By SUBRINA HUDSON Staff Reporter
Creating high end T-shirts with cool graphics imprinted on the front was just a hobby for Meredith Garrett – until it got her kicked out of her Santa Monica apartment.
“My roommate kicked me out because she thought there was too much commerce going on in her apartment,” she said.
That misfortune turned into an opportunity. Her apparel company, Signorelli Inc., has grown from a one-person operation to employ about 70 people at the company’s 40,000-square-foot facility in Huntington Park. It also outsources some manufacturing to China, where its factories can accommodate orders it landed in recent weeks from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Forever 21. She’s also creating apparel for King Digital Entertainment to go with its hit online game Candy Crush Saga.
The big contracts with huge retailers mark a rapid rise for the company, which Garrett formed in 2005 with little more than an interest in fashion and a couple of credit cards.
At the time, she was a 23-year-old assistant at New Line Cinema in West Hollywood and often visited the nearby upscale boutique Kitson. Garrett said she wasn’t impressed with the quality of some of the T-shirts and decided to create her own.
She hired a freelance artist, a student at UCLA, to help design her logo and T-shirt graphics.
But when it came to making a garment, Garrett said she had no clue what to do.
“I would go to factories, figure out how to cut and sew, what the costing was, find fabrics, do patterns,” said Garrett.
She spent about six months researching and meeting with pattern makers, sewers, cutters and dye houses in downtown Los Angeles before having samples to show potential buyers.
Two months after launching her line at the Los Angeles Fashion Market, Garrett had $45,000 in orders from various boutiques.
“I had enough orders and enough legitimacy that I could tell this was going to be a business,” said Garrett, who then quit her job at New Line.
She had enough orders but not enough money to produce the shirts, so Garrett took out a $30,000 loan to help cover costs.
Garrett said she started out by hooking up a credit card machine to her phone line to process orders, boxing up her fashion T’s then loading them into her truck to drop off at UPS to be delivered to boutiques.
“That was my first month of production,” said Garrett. It was busy enough that her roommate asked her to pack up and find a more appropriate place from which to run a business.
The line really took off two years into the business when celebrities Courteney Cox and Nicole Richie were spotted wearing the line.
Signorelli began making T-shirts with images licensed from Marvel Comics, Mattel Inc. and a number of movie studios such as Paramount Pictures and Universal Studios. And she also started manufacturing for retail chains such as Forever 21, Hot Topic and PacSun.
“We started targeting those customers,” said Garrett. “But what do I know about mass-producing garments at dirt-cheap prices to try to make a margin? It was a good idea because it obviously ended up paying off now, but at the time it was very difficult to try to make money when you’re really learning a new business.”
Nut and bolts
Frances Harder, founder and president of downtown L.A. non-profit Fashion Business Inc., said gaining the knowledge to break into apparel manufacturing takes research as contacts can be hard to find.
“There is still a lot of manufacturing in Southern California,” she said. “It’s just very difficult to find them. So, for somebody to start like she did, it’s quite difficult.”
Its fine for someone to aspire to be a designer, but Harder said the nuts and bolts of running an apparel business offer a number of setbacks.
“There’s so many rules and regulations governing apparel manufacturing in California,” said Harder. “It’s actually staggering that people can actually do it. The other big obstacle is the labor – finding people who are willing to sew and who are compliant.”
Though she would not disclose revenue figures, Garrett said sales are about evenly split between high-end retailers and mass-marketers like Wal-Mart.
The company can process anywhere from 5,000 units per style to as many as 80,000. Manufacturing is split among its Huntington Park facility and plants in China, where larger orders are produced.
Scott Wilson, vice president of sales and development for JS Apparel Inc. in Carson, another apparel manufacturer, said working with a mass-market retailer is a very different business.
“The costs incurred are the same – the fabric, cut and sew costs,” he said. “The difference is the margin. … I mean nobody is really making a large margin off (mass-market) product. On Bloomingdale’s or Nordstrom, the margins are much higher.”
Garrett said now the challenge is managing the company’s continued growth.
“Sales are not the problem and the growth is going to come,” she said. “The challenge is now managing it and putting the right systems and people and operations in place so that the growth goes smoothly.”
