"Material woman" makes style successful

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Calgary fashion designer Carol "Starlight" Mason has already proven worthy of her Blood name, "Material Woman."

Since she started Starfire Clothing Company, Ltd., in 1990, she has been turning heads and winning sales in both Canada and the United States with her Native and country-style fashions.

Now the Native business-woman wants to use her imagination to expand her business. For that idea to take shape, however, Mason will need money even more than fabric.

"I need $250,000," says. Actually, $300,000 to $500,000 would be better, she adds, but one-quarter million will do."

With the money, she envisions fulfilling the first step of her business plan - setting up her own manufacturing plant. Presently, she contracts work out to other Calgary manufacturers.

She would start small: Six permanent seamstresses, more on contract as needed, a floor supervisor, a receptionist/office manager, and a team of marketing representatives. She already knows who she would fit into those jobs.

She would use the rest of her capital to help meet the plant's early operating costs. "You need the money in place to carry you for two seasons," she explains. Revenue from the winter 1995 line of clothing, for example, wouldn't start coming in until after she needed to buy fabric and start production for the summer 1995 line.

"You need a good two (fashion) seasons to get you going and that's a good one-and-a-half years." Good profitability, she adds, could take up to three, even four years.

"I thought I'd stay in Western Canada and stay small," Mason says. Presently, Starfire sells about 8,000 to 10,000 items of clothing annually.

But U.S. sales orders and invitations to fashion shows in the united States, Germany and Japan keep prodding her to think big.

"We got down to Texas and they just swarmed around us," recalls Mason, who with her husband, Jim, attended the giant Western Wear Mart in Dallas in March, 1992. Eleven sales representatives wanted to sell the jackets and other clothing items in Mason's collection. Company capacity forced Mason to settle on supplying only two of those sales representatives.

Declining multi-million dollar orders from J.C. Penney's, a U.S. national department store chain, and Osh Kosh, a leading children's wear line, hurt the most.

Now as she counts the financial cost of expanding her company, she considers all her existing assets.

"We've never had a problem getting an order," she says, opening a file folder and waving a couple of orders in the air.

Contacts have come easily, too - in New York, Los Angeles and Texas. Top designers, such as Alfred Sung, consider her a colleague. Celebrities such as Tantoo Cardinal, who asked Mason to design the dress she wore for the 1991 Genie Awards, call her friend.

"(Being) a Native woman from Canada who is a designer - they've never seen that before...They are curious to the point where they give me anything I want," Mason says about a couple of Eastern U.S. fabric suppliers.

Masons says her U.S. experience has also given her confidence and street-smarts. She now knows all the tricks of the trade, some of them through painful experience. "The clothing business is a very cut-throat business."

Surprises, such as delayed fabric deliveries, also can hurt a clothing manufacturer working hard to meet its own deadlines. But Mason says she's ready for them, too. "We know what to expect. We know what the roadblocks are."

She also knows the value of existing Canadian business. Filling local orders, such as the 254 jackets recently ordered for the cast and crew of CBC's North of 60 series, will keep Mason's manufacturing plant busy in the off-season.

But raising $250,000 to fulfill her U.S. marketing dream likely won't be as easy for her as it was for Calvin Klein, Mason says with a bit of a smile. He was handed his $250,000 right out of fashion school, when someone saw his show, liked it and backed it.

For Starfire, says Mason, it was Peace Hills Trust, a wholly-wned Native Alberta company, and the federal government's Western Diversification Plan that gave her new, untried company its first modest financial backing.

Now private investors have offered to supply the capital that Starfire presently needs. But Mason says she's reluctant to accept that offer. Instead, she's hoping Starfire's long-term business relationship with the Royal Bank will lead to a better financing deal.