A very stylish business: What goes into creating a fabulous T-shirt? For this small fashion design firm, it takes a few square yards of teamwork

Career World, Jan, 2007 by Leah Paulos

Picking out an outfit to wear to school every day is hard enough, and all you have to do is browse through your closet, look in your drawers, or maybe pick up something from your bedroom floor. Imagine if you had to design and construct a shirt, skirt, or pair of pants from scratch! Months of work go into taking a new garment from concept to store shelf. And a lot of people with different skills come together to make it happen. If you really love mixing and matching, dressing up for fun, or making your own Halloween costumes, you might like to work in the fashion industry.

Michelle Brown, based in Lafayette, Calif., is thrilled to be part of such a creative field. She's the founder of the chic nature-themed Pink Spike line of T-shirts--they're comfy and reasonably priced, but they look fancy and fashion forward at the same time. "[Designing] allows me to be innovative every day. I'm not someone who could work 9 to 5 in a cubicle!" After graduating from fashion design school, she teamed up with her friend Chad Jenkins to create the line and the business in 2001. "It's perfect because Chad and I have a similar vision, but we have different talents," Brown says. "Plus, it's fun to work together every day, since we're good friends."

Another reason Brown loves having her own business? Both she and Jenkins adore animals and want to make people more aware of animal cruelty. They give a percentage of all the proceeds from Pink Spike to animal rescue charities.

How exactly does a Pink Spike T-shirt get made? And how do up to 10,000 of them end up in national chains such as Metro Park and Anthropologie and in 250 locally run boutiques each season? Many people work as a team throughout the process to make it happen--from concept to design to production to store.

The Steps From Sketch to Shirt

Fashion designers are often considered the artists of the clothing production process, and that is definitely true in Brown's case. She makes sure each T-shirt she designs is flattering, easy to wear, original, and very stylish. Once she has a vision for a new shirt, she makes a rough sketch on paper. Then she uses a sewing machine to make a sample of the shirt. Once the sample is to her liking, she converts it into a pattern. A pattern is a flat, cutout paper version of the shirt that can be used to make many copies of the garment out of fabric. If Brown is too busy with other tasks (you'll soon see that she has a million!), sometimes she draws the shirt design and sends it to a professional pattern maker.

Most Pink Spike shirts feature silk-screened animal graphics--giraffes, birds, tigers, horses. As a graphic designer, Jenkins creates the images. After looking at art books and nature photographs for inspiration, he draws several versions of an animal on paper. He and Brown choose the best one, and then Jenkins scans it into Photoshop. He then produces a digital version of the sample shirt Brown has designed. "This allows us to electronically play with the color, size, and placement of the image on the shirt," says Jenkins.

Once Brown and Jenkins have the final design for the shirt, they place an order with Neil Miller, the owner of the Los Angeles-based clothing manufacturing company Style Up America Incorporated. "Each shirt requires about 1 yard of high-quality combed cotton," says Brown. "If the order is for 300 shirts, I send Neil about 300 yards of fabric, plus the sample shirt and pattern." Miller then sends the fabric to another local company to have it cut into the shape of Brown's pattern.

The cut pieces of cotton are returned to Miller a few days later. "I send them right up to the large sewing room we have in the factory," says Miller. There, each of the 100 sewing machines is operated by a specialist who assembles the garments by sewing up the seams and making hems. "After sewing, I have the shirts moved into the finishing room, where they're looked over by inspectors who remove loose threads and look for holes or other defects." Miller has been in the clothing business for more than 30 years, and he supervises every step of the process.

After the shirts pass inspection, the shipping department of Style Up America sends them back to Brown. She sends them immediately to Stephan Cavelti at Sunshine Designs, a local screen printing company that prints Jenkins's animal designs onto them. Cavelti, a partner at the company, oversees the process, which involves burning the image onto a screen, printing it in the exact spot on the shirt that Brown and Jenkins specify, and drying the ink.

It's a Business

Running a cutting-edge fashion company like Pink Spike has a lot to do with crafty tasks such as designing and sewing. "But there are many business tasks involved as well," says Brown.

Pink Spike and the stores that sell its clothes are in business to make money. The clothing, therefore, needs to be sold to stores at wholesale prices so the stores can profit by selling it to customers at retail prices. To help with that effort, Jenkins designs a three-page catalog with pictures of all the new styles each season. "Once it's printed, I send it to the stores that have carried the line in the past and those that I hope will order it in the future," says Brown. When a store decides to order Pink Spike shirts, she fills out a purchase order and keeps a copy for reference when it's time to ship the shirts and do the accounting.