“I did see the parade,” I finally answered. “What did you think about it?”
Mom’s face practically lit up like a Christmas tree. “Oh, wasn’t it wonderful? I had no idea Hope was so talented. She’s certainly been keeping it a secret.”
“You really liked the clothes?”
“Honey, I would buy the clothes if I had any money… and if I was twenty years younger.”
The compliment was directed at Hope, but I felt the pride swell inside me anyway. My mom liked our clothes. She liked my clothes.
I wasn’t good at school, I spent more time in detention than I did in Math class. My report card was always a disappointment and I sucked at sports. But this? This was something I could do.
And I did it well.
Not just well, I was awesome at it.
I’d never been prouder before in my entire life. Perhaps this was setting up my future. Maybe now I could actually dare to believe I would be a fashion designer for the rest of my life. I wouldn’t have to work two jobs like Mom did and miss all my kids growing up.
I could be okay.
Better than okay.
I wanted to scream and shout about how happy I was. Instead, I had to keep it all inside. I had to watch Hope get showered with attention and praise. It was her smile that beamed with pride. Her head that swelled with the compliments.
But that’s how it had to be. Jane and I were too young to be taken seriously and Hope was doing exactly what we had asked of her. I couldn’t be angry with any of them.
My time would come.
Jane and I slipped away from everyone and disappeared to the waiting room where all the models were still waiting for us.
We set out hanging the clothes they took off and making sure we had a full inventory. Considering our website had crashed with the orders, we probably needed every piece of clothing we had. Jane could only sew so fast.
When all the girls had left and it was just Jane and I in the room, we finally collapsed. The only place to sit was on the floor so we did, surrounded by our clothes that created a makeshift fort around us.
“We did it,” Jane sighed. Her shoulders slumped. She looked as exhausted as I felt.
I held up my hand in a high five and she hit it. “We were awesome.”
She giggled. “We were. Can you believe it?”
“I can hardly believe anything that happened today.”
“Our website crashed. Beau said we sold out of stock. Everything in this room belongs to someone else.” She gestured around the racks of clothes.
“I guess that means I won’t get to wear any of it,” I replied, smiling. I kept teasing Jane about keeping all the clothes for myself because of her mad sewing skills.
“No, none of it is for keeps.”
Silence settled around us. At some point, we were going to have to find the energy to get up and pack everything away. Then there were the bollards to return to center management, deal with filling the website orders, start with more designs.
Being good at something was exhausting.
Finally, Jane leaned back on her elbows and let out a sigh. “I think we might be in the fashion business.”
I laughed. “I think we might be too.”
Fashion Finds
CHAPTER 1
Every time I received my exam marks, I got this horrible groan-worthy feeling in my stomach. I had no idea whether I had passed or not and what consequences I would have to suffer.
Like maybe I would be doing the vacuuming at home for a week. Or maybe Mom would insist I spend two hours doing my homework every night. My report card rarely ended with a celebratory ice cream.
I had good reason to get that groan-worthy feeling with any results I received. School wasn’t my thing, it was more of a compulsory social event. It filled me with dread.
That’s exactly how I felt now.
But I wasn’t waiting to see my exam mark, I was waiting for the reviews of our Every Girl Inc fashion launch. Someone – that someone might have been me – sent a video of our fashion parade to the biggest fashion blogger on the internet.
Mr. Fashion could make or break a new label and I wanted his honest opinion. If we were going to fail, then I wanted to know upfront. Before all my hopes got so high that the crash would be heartbreaking.
“Is it up yet?” my business partner, Jane, asked. For the hundredth time.
I refreshed the screen again. “Nope. He always posts at seven o’clock and it’s three minutes past. Maybe he hated us and needs to add some more words to describe the horror of our fail.”
“Would he be that mean?” Her brow was creased with wrinkles of concern. I was so glad she was there to suffer with me.
Actually, technically I was there with her. We were, after all, in her mansion. It was quieter there, she didn’t have two snotty brothers and a baby sister like I did.
“Would he be that mean?” I repeated, incredulous she would even ask that question. “He once called a designer the worst thing to happen to fashion since the grunge movement.”
“Grunge movement?”
I rolled my eyes, there were no words for Jane’s ignorance of the entire fashion world. If she didn’t have crazy sewing skills, she would not be part of Every Girl Inc. Unfortunately, I needed her. I sucked at sewing.
Hitting refresh one more time, the website finally updated. “It’s up!”
She jumped to my side as we started reading:
I was recently introduced to a new fashion line, Every Girl Inc. Their launch, guerrilla-style in the Stanthorpe Grand Mall, was a grassroots campaign to appeal to the fashionista in all girls.
“That sounds promising,” Jane commented. I shushed her so I could keep reading.
Over the many years I have been in the industry, I have had to sit through many launches. I have seen the best of clothes and I have seen the worst. Launching any new label in this business is a bold and risky move.
The groan-worthy feeling was starting to tie a knot in my stomach. I didn’t like where this was going. Jane was so quiet that I expected she was fearing the same thing.
When I saw the video of Every Girl Inc, I expected to see more of the same. A bold statement without much substance. Perhaps some fashion school graduate that expected to conquer the design world but would sadly fade away into oblivion.
“This isn’t going so well,” Jane whispered. I couldn’t disagree with her. I couldn’t even find the words to say as much.
So when I played the video, it was like experiencing a breath of fresh air. Every Girl Inc embodies what is at the heart of every fashion designer – wearable clothes that complement the woman lucky enough to don them. Their flair and finesse are only rivaled by their beautiful cuts and fabric flow.
Every Girl Inc is a young designer label perfectly placed to set the fashion world on fine. Look out ladies, there’s a new player in town and I predict they are only going to get better.
Oh. My. God.
I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. Mr. Fashion liked our clothes. No, he loved our clothes. My designs. Jane’s sewing. He was talking about us.
“I think we should retire now, because it’s not going to get any better than this,” I said. I wanted to prove Mr. Fashion right and only get better but the pressure of actually doing that was frightening.
I’d never had people expecting me to succeed before. It was a new and terrifying experience. How did other people deal with this kind of pressure?
“No, now we need to get working,” Jane insisted. “While you’re online, can you find any more reviews? Maybe what ordinary people are saying about us?”
She probably had a point. While having the endorsement of Mr. Fashion was fantastic, it wouldn’t mean anything unless the people actually buying our clothes thought we were doing a good job.
I logged onto the fashion forums which I had spent most of my teenage life on. While other girls my age talked about boys, I talked about clothes. And the fashion forums were the best place to do
it.
Doing a quick search, I found a whole discussion thread based on our label. It felt so weird seeing them discussing Every Girl Inc. It had been between only Jane and me for so long and now our baby was out in the world. Alone. Vulnerable. I hoped we’d done the right thing.
“Well?” Jane asked.
“They really like the clothes,” I replied. “But…”
“But what?”
I had to read through the thread twice to make sure I was reading it correctly. There was so much praise that I wanted to cry… again. But there was something else too.
“They think the clothes are too expensive,” I said. Okay, so it was our first negative feedback. But, as far as feedback went, it wasn’t so bad. They could have hated the clothes. Price was something we could take action on.
“They are pretty pricey, but it’s not like we’re making a huge profit,” Jane said. She was in charge of all the numbers. My eyes tended to glaze over when she talked about mark up and profit margins. “We purposefully priced them as low as we could so kids could afford them.”
I went to our website – now fixed and up and running again thanks to the magnificent Beau – and scrolled through the clothes.
It was still so weird seeing my designs as real clothes. I got a little thrill every time I saw them.
Focus, Truly, focus.
Prices. We charged about fifty bucks for a dress, forty for a top, and the same again for a pair of pants. That was expensive. I hadn’t realized we were charging that much.
I certainly couldn’t afford to buy our clothes. Jane was rich so it was probably cheap to her. I doubted whether she even looked at a price tag before buying anything.
“They are too expensive,” I started. “Nobody can afford these prices.”
“That’s what we need to charge, otherwise we’re not making any money.”
“Then we need to find a way to make them cheaper.”
Jane took the laptop from me and scrolled through the website herself. She pursed her lips as she studied the page. “Are these really expensive? Isn’t that what all clothes cost?”
I wanted to laugh. She was adorable when she was clueless. “Yes, they’re expensive. I can’t afford to buy my own clothes. Every girl can’t afford them and that’s the whole point of our label.”
“Then we’re going to have to reassess everything.”
We certainly were.
CHAPTER 2
Talking about numbers made my head hurt. Literally. I had a massive headache but that didn’t give me a get-out-of-jail-free card. Not when it came to business stuff.
Jane, however, was in her element. She loved this stuff. “We don’t have any overheads so that leaves only variable costs. We have to cut those.”
Overheads? Variables? I wasn’t sure she was still speaking English.
I pretended to understand anyway. If nothing else, I was a superb actress. “So how do we cut them?”
Jane tapped her pencil on the desk as she thought about it. Her mind was brilliant, I knew she would come up with some answers.
So I waited.
And waited.
It would have been nice to have a solution to offer myself, but that wasn’t going to happen. I was great at making dinner for my family of five on only five dollars, but we weren’t talking macaroni and cheese here.
So I waited some more.
Finally, Jane’s face lit up with a stroke of an idea. I could almost see the light bulb appear over her head. “We need to buy our fabrics in bulk, that’s the only way. Our main expense is material and I brought it all straight from the sewing store. We need to get it from the warehouses instead.”
Shopping, that sounded doable. “Okay, so we get fabric from the warehouses. We can do a shopping run on the weekend.”
Jane shook her head. “It’s not that simple. Wholesale suppliers don’t just let anyone in. We’ll have to get Holly to set up an account.”
Holly was the official owner of our business. She had half of a business degree so we figured she would suffice. All she had to do was pretend to be the fashion designer and commit fashion fraud. Easy.
“So we’ll get Holly to set up an account.” I still wasn’t seeing the problem here.
“Have you ever been to Costco?” Jane asked. Talk about a random change of topic.
“Uh, yeah. Have you?” Jane at Costco? I would have paid money to see that.
“I’ve heard about it. But you know how when you go there you have to buy, like, fifty rolls of toilet paper to get the cheap price?” She waited patiently while I nodded. “It’s the same with a wholesaler. We have to buy a lot of fabric to shop there.”
“So we buy a lot of fabric.” My mind wandered to the fifty or so toilet paper rolls we had at home. It took a while to get through that much paper. If space was an issue, then Jane had a whole mansion to store the fabric. I still wasn’t seeing the big problem.
Jane took a deep breath, trying not to get frustrated with me. I knew that look well. “To buy a lot of fabric, we have to lay out a lot of money.”
Ahhhhh… there it was.
“We don’t have a lot of money,” I said, feeling like I had just solved some complicated calculus problem.
“Exactly. To buy the fabric, we’re going to have to put everything we have back into the business. If we don’t sell any more clothes, we’re going to go broke.”
“It’s a gamble.”
She nodded in agreement. “So do we take our money and run? Or do we roll the dice and take the risk?”
There was a third option, keep going with the expensive clothes and fabrics from the store. But that wasn’t really an option at all. We had a clear vision for Every Girl Inc and expensive clothes did not fit into that model.
In fact, there wasn’t really any other option. There was no backing out now. Not when I had tasted success and found it to be pretty darn tasty.
“Dices were made to be rolled,” I replied, my lips quirking up into a smile. I put my fist up, waiting for a bump.
Jane bumped me. “Then let’s roll.”
After that big decision, the rest was really easy. We hunted down the best wholesalers in the city and made a list for Holly to contact. Considering we were giving her a cut of all the sale proceeds, she had to do a little work for it.
By the end of the evening, the problem of pricing didn’t seem as huge as it did at the start. Just like all our other problems, we found a solution that would help us move forward.
We were kind of awesome like that.
I crawled into bed that night, certain I would dream of nothing but price tags and numbers. I honestly didn’t know how Jane did it.
There was nothing we could do about the new clothes until the following Saturday. Hope had done her tasks by then and got everything ready with the wholesalers. That just left us with some serious shopping.
Jane picked Holly and me up early on Saturday and we drove to the industrial part of the city. Out there, the buildings weren’t pretty, just large boxy type structures designed for function over façade.
And we were going shopping in the biggest one of all.
My eyes were like saucers as we parked the car in the lot. The building had to be as big as several football fields. It was busy too, trucks and commercial vans waited to be loaded with fabrics everywhere. I hoped Jane’s little Mazda would be able to cope with our haul.
“We should stick together inside,” Jane started, giving us a lecture before we even got out of the car. “I have a list of everything we need and we can’t get anything extra. Our budget is tight, so nothing not on the list. Got it?” She stared at me with that last comment.
What, like I would stray from an instruction?
Jane was getting to know me too well.
“I know. Got it,” I replied, trying not to take it personally. I wasn’t a list person. I wasn’t the kind to color inside the lines. But, for the business, I would definitely try.
We were allowed out of the vehi
cle and followed Jane inside. The moment we stepped through the doors, I understood her warning about sticking together. The place was packed. No, not just packed, it was like we were all vacuum packed in together.
No air. No room.
Lots of BO.
I actually gripped onto the back of Jane’s top so I didn’t lose her. A few minutes later, I felt Holly do the same to me. We wove through the massive crowd elephant style. Which was a pity because I really loved shopping and this wasn’t fun at all.
The bolts of material were huge, taller and rounder than all three of us put together. I had some serious doubts whether Jane’s car would be able to haul everything back to her place. We might need to leave Holly and come back for her later.
Jane stopped. I didn’t notice, running straight into her back. Holly did the same to me, letting out her breath in an ‘oomph’ right into my ear.
“This is beautiful,” Jane said, running her hands over a bolt of material. It was red and thick. Instantly, I could imagine it in a winter coat. Or a skirt. Or perhaps some pants.
“It’ll work,” I replied. “Let’s get it.”
Jane consulted her list, satisfied it met some predetermined criteria. She raised her hand to get the vendor’s attention.
A short man with a moustache and beard hurried over. His entire face was covered with a layer of sweat which he dabbed at with a handkerchief. “You like this one?”
“It’s okay. How much per yard?” Jane asked, keeping her voice neutral.
“Eight.”
“I’ll give you three and buy the whole bolt.”
How did she go from eight to three? Was she crazy? There was no way Mr. McSweaty was going to go for that. We were going to lose the fabric.
He eyed Jane carefully, his gaze travelling over every feature of her face. “Seven.”
“Four,” Jane shot right back.
Fashion Fraud Collection Page 10
