A country twist - businesses profiting from country fads

Nation's Business, March, 1993 by Susan Holly

In music, clothes, cuisine, even lifestyle, "country" is hot and spreading its Western accent.

By day they are computer programmers, government workers, teachers. By night they are cowboys and cowgirls, dressed in their $300 boots, $150 hats, $100 painted-desert shirts, and good old standby jeans--perhaps cut a little looser to accommodate aging baby boomers.

They hit the dance floor two-steppin' to Garth Brooks and Reba McEntire at any one of hundreds of country dance bars that have popped up in the past couple of years. And this isn't just in Amarillo or Nashville. This is in Santa Monica, New York, Chicago, Buffalo, Orlando, and Washington, D.C.

Many businesses across America are profiting from a newfound passion for country music, country dancing, and the whole ephemeral, idyllic notion of country living. Garth Brooks is out-selling rock superstar Michael Jackson. Discos are being converted into country bars. Shoe stores have moved cowboy boots to prime position in their display cases. Nouvelle cuisine is giving way to country cooking. "Country happens to be where we're living today," says Bill Boyd of the Academy of Country Music, a Los Angeles-based organization that promotes country music worldwide.

At the Riverside Inn, long an authentic cowboy bar in Seattle, business is up about 40 percent just in the past year. On a typical Friday night, 700 customers crowd in to do the Texas Two-Step or the Achy-Breaky, a dance popularized by country-music star Billy Ray Cyrus.

Moreover these new customers are not the rural patrons you might expect in a country bar, says Blake Dowen, the marketing director and 23-year-old son of owner Steve Dowen. They're yuppies you would expect to find at TGI Friday's. Although the club still has about a 10 percent core of real cowboys among its customers, the rest are "wannabe" wranglers from Seattle's swanky suburbs.

Theories abound to explain the current country craze. The popular wisdom is that Americans are turning back to hearth and home for comfort in somber economic times. "Country started as a place," says Danita Allen, editor of Country America, a monthly magazine that covers the country scene's music and lifestyles. "There is a national historical consciousness that country is a good place. It is wrapped up with a whole lot of values--being neighborly, friendly, a hard-work ethic."

Country music speaks directly to those values, says Ed Benson, executive director of the Country Music Association, an organization in Nashville, Tenn., that includes country musicians, marketers, and broadcasters. The music "reflects the stuff of the basic human condition," Benson says.

Although country music has repackaged itself--presenting young, good-looking artists in polished performances--it has not forgotten its heritage of simple melodies and words that toll a story. Many find the music comforting compared with the anger and frustration of rap and the primitive screams of heavy metal.

As rap music has worked its way into the mainstream, the mainstream has switched channels. Baby boomers have trouble relating to rap or today's heavy metal, music experts say, but country now sounds familiar to them. The new country artists take their cues as much from the folk rock artists of the 1970s---the Eagles, James Taylor, and Dan Fogelberg--as from traditional country-music singers like Merle Haggard and George Jones. "You don't have to sing through your nose and have a fiddle in your band" to be a country singer, says Boyd.

As the demographic power of the baby boom has taken hold of country music, it has translated into business opportunities for other boomers. Take Kathy Bressler, 42, better known by her company name, Cattle Kate, in Jackson Hole, Wyo. In 1981, with a $300 loan, Bressler began designing and manufacturing authentic Western silk scarves. A few years later she expanded her business, designing a full range of clothing with the look and feel of the old West.

Sales have been growing steadily for the past three years, and Cattle Kate's annual revenues are now about $500,000. Her clothing is sold in 500 stores in the U.S. and through 250,000 catalogs mailed out annually,

Bressler, born in Pasadena, Calif., says "the frontier was always calling to me." She spent eight years living in an authentic ghost town along the Oregon Trail, where she was the town seamstress sewing clothes in a back room at the Mercantile Saloon.

After moving to Jackson Hole, where she married and had a baby, Bressler started her business, doing all the work in her home. She now employs a network of 15 home seamstresses to sew the clothes she designs.

Cattle Kate's apparel includes dresses for $150 to $300, men's shirts with buttonon collars for $135, vests for $100 to $120, petticoats and pantaloons for $100, men's frock coats for $329, and riding outfits for $275 to $395. The designs are all authentic Western styles--with fitted bodices, full skirts, hand-made laces--and the materials are all natural fibers.

In the beginning, Bressler's customers were working ranchers. "The roots of my design are with Western cowboys rather than Western glitz," she says. Today, a number of her customers live in big Eastern cities. "They are people with visions of country living. They want to wear something that can take them back to the West," she says.