co., founded by Olga and Jan Erteszek in Los Angeles in the 1940s, was purchased by Warnaco in 1984. Olga has operated a manufacturing plant in Santa Paula since the late 1960s and in Fillmore since the late 1970s.

The transition to AFR would affect about 200 employees in Santa Paula and another 50 to 80 workers in Fillmore.

“We’re working hard to get the deal done,” said Warnaco spokesman Jeff Tawfield. “Such a transaction would be consistent with our corporate objective to either relocate employees or to attempt to sell the Olga facilities to another manufacturer who would retain the employees.”

AFR manufactures upscale-label lingerie for private retailers and catalogs and produces its own line of lingerie, Parisa by amir.The company hopes to move into the Fillmore plant in mid-July and into the Santa Paula facility in late July.

“It’s always nice to save over 250 jobs,” said Amir Moghadam, president and chief executive of AFR. “The workers have been here many years, and being in a small area, I don’t think there would have been a whole lot of [other] work waiting for them.”

Moghadam said if the deal goes through, he plans to hire additional workers for the two plants.

Trying to get 4-year-old AFR moved into Ventura County as Olga moves out has been a combined effort between the two companies, Santa Paula and Fillmore city officials and the Ventura County Workforce Development Division, a federally funded agency that would subsidize AFR for on-the-job retraining of about 150 employees.

Moghadam said he had looked to expand elsewhere before selecting Ventura County.

“We actually had not looked into Ventura County,” Moghadam said. “We tried to open up in the city of San Fernando, about eight miles away from [the Van Nuys headquarters]. We even looked at a building and almost signed the lease.”

But when he heard there would be 250 factory-trained lingerie workers and two vacant plants available in the near future, he took notice.

“We looked into it a little more and realized the opportunities,” he said. “Geographically, it is farther from [Van Nuys] than we wanted it to be--the farther away you get, the less control you have. But in any situation you look at the ups and downs and weigh them.”

Bruce Stenslie, acting director of administration for the county’s Workforce Development Division, anticipates spending about $150,000 in federal funds to retrain Olga personnel for jobs at AFR. “Without those dollars, it’s not likely AFR would locate the plant here,” said Stenslie, whose office receives about $9 million annually under the federal Job Training Partnership Act to prepare adults and youth for the work force.

“Our retraining work has to do with seamstresses and related floor operations, all the way to management and the functioning of equipment,” he said.

“Our concern is primarily to facilitate AFR’s coming in and to get them up and running as soon as possible.”

Although Olga and AFR are in the same line of business, machinery and manufacturing techniques differ, he said.

Cecelia Uber, director of the Fillmore Chamber of Commerce, said she is ecstatic about the possible arrival of AFR. Uber was the first Ventura County representative with whom Moghadam came in contact.

“He wandered into our office five days after Olga made the announcement and he said, ‘I hear you’ve got a plant closing down around here,’ ” Uber said. “I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Well, I’d like to buy it.’ ”

Uber said maintaining the current work force in Fillmore is critical to the local business community and economy.

“For Fillmore, Olga was one of our major employers. To not lose that technical ability here is wonderful,” she said. “They would have been reemployed, but they would have been reemployed out of the area and our tax base would have been hurt. Fillmore is a tight community, and when people are employed here, the dollar stays here.”

Uber said the arrival of a major manufacturer would bode well for a town that continues to rebuild from the Northridge earthquake.

“I think it will be an example to other companies,” she said. “We have been stagnant, and now we have something to brag about. We were doing fairly good bringing in new businesses before the earthquake. This [would be] our first since then.”

Ken Cott, Santa Paula’s economic development director, said the arrival of AFR would have an emotional impact as well as an economic one.

“The emotional trauma eliminated through the retaining of these jobs is significant,” he said. “It’s exciting to take a negative situation and create a positive one. It happened extremely quickly.”

If AFR moves into Ventura County, Moghadam said, he expects his privately held company to double its output with the new facilities and with expansion in its five industrial buildings in the San Fernando Valley. He anticipates annual production to increase from about 2 million pieces of lingerie to about 4 million pieces.

He also expects his work force to increase to about 500 employees.