Tough As Leather

Entrepreneur, April, 1999 by Geoff Williams

Building a business isn't easy, but how much can one entrepreneur take?

WHEN JULIA DUREN arrived from Hamburg, Germany, at the San Francisco Airport in 1982, she was a 30-year-old mother with two children, ages 5 and 2. Her second husband, an American, was doing life at San Quentin. She had almost no money and no friends, family or contacts to speak of. But Duren knew something about leather, and she had a dream.

That put her on the road to success. Today, she's the largest shareholder of K.L. Manufacturing Inc., a Larkspur, California, firm that had revenues of $1.2 million last year. She has 24 employees, all of whom have profit sharing, 100 percent health benefits, paid vacation time and all the other benefits successful businesses can afford. But the ups and downs Duren endured are perhaps better-suited for the trampoline business.

"I was scared as hell," Duren says of her arrival in the United States. She had only a tourist visa that didn't allow her to work or live in the country, despite her recent wedding, and had to immediately apply for her green card. It's easy to speculate why she would marry a man serving a life sentence, but it was a real marriage, maintains Duren, who was married for seven years before she sought a divorce.

With two little girls to feed, Duren knew she couldn't have achieved her career goals in her homeland. "I had specialized in leather and was doing some innovative stuff," says Duren, who was designing clothing for European musicians. "It was very difficult back then to be an entrepreneur in Germany because there were strict regulations as to what kind of degrees you had to have to train other people. I knew I couldn't hire and train workers if I needed them."

In fact, hiring workers would be a long way off. When Duren arrived in America, she had $2,000, which was quickly eaten up by her first and last month's rent in San Rafael, California, and the purchase of "a very beat-up car." When she ran out of money, Duren pawned two family heirlooms, a diamond bracelet and a gold watch, for $600, and bought a sewing machine and some leather.

The car died its final death after a month, and Duren and her daughters had to sleep in one bed, but the family was going somewhere: Keky and Leila were going to day care, while their mother searched for clients for her handmade jackets. "I went from store to store and pretended I was a rep, and got some orders. Then I'd hop on the bus, pick up my kids from the public day care and make the things," says Duren. "There was along period when I slept three and a half hours a night."

TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE

One day a shop owner asked if Duren could make a purse to match the leather jackets. Sure, Duren responded, having absolutely no idea how to pull it off.

"You use different tools for jackets than for handbags," explains Duren, "so I designed a handbag almost like a garment. I kind of stumbled across something nobody was doing."

This first bag was well-received. Duren developed more styles and began pulling in $6,000 a month in sales. By 1984, she had attracted an investor a friend of a friend of a-well, you get the picture. The cash infusion allowed her to set up camp in a cushy studio and hire five employees. Soon, $6000 per month became $25,000. "This is too good to be true," Duren thought.

She was right. Soon the investor hit financial troubles and took them out on her. He yanked all her new equipment and accounts receivable. Worse, he liquidated her inventory, telling clients they were getting the merchandise at a last-chance, going-out-of-business discount. He was going out of business, but Duren wasn't, nonetheless, she now had no equipment other than what she'd started with years before, and with no materials to work with, no money was coming in. After releasing her employees, Duren was back to where she started.

Fortunately, Duren found out what her investor was up to and managed to convince her clients that she was still in business, though she was again a one-woman show. To make things worse, she was dealing with a more personal dilemma at the same time. On a day shortly before her investor pulled out, Duren was in San Francisco delivering her goods to a fashion show when she received a phone call from a hospital emergency room. Leila had been run over by a car. Chasing after a ball at her baby-sitter's house, she had run into the street.

Leila was in a coma for seven days, and Duren remained by her side the entire time, talking day and night because the doctors said the mother's voice might awaken the little girl. "It was so scary and surreal," says Duren. Keky had witnessed the accident, felt responsible and refused to go to the hospital. Aside from a friend who brought over some food, Julia Duren was all alone.

REFUSE TO LOSE

When Leila awoke, her pelvis and foot were broken, but she hadn't suffered any brain damage. Nursing her back to health took two months. Without insurance, Duren faced the medical bills knowing that she barely had the equipment or materials to do business even if she had had the time. When she finally did, she was practically down to her last dime, but she knew her priorities: "If there was a choice between buying some 'luxury' food--at that time, that would have been yogurt--or a glossy folder to present my merchandise in, it was the folder, hands down."