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Tuesday, Mar 19, 2024
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Wearing the Pants

WOMEN COMING TO THE FORE IN OC’S APPAREL INDUSTRY

Marta Bhathal and her daughter Lisa are not household names, but the swimwear their 30-year-old company, Raj Manufacturing Inc., designs under the names BCBG Max Azria Swim, Guess?, Athena and Barefoot Miss certainly has garnered recognition.

The mother-daughter team, who work with husband/father Raj Bhathal, are among Orange County’s top female fashion executives.

But while male OC apparel execs and designers such as Giannuli Mossimo, Shawn Stussy, Bob Hurley, Bob McKnight and Marvin Winkler are national or local personalities, local female execs are fewer in number and generally have not garnered major public attention outside the apparel industry, even as they have reshaped that industry in recent years.

One who has been in the spotlight is Kathy Bronstein. The CEO of apparel retailer Wet Seal Inc. made news as one of the county’s highest-paid execs, with a $742,179 salary and $1.5 million bonus last year. (By comparison, Quiksilver Inc.’s McKnight draws about half her salary and his bonuses have fluctuated between $168,000 and $1.2 million the past three years.)

Bronstein is an exception.

The Bhathals labor in obscurity, despite their ranking as the third-largest apparel firm in OC on the last Business Journal list. That’s the way this pair prefers it. Others are less satisfied.

Susan Crank is president and CEO of Anaheim-based Lunada Bay Corp. where she oversees about 80 employees with sales of more than $40 million annually.

She believes that her ascent to the CEO position was more difficult because she is a woman, but that it gave her the solid foundation she needed to run a strong business.

“I’ve had to work harder to get the same kind of promotions and responsibilities as my male cohorts, but it prepared me to run a business because the hours were longer, process was more thought out and I had to prove myself.”

Although it’s been a long time since Crank was asked, “Did your daddy give you the business?” she believes there are still too few female CEOs in the ranks of the apparel industry. Also, women are still trying harder than men to gain acceptance, she says.

“The power of perspective is important in our industry and the retailers who we do business with,” Crank said. “It takes a woman longer because she must prove herself versus the assumption that the person at the top of a company is presumed to be capable. A male CEO is assumed to have the benefit of the doubt, but a female CEO often has to show her stuff before she is appreciated.”

Crank’s sentiments were echoed by Pat Hawk, CEO of Hawk Clothing in San Juan Capistrano.

“The surf industry and the skate industry appear to be a boy’s club,” she said, but added “once people see that I am a viable businesswoman, they respect me and speak to me that way.”

But increasingly, the county’s top surfwear companies including Quiksilver, Billabong and Hurley have women in key design and executives positions and other women have stepped out on their own to found labels such as Lucy Love, Chicks Rule, Hawk Clothing and Sugar and Spice. These are not all surfwear companies, but some have their roots in the industry.

“I think that a lot of these women broke the glass ceiling,” said Court Overin, trade-show director for Action Sports Retailer in Laguna Beach. “I think it’s been tough for a lot of women because the industry was a men’s industry, both men’s sportswear and hard goods (surfboards, skateboards and snowboards), so there are those barriers to break down.”

Bob Hurley, president, Hurley International in Costa Mesa, says in the past there was definitely a “guy factor” in the business and the perception was that “girls didn’t know what’s up, and what does a girl know about surf or skateboarding?”

But Hurley adds, “Guys are more open-minded now, and girls know best what looks good on men and know best about what looks good on women.”

Hurley International’s designer, Lian Murray, was the key men’s designer of Billabong USA for seven years.

While Murray was designing for Billabong, the company’s sales grew from $13 million to $70 million, but she is now in a better position at Hurley, where she is the second-largest shareholder.

Certainly Murray has come a long way since college when she was designing and sewing T-shirt dresses in her dormitory with her roommate. After graduating from school with a degree in psychology, 21-year-old Murray established her own retail store in the Melrose area of Los Angeles. She wanted a job designing clothes for the Australian-based Billabong, but she had to prove herself first. Murray says it was the hardest job she ever landed.

“I said, ‘Let me prove myself,’ and the line did really well,” said Murray, who freelanced a fall line of fleece and denim clothes to get her foot in the door.

“I think it was so much harder being a woman because all my competitors and fellow designers are mostly men and most are good surfers,” she said. “A lot of people say bad things like, ‘What does she know about board shorts,she doesn’t even surf.’ ”

Apparently, the women knew more than the men thought. In the past few years, the expansion of surfwear offerings into women’s and juniors’ lines has revolutionized the industry.

Quiksilver led the way with its Roxy line, headed by Adrienne Ernst (who left Quiksilver to join Bronstein at Wet Seal as senior vice president of design and product development).

The success of Roxy helped establish a junior’s market in the surfwear industry and spawned competitors not only at other men’s surfwear companies, but in smaller niche companies that cater to even smaller girls.

“Women’s companies are on fire right now; it’s such a good time to be a part of this,” said Dana Dartez, co-founder of 26 Red Sugar, the women’s division of 26 Red in Irvine. (Dartez sold her stake in the company and moved to Quiksilver where she is designing for the Roxy division.)

Emmy Coats, who runs the women’s division of her brother’s business, Stussy Inc., is second-in-command at the Irvine-based company. She agreed with Dartez’s assessment.

“In the last five years, Roxy’s presence in the market and the whole girl thing just blew up,” she said. “Now surf shops are doing more business with girls than they did with men’s, and surf shops were once primarily about men’s surfwear.”

Quiksilver’s Dartez adds that “since women have become involved, the (surfwear) industry as a whole has become more important and it is not just about water.”

Lisa Bhathal, Raj’s executive VP, goes so far as to say she believes the apparel industry is really now a woman’s world.

“I’m lucky because women like my mom and Kathy Bronstein have paved the way for the next generation,” she said. “We joke that we have a few token men in the business.”

Others who have been making a name for themselves in the apparel industry include:

n Lissa Zwahlen, who replaced Ernst as vice president of design at Quiksilver. Zwahlen heads up the design of products in all women’s divisions including Roxy, Teenie Wahine, accessories, cosmetics, shoes and swim.

Zwahlen is working on a new unnamed Quiksilver label for women.

n Holly Sharp, who launched the Irvine-based Gotcha’s GirlStar line for junior girls before debuting her own Lucy Love brand at the Action Sports Retailer in the fall of 1998. Sharp has carved out her own destiny as a designer of apparel, swim and couture wedding dresses, but she is part of a fashion family that includes her brother, Shawn Stussy, who founded the surfwear company by the same name.

n Hawk Clothing CEO Pat Hawk, who is the sister of skateboard legend Tony Hawk and former Surfer editor Steve Hawk. Tony Hawk is vice president of promotions and Steve Hawk is vice president of marketing. The three co-founded the children’s skate apparel company in January 1998, and it has since grown its annual sales to $2.5 million. She also has a hand in promotions for Tony Hawk’s Birdhouse skatewear company geared to older core skateboarders.

n Designer Darcy Lee, who has managed to melt the ice with retailers who were at first reluctant to try her lines of female snowboard clothing. They told her that women would just buy the men’s clothes, but she insisted that women wanted and needed their own designs and would be a viable consumer base.

Her company, Costa Mesa-based Cold as Ice, recently sold a 50% stake to Patagonia in Ventura.

n Margaret Mackey, co-founder of Chicks Rule, Huntington Beach, who recently bought out her two male partners to run the flashy junior’s label that includes a full cosmetics line. The company sprang from a men’s line after she designed a single T-shirt with the wording “Chicks Rule.”

n Joy Horwtiz, co-founder of Sugar and Spice, who also has found a niche in the children’s clothing market for her little girls surf and fashion line. Horwitz co-founded the Newport Beach-based business with her husband. n

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