Raj Manufacturing LLC co-President Lisa Vogel was recently at the pool with her 11-year-old son, Vaughn, when he lobbed a question.
“Mom, what’s your most productive SwimSpot store, is it Fashion Island?”
Vogel, who went to work for the family business straight out of college, was caught off guard but relished the thought that Vaughn might one day follow in her footsteps.
“I loved it—he just has a little business mind, so we’ll see what happens,” she said. “I grew up learning so much during dinnertime conversations” with her parents, Raj and Marta Bhathal, who founded the Tustin-based swimsuit designer and manufacturer in 1968.
Vogel and her younger brother and company co-president, Alex, took over operations in 2007 in an investor-backed buyout deal with private equity firm Swander Pace Capital LLC in San Francisco. Raj Manufacturing had an estimated $300 million in revenue last year, with about 400 employees.
Vogel, one of five women honored at the Business Journal’s 21st Annual Women in Business Awards luncheon on June 23 at Hotel Irvine, said she “always had a passion for fashion.” (See related stories on pages 1, 6, 9 and 12)
Wet Seal LLC’s then-Chief Executive Kathy Bronstein hired her as an assistant buyer during Vogel’s senior year in college.
“I would work three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and I would commute to USC Tuesday and Thursday and finish my classes,” she said.
Robinsons-May
She graduated in 1993 with a degree in business and three job prospects: Wet Seal wanted her to stay on; the old Robinsons-May department store chain wanted to bring her on as a buyer; and her parents invited her to join Raj Manufacturing.
“Both of my offers were for more money than my parents were offering me, but I decided to look long term and took a job in the family business, basically to start the marketing department,” Vogel said. “I literally graduated on Friday and started on Monday.”
Raj Manufacturing, which made its name with Barefoot Miss of California swimsuits, employed 200 at the time.
She put together a marketing and public relations plan and got her “feet wet working with different fashion editors out of New York” to gain national editorial exposure for the company’s three in-house labels.
Vogel took on other responsibilities over time, moving to the operations side. Her brother joined her in 1999, and the siblings “saw an opportunity for a shift in the marketplace. Licensed brands were becoming important.”
“I worked on signing those brands, and through the years probably that’s most of my forte,” Vogel said.
Guess
The company signed its first major licensing deal with Guess Inc. that same year, followed by women’s swimwear lines for Irvine-based O’Neill Clothing USA in 2003 and St. John International Inc. in 2004.
Raj Manufacturing makes Athena swimsuits, performance brand Next, and higher-priced label Luxe by Lisa Vogel, for which Vogel provided design direction. It acquired Basta Surf this year, and its licensed brands are Ella Moss, Splendid, Hurley, Reef, Nautica, Juicy Couture and Oakley.
“There has been some shifts over the years for various reasons, but we’d like to think we have a very robust portfolio of brands that complement each other and don’t compete with each other,” Vogel said. “Our proprietary brands are still the larger portion of our business.”
The company launched the SwimSpot Holdings e-commerce and retail chain in 2010, and it’s since become its main focus and “biggest avenue of growth”—a ninth store is in the works, and two more are set to open within a year.
Raj Manufacturing competes with Anaheim-based Lunada Bay Corp. and with Cypress-based Manhattan Beachwear LLC, among others.
The SwimSpot venture was an attempt to “own our own destiny a little bit more.”
“What we saw was the shrinking of the wholesale channel, and we realized that in order to grow our business, we needed to look at other opportunities, and at the time no one was [selling direct-to-consumer] in our business,” she said. “Now people are starting to follow in our footsteps.”
Vogel described the company’s culture and working with her brother as a “check your ego at the door” policy.
“Alex and I may argue over things, but it’s because we are passionate about the business and we let it roll off our shoulders five minutes later because it is not about us,” she said.
She credits her mom’s advice to “be flexible in business” for helping her navigate the “male-dominated” swimwear industry.
“Men in general tend to be flexible by nature, and women tend to be more rigid … we like to be organized, precise, orderly, and sometimes things change and you can’t be like, ‘Who moved my cheese?’… It’s a matter of switching gears when you need to switch gears.”
