She Owns It
Portraits of women entrepreneurs.
Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSusan Parker.
There are many ways a factory can botch an order of dresses. Susan Parker spent the last month of 2011 dealing with a couple of them. She shared her experiences during the most recent meeting of our business group, and we wandered into a discussion of the challenges faced by women who own businesses, especially those operating in male-dominated industries like the garment business.
Most recently Ms. Parker, who owns Bari Jay, received an order of 600 prom dresses from China that looked beautiful — on the outside. Put one on, however, and “the entire lining would pop open,” she said. At first, Ms. Parker looked into getting the dresses fixed locally. She got an estimate of $12 a dress, plus the cost of new linings. The Chinese factory offered her $5 a dress toward the repairs. Ms. Parker said $5 hardly seemed fair given that the factory was “100 percent” responsible for the mess.
“You wanted 100 percent?” asked a group member, Alexandra Mayzler, who owns Thinking Caps Tutoring.
That was the goal, said Ms. Parker, who eventually got the factory to offer $8 a dress. But then she learned that, because of the severity of the problem, known as seam slippage, no local shops would touch the dresses for fear of completely destroying them.
The Chinese factory then suggested Ms. Parker sell the defective dresses to a discount retailer like T.J. Maxx. But she had customers who needed the dresses — and tight deadlines. “On top of that, I already paid for them, so if I sold them to T.J. Maxx how much am I going to get?” asked Ms. Parker, who told the group that most prom dress factories, including this one, won’t ship until they receive payment. (One member of the business group, Jessica Johnson, was unable to attend this meeting.)
Ms. Mayzler wondered why the factory couldn’t simply ship new dresses to Bari Jay. Ms. Parker responded that the costs, including new material, would be prohibitive. Plus, she would need to find a new buyer for the time-sensitive order.
After spending much of December negotiating with the factory, Ms. Parker said a solution is in sight. The factory has agreed pay the freight to ship the dresses back to China and to repair them without charge. It will cost between $3,000 and $3,600 to ship the fixed dresses back to the United States. Ms. Parker wants the factory to split those charges with Bari Jay. That issue remains unresolved. Ms. Parker will also have to pay duty of about $4,500 for a second time. She plans to submit a duty drawback form for reimbursement, working with a company that will take a percentage of her recovery. “It will probably take me a year, but hopefully I’ll get some, if not all, of it back,” she said.
To prevent further problems, Ms. Parker sent two quality control inspectors to check on the finished dresses, and those in progress. Going forward, the factory will send samples of all linings to Bari Jay for approval. Because the mistake was also costly for the factory, Ms. Parker is confident it will work hard to avoid a repeat.
In December, Ms. Parker also resolved a longstanding conflict with a different factory — this one in Southeast Asia. In early 2011, Bari Jay received a disastrous order of ill-fitting dresses that, Ms. Parker said, “didn’t look anything like they were supposed to look.”
At the time, Ms. Parker had a warm relationship with the factory, which has staff members in New York. The factory, she said, used this friendship to convince her not to cancel the order when it ran late. Although she worried there would be problems from the start, Ms. Parker said the factory promised to “be there for Bari Jay” if anything went wrong.
But the factory offered no help, she said, when the “atrocious” order arrived. Instead, it forcefully demanded full payment. “Every day they were coming down to see me, calling my cell, e-mailing me at night,” she said. “They wouldn’t leave me alone.”
“It’s like this bully tactic,” said a group member, Carissa Reiniger, who owns Silver Lining Limited.
“They wouldn’t do this with other men,” said Ms. Parker. She said she recently became friends with a representative of another factory who told her he had never seen the Southeast Asian factory behave so aggressively with a customer. The factory wouldn’t be pushing so hard, the new friend told her, referring to Ms. Parker and her sister, “if you weren’t girls.”
Eager to get beyond the matter, Ms. Parker agreed to pay the factory 50 percent of its fee — and figure out the rest once she settled with the store that had ordered the dresses (this factory invoiced Bari Jay upon shipment with payment due immediately, an arrangement Ms. Parker said resulted from their previous friendship). Because the factory wasn’t getting everything it wanted, Ms. Parker said, “I felt like I was winning.” But her new friend said that she and her sister were “just rolling over and playing dead.” He assured Ms. Parker that no one would ever pay his factory as much for such a disastrous order.
Once the deal was made and Bari Jay paid, Ms. Parker said the factory asserted it had been short-changed. Then, she said, the haggling began anew. “They think that because you’re a woman, you’re just going to cave at some point,” she said.
Ms. Reiniger agreed. Ms. Mayzler, however, said she did not believe she had faced this particular challenge as a female business owner: “I don’t really see it at all.”
Ms. Parker speculated that Ms. Mayzler’s experience is different because education isn’t a male-dominated industry.
“I was just going to say, we deal with men all the time,” said Ms. Reiniger.
There are a lot of women in education, Ms. Mayzler acknowledged. She added, however, that parents have yelled at her.
“I don’t think Susan and I are talking about speaking,” said Ms. Reiniger. “It’s not verbal — it’s a strategy to get what you want.” Ms. Reiniger added that she hates to “play the woman card” and hesitated even to join this business group because she sees herself as an entrepreneur who happens to be a woman. But she said the reality is that being a woman changes everything.
Ms. Reiniger explained her theory. “These guys can’t totally separate women and business because men have been tuned to see women in a certain way,” she said. “So, when a woman stands up and says, ‘No, I’m not paying for this,’ the guy’s reaction gets emotional.”
“Can I just play devil’s advocate?” asked Ms. Mayzler. She suggested that maybe the issue related to Ms. Parker’s perceptions. Perhaps the pushy factory would behave the same regardless of whether it was dealing with a male or female customer.
“But I know he doesn’t,” said Ms. Parker. “I know a million people who deal with him.” She said Bari Jay, however, will never use the factory again.
We’ll continue this conversation in future posts. In the meantime, let’s hear from female owners — and the men who do business with them. What’s been your experience?
You can follow Adriana Gardella on Twitter.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=2654f4423f38f5204faa5761f2576d90
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