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Good
Politics Make Good Business |
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To
Paulina Quintana, a fashion designer making it in a
cut-throat business while refusing to cut anyone’s
throat, success means both creating something
beautiful and insisting that there’s a better way to
do it. Biodegradable packaging, an uncompromising
no-sweatshop stance, multicultural models—it’s all
in a day’s work for Quintana.
But then, a commitment to social justice is the
Quintana family way.
Back in the family’s native Chile, Quintana’s father,
a doctor who practiced socialized medicine, was
imprisoned for actively opposing Augusto Pinochet’s
ruthless regime in the mid-’70s. Upon his release,
he and his family were internally exiled in Chile.
Amnesty International launched a letter-writing
campaign to free the Quintanas and allow them to
leave the country; they re-established themselves in
Los Angeles.
Quintana follows in her father’s footsteps with a
dedication to justice, manifested in her fair
business practices. Today, with her line of
children’s clothing, Quintana is proving that
businesswomen can have it all—handsome profits and
healthy morals.
She employs seven people, not including herself. Her
clothes are available across the United States, in
six countries and on three continents. In Style,
Child, Parents, and other magazines regularly
feature her designs in photo shoots. And she’s just
opened her flagship store, called Paulina Quintana,
in Los Angeles’ trendy Silver Lake neighborhood.
But it wasn’t always smooth sailing. Three years
ago, armed with a degree in painting from UCLA and
five years’ experience teaching art in public
schools, Quintana wasn’t even sure she had what it
took to be a businesswoman.
She had been creating her own fashions for more than
a decade. ”Like most Latinas, I grew up crocheting
and knitting and sewing,” she says. Most of her
designs were gifts for boyfriends, but a series of
skirts she made from vintage pillow cases turned a
few heads.
It took years, however, for her to show a sample of
her work to a neighborhood boutique. The store liked
what it saw and agreed to carry a few of Quintana’s
designs. She was in business, but she had no idea
what to do next.
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She bought the wrong fabric.
She bought too much fabric. She sent her
first batch of orders out to a contractor
recommended by a friend, and they came back
completely unusable a week before she had to
deliver them. “I think I cried that day,”
she says.
In fact, for a while, the only thing that
kept Quintana going was her belief that
she’d hit so many walls and made so many
mistakes that there couldn’t be that many
walls or mistakes left.
“I kept saying to my father, ‘You sent me to
art school! How am I supposed to manage this?
I don’t know anything about business,’” she
laughs. “‘I know how to create and I know
color schemes. I don’t know how to do the
balance sheet.’...I didn’t know what I was
doing.”
But then Los Angeles’ Museum
of Contemporary Art gave her a big vote of
confidence, placing an order for its museum
gift shop. “I think the only thing that made
me continue was that I knew that I had to
complete this order. I knew that I had to at
least follow through. I couldn’t give up so
easily,” Quintana says.
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Acutely aware of
what she didn’t know, Quintana decided to shift
focus and rely on her instincts.
Having grown up in a family that refused to cut
moral corners, Quintana was convinced that there was
a right way to do business. She contacted the
Garment Contractors Association of Southern
California, a nonprofit company that represents
legal contractors offering workers good conditions
and living wages. GCA led her to MGM Apparel, a
nearby contractor.
But MGM was a powerhouse, turning out thousands of
garments a day for major companies. She couldn’t
offer MGM a contract that would be worth its time.
But, literally and figuratively, she could speak its
language.
“I think because MGM is a Mexican-owned company and
I’m Chilena, and we could speak Spanish together,
they actually took the time to help me,” she says.
“The language has helped me enormously in this
business. The majority of the companies in this
business are Latin-based. ... I think if I had gone
in not embracing my culture and their culture, it
would have been totally different. Because I
approached it [with] ‘We’re both of the same thread—help
me out,’ they were definitely more willing to hold
my hand throughout the process.”
Able to take on larger clients, Quintana could shop
her clothes around Los Angeles. Within a few months,
she landed an account with Barneys, and everything
changed. She started getting calls from around the
country. Her business soared.
She needed to grow, and fast. But to her surprise,
she found she couldn’t qualify for a small-business
loan. Her business barely had a track record, and
her former salary as a teacher didn’t impress the
banks. She took a deep breath and took out a loan on
her house.
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Even though the house is now on the line,
Quintana’s still committed to her no-sweatshop
policy. She’s been approached repeatedly by
overseas contractors who offer to expand her
profit margin exponentially. She always says
no. “It doesn’t feel right,” she says. “If
someone’s charging me 10 cents for a T-shirt
I’m paying $2 for now, I can only imagine
what that person who’s actually making it is
making, and what their quality of life is.”
These business practices have actually
garnered Quintana customers. At trade shows,
buyers often ask where her clothes are made
before placing an order. “I had this [buyer]
from D.C. say that, living in D.C. and
seeing the politics and how it affects the
economy and how it affects people, it’s
really important to her that it’s made in
the U.S.,” Quintana says. |
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Even after 30
years in the United States, Chilean culture still
feels very natural to Quintana. “Chile is a very
social country,” she says. “There’s a nice, slower
pace there.”
This idea of moving at the right pace has strongly
influenced Quintana’s design philosophy. “I didn’t
want to do stuff that was too flashy. I wanted kids
to grow up at the right pace. I wanted to go back to
... just basic playwear with a good design,” she
says. She believes that kids don’t need to be over-stimulated—just
stimulated enough to spark their imaginations.
Success has sparked Quintana’s own imagination. “My
goals are a lot bigger and a lot more grand now than
they were in the beginning,” she says. “Because the
response had been so great, I can start dreaming a
bit more. |
