The Quirky Upstarts of the Fashion Biz

Two years ago this month, Melody Kulp plucked a million-dollar idea from the garden and put it in the tresses of two young girls. Kulp was playfully putting flowers in the hair of her boyfriend’s 7- and 9-year-old cousins. They, in turn, tried wearing Kulp’s decorated barrettes. Like a revised Goldilocks tale, the thin-haired girl called the barrettes too heavy; the thick-haired one said it was too flimsy. Kulp went to the craft store to make a hair decoration that was just right.

She discovered silk flowers and Velcro--and the beginnings of Mellies Hair Artistry. A week later, Kulp and her boyfriend, David Reinstein, punched out Velco rounds with paper hole-punchers and glued crystals and flowers on them so the decorations would adhere to hair.

“I didn’t think it was a big deal,” said Kulp, now 25 and a UCLA senior.

But Reinstein, 25, son of a veteran inventor, recognized the potential. Five months later they were on top of a hair accessory craze that spread around the globe. Sales this year are expected to hit $14 million, aided by their new Mellies Hairlights, Velcro-tipped strands of glass beads.

Across Los Angeles, young entrepreneurs such as Kulp and Reinstein are creating quirky fashion and beauty items. They are churning out products that seem improbable sellers--waterproof glitter eyeliner, banana-mint face masks, paint-by-number makeup kits and vintage, bejeweled handbags, yet they thrive in spite of, or perhaps because of, their utter silliness.

In a town where pink hair raises nary a pierced eyebrow, eclectic fashion statements are visual resumes that amplify the region’s free-thinking rebellion against tradition. With impressive fashion pedigrees, or none at all, hundreds of rag trade entrepreneurs thrive on L.A.’s unique vibe. Most turn over just enough cash to pay bills, and others succeed big time, catching the eye of a deep-pocketed conglomerate--such as Beverly Hills’ Dineh Mohajer, who sold her Hard Candy nail polish for a reported $30 million to Moet Hennessey-Louis Vuitton, owner of Christian Dior and Givenchy.

Southern California is a fertile field for upstarts who would probably wither in other parts of the country. With the seed of an idea, they can sow their dreams across the region’s acres of suppliers, factories and stores, where in mere weeks, some bloom into The Next Big Thing.

“Southern California has a culture that is unique to the world,” said Thomas O’Malia, director of the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at USC, where the university offers an entrepreneurship major. That culture, he said, not only allows for risk, but also forgives failures.

The region’s many factories and large labor pool mean “it’s relatively easy to get people to do all kinds of things,” O’Malia said. “If someone wanted to introduce a new fashion, there is an infrastructure, where someone will be a mentor or will make a prototype for next to nothing.” Getting money to build their dreams isn’t a problem, either. Risk-takers like to support kindred spirits and get a vicarious pleasure from funding other business newcomers, O’Malia said. “They are living the life of excitement of a 20-year-old designing fashion, and they remember how much fun it is.”

Kulp and Reinstein found their mentor easily: Fred Reinstein, creator of the ‘70s and ‘80s toy and novelty fads, the WallWalker and the Slush Mugg. Though Reinstein’s father didn’t give them a cash handout, he provided priceless advice and a spot in the back of his company’s El Segundo warehouse, where they made samples--and their own decisions. Now Mellies has overtaken half of the office and warehouse.

Startups, unburdened by layers of management, often can spin on a dime to give stores exactly what they need. Accessories store owner Jacqueline Jarrot routinely tells her vendors how to change items to make them sing at the cash register of her Beverly Center and Fashion Square stores. At the peak of the jeweled-barrette fad, Jarrot said, she sold 300 to 400 a day for nine months.

Proximity to the entertainment industry’s image-makers can give L.A. designers a huge head start. Actress Sarah Michelle Gellar illustrated the magic of Mellies when she stuck a few into the hair of an inquiring Jay Leno, Kulp said, and later wore them at movie premieres and awards shows. Presto! Instant spokeswoman!

Celebrity stylists regularly scour stores and can become crucial connections for local entrepreneurs. At Jarrot’s stores, if a stylist buys something that a celebrity client loves, “then the celebrity tells another celebrity.” Then Jarrot begins phoning star-tracking magazines to say who bought what.

“We’ll sell 1,000 bags if Sharon Stone gets a mention,” she said.

If designers are willing to accommodate the 24-hour demands of the entertainment industry, they can quickly get national exposure, said Liz Dolan, whose accessories showroom, Parallel Lines, has launched dozens of newcomers.

“Some young designers have a person who goes to the major studios and offers their products to the shows,” Dolan said. Costumers return the favor by using the new looks.

And if a costumer needs an orange gingham handbag tomorrow, local designers often can just step outside their front door for supplies.

“We’re in the garment district because this is where everything is,” said Monique Moizel, creator of reversible Topsy Turvy handbags. “If I need a couple of yards of fabric, I just go down the street and buy it.”

Moizel became an accidental entrepreneur after the Otis Art Institute asked her to leave her fashion design studies in 1997. “They told me to look into a different career,” she said. “They didn’t understand my work.” Now the 24-year-old is on track this year to sell $1 million of her reversible zebra-print, daisy-trimmed AstroTurf or paisley-and-polka-dot bags to Nordstrom, Macy’s, Rampage and more. For the first year of her nearly 2 1/2 years in business, Moizel ran the firm from her childhood bedroom.

“It was kind of a hobby while I was in a dead-end job,” she said. But a $5,000 loan from a close friend’s father got her started. “I got a little fax machine in my bedroom and I’d get orders,” Moizel said. “Then I’d drive around all day looking for stores to get into.” Now she has a real office, a real apartment, nine employees, her own factory--and a new Ford Explorer.

“I can buy things I never could,” said Moizel, who is expanding into clothing via a new licensing agreement with L.A.’s TNT Co.

Many an entrepreneur began with a bedroom-based business, including Galit Strugano, 24, who runs GirLActik, her one-woman, one-product cosmetics company from a bedroom in her mother’s Encino house. She said she sold about $100,000 of her sparkle eyeliners in 14 colors, enough to keep the business running but not enough to satisfy her fashion appetite. For that, she waitresses.

The eyeliner is just step one of her plan to eventually host a beauty and talk show. Unable to pay for professional makeup artist training with her $1,800 nest egg, she instead found instruction at college extension courses, which in L.A. are plentiful and cheap.

“I don’t recommend this,” Strugano said of her next step, “but I opened the Yellow Pages, looked under cosmetics, and the first person I called was my chemist.”

Only the New York area has more cosmetics labs and packagers, said Tom Raffy, himself an entrepreneur who started GAR Labs, a contract packager in Riverside.

“If you took a compass from the Valley to Anaheim, there are 50 to 100 raw-materials suppliers,” he said. “Ergo the suppliers, ergo the manufacturers. If you’re sitting in St. Louis or Phoenix, you’re dead in the water.” Give Raffy seven days, $5,000 to $10,000, and a description of your product’s look, smell and feel, and he’ll have a budding business ready for retail.

L.A.’s strong support system extends to its stores. As giant retailers consolidated and got even bigger, tiny specialty stores became friendlier to new ideas. “In Los Angeles, there are a lot of trendy stores that are very supportive of new designers,” said Angela Amiri, who launched a handbag collection with a stockpile of vintage fabrics. The former assistant to Bill Blass said, “If you can ship on time and your quality is good, they’re loyal to you. Then if you introduce new product lines, they’re interested.”

To compete with mega-merchants, mom-and-pop stores search to find the fun and unusual, said Richard Giss, a retail analyst with Deloitte & Touche. Those things, more often than not, come from a solo designer with a dream and a handful of samples.

Getting on the shelves of prestigious merchants such as Neiman Marcus, Barneys New York or L.A.’s own Fred Segal can validate an item’s hipness. When Kimberly Leone, 26, and Randall Fink, 29, took their food-based 310 beauty products to a Fred Segal buyer, they had high hopes.

“When the buyer said yes, we knew we weren’t crazy,” Leone said. Now their Boyle Heights factory churns out papaya enzyme face masks, tangerine lip balms and Hershey Kiss-shaped massage bars that have become darlings of beauty magazines. They don’t advertise, but those magazine mentions are spiking sales, particularly on their Web site, which gathers an additional $3,000 a month.

The partners credit L.A. with providing everything from their collection’s name (the chic 310 area code) to their training. Leone met Fink, her partner and future husband, at USC’s law school, and as an undergraduate, studied business at USC’s entrepreneurship program.

The odds of succeeding long term in the beauty business aren’t good: Raffy said four out of five newcomers fail in North America. But failure is a relative term to an entrepreneur, O’Malia said, who teaches that entrepreneurship “is a wonderful journey and a great way to go through life.”

Whether they end up with $30 million or $1.19, L.A. entrepreneurs enrich the city’s priceless reputation as a place where great fashion ideas blossom--and decorate the world.

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Valli Herman-Cohen is at valli.herman-[email protected].