Shows and so forth

With the addition of clothing production to the mix we entered a very creative but also extremely stressful time. I enjoyed selling in New York but often times getting prepared for these shows was really really hectic with loose ends, forgotten brief cases, lack of sleep and so forth. A number of times the "collection" would come into Los Angeles the night before and we would take it the next morning to the show in New York. The collections were really beautiful and sales sustainable but it was a lot of work. Boutiques of the sort that bought our collection (I realize as I write this now) have almost totally disappeared from our towns and cities. Twenty years ago, they would congregate and mingle in New York or Paris to select items to purchase for their clientele. If it was winter in New York, the store owners were buying for a spring delivery. So when we collected the orders we would immediately begin creating the silk and now the clothing too. For the most part we were still working in Cambodia as by this time we came in contact with very talented seamstresses and the general level of the clothing production was very fine. An interesting note is that we were probably early practitioners of what came to be called "micro-finance" as we purchased the quality machinery to produce the clothing and let the individual sewers purchase them over a short time so that they were their own to do with as they wished.