A Chat With May’s Profile, Suzanne Vlietstra, president of Hobby Horse Clothing Co.

CS: Could you give examples of what some of these challenges may be (e.g., the rising costs of mailing a catalog, downturn in the economy, etc.)?
SV: We have lots more than just the catalog end, of course, because we’re manufacturing stuff. Challenges for us start at manufacturing. We’re too small to have most of our stuff made overseas. You know we’re not making much in China. So we’re still having to source manufacturing for the garment industry in the United States. Ninety seven percent, I heard a figure, of all apparel is imported in the United States. So we got to find the 3 percent that’s still doing it here and work with those contractors and so forth. And our exchange rates are affecting our raw materials. Like you wouldn’t think the price of zippers, brass zippers, would triple. How much does a zipper and a pair of pants cost? Well, three times more than it did a couple of years ago. It starts to add up.
We’re having more and more trouble sourcing things. Because so much garment manufacturing doesn’t take place in the United States anymore, we can’t afford to buy a complete mill run of fabric. So we have to buy more and more from jobbers. Then that means that we can’t replenish the fabric. And to accommodate that, it’s a weird thing in cataloging, we’ve gone to making what we call “limited editions” on a tremendous amount of our garments. We buy a batch of fabric, cut it, make it and be done with it. That’s presented some huge challenges from a cataloging end of things.
For example, almost half of our “limited editions” planned for the ’08 catalog sold out at our first wholesale trade show in January. So I had my catalog ready to go on press and suddenly realized, “I’d sold out of a huge number of items that were going to be printed in that catalog that’s supposed to last us the year.” That doesn’t happen to people too often. What do you do when your catalog’s just about to go on press and you find out that, let’s say a third of the products are suddenly not available? You can’t just go buy more, you’ve got to invent them.
So there we are, pushed by our own success on these “limited editions” that our dealers bought up like crazy. We can’t replenish them. So we’re almost doing semi-custom work in a broad-base catalog. That’s my biggest challenge right now — how to balance that. We can make more profit on the limited editions, we can definitely sell them for more, but when they’re gone, they’re gone. And you got a black hole in your catalog.