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COVER STORY
Wouldn't
Trade it For Anything
Margie Nance has been through it all. Now she's sharing what she
has learned.
By Howard Shingle
Photography by Jim Robinette
Education
Director, Teacher, Custom Workroom.” That’s how Margie
Nance’s business card could read. Although she no longer owns
and operates her own workroom, her experience and success with Best
Dressed Windows is so vital to her current responsibilities, it
couldn’t possibly be left off.
Nance is the director of education for the Custom Home Furnishings
(CHF) School in Swannanoa, NC, founded and operated by Cheryl Strickland.
She coordinates all the instructors and classes for the CHF Educational
Conference and Trade Show, which now is held twice a year (see page
42), and helps develop new classes at the school.
She also teaches. This year Nance is leading the “Total Experience
at the Biltmore” class along with “Historic Treatments”
and “Window Treatments 101.”
This was not what Nance started out to do. In fact, she wasn’t
sure she could get up and teach a class with eight students. But
she did, and then went on to leading conference seminars—which
could have 20, 30 even 40 or more attending! In both cases, Nance’s
experience and willingness to share information saw her through.
She then volunteered to help coordinate the instructors and classes,
and now, over the last two years, she has come to be right where
she wants to be.
“I love it. I absolutely love it,” Nance says. “I
feel like I’m at the top of my game right now. I’m doing
beyond what I ever thought I could do as far as where I am in the
business. Being director of education is a big honor. Working here
and working with Cheryl has been wonderful. All the dreams and goals
of being in the business . . . I’ve pretty much done it, and
I’m doing it every day.”
IT’S ALL ABOUT SHARING
Experience is a great teacher, as we all know. But unless it’s
paired with a willingness to share information, the knowledge gained
goes nowhere. Nance’s drive to help others is rooted in the
frustration she felt trying to start her own workroom business some
12 years ago. It was a business that began with a simple conversation.
Designer, Barbara Fisher of Charlotte, NC, was talking to Nance’s
husband, Andy, and asked if Margie knew how to sew window treatments.
His response was, “She has a very expensive sewing machine,
so I am sure she can sew.” He came home and told Margie that
Fisher was looking for someone to fabricate window treatments, and
Margie’s first thought was, “I can’t do that for
a living, I’ve only made one valance and that was a nightmare.”
With his usual optimistic outlook, Nance’s husband assured
her saying, “Sure you can. You’re creative, you can make
anything.” By the end of the week, Margie Nance Designs was
born.
The business might have gone no further than that, however, without
Nance’s persistence. “I couldn’t find a single book
at the library or bookstore on starting this type of business,”
she recalls. Her next step was to contact local workrooms to ask
if she could stop by and see what a real workroom looked like. While
willing at first, Nance found that when she tried to make actual
appointments, the workrooms stopped returning her calls. “They
just didn’t want to share information. I couldn’t figure
out what the big secret was; why everyone I spoke to was so protective
of his or her workroom. I was frustrated and remember thinking that
someday if anyone ever calls me and asks to come to my workroom,
I would welcome them to come by.”
By the time Margie Nance Designs became Best Dressed Windows a few
years later it was one of the largest wholesale workrooms in the
Charlotte area. Margie and Andy Nance were working for more than
40 designers in and around the area and creating treatments for
people all over the country—some of them famous. “It was
so much fun to be watching a sports game or to see a celebrity on
TV and say, ‘I made his treatments.’” Nance says.
The business also became quite the family affair. Besides Andy doing
the installations, Margie’s dad, Vic Palumbo, was coming in
to build whatever was needed or running off for pick-ups at the
local distributors. The Nances’ eldest son, Drew, worked one
summer answering the phone and doing computer work, and even the
two young-est, Stephen and Cody, would help out by stuffing pillows
or picking up pins off the floor.
Through all this time, Nance never forgot her promise to help others
openly and honestly. “I taught classes for the local community
college, and I was a field trip for them,” she says. “I
invited college students to come and spend most of the morning.
I would tell them what it was like to work with a workroom. I invited
any one of them at any time to spend the day with us to observe
what goes on in a workroom.
“It goes back to the beginning when no one would let me in
their workroom. I’m never going to do that. People need to
see what it’s like in a workroom, whether you’re a competitor
or not. If you’re good, no one is going to take your customers
away. I wasn’t afraid because we offered tremendous customer
service and I wasn’t afraid of losing people.”
IT’S ALL ABOUT DECISIONS
During the years Nance ran her business she handled all the tough
decisions workrooms must face: moving out of her home, finding the
right location and reinvesting in the business by purchasing equipment.
What started in a bonus room over the garage ended up spilling over
to almost every room in the Nances’ house. It was time to move
the business out. “I once had someone ask me when I knew it
was time to move out. I told them my husband and I sat down and
we figured out how much money it would cost us if we rented space
and never made a single dime. We sat down and came up with a figure
of $5,000 and thought at the very worst case we’d lose $5,000.
That wasn’t enough money to scare me out of moving, so we did
it.”
Nance ended up moving the business twice more. The first move out
of the house was to a space that required a commute to the next
town, but she couldn’t pass up the deal on the rent. The next
location was in a strip mall.
“What attracted me to this unit was the huge glass windows
overlooking the garden center across the parking lot. It was a place
I could enjoy going to each day,” she says. She then found
out her largest competitor was just across the street. “It
was kind of a scary thing to do right at the beginning. It wasn’t
like I was trying to take her business, it just made sense to me
to be there. It was on a good, busy street and it was pretty convenient
to the home.
“But it did help us. We actually picked up a couple of designers
because they turned around in our parking lot, saw us and came in
and asked us who we were and what we did.”
At 1,500 square feet that space soon became too small—it was
time to move on. This last move helped double the business because
of its location. “People say, ‘Location, location, location.’
It’s true,” Nance says. She found 3,500 square feet in
a wonderful old building in a section of town called Southend, the
design and arts center of town where designers come to purchase
fabric. She thought since her customers were down there to shop,
she would make it convenient for them to drop by the workroom. “We
moved into a place that was so convenient for the designers. We
told them, ‘When you go to pick out your fabrics downtown,
we’re right on the way. Stop by.’”
Another smart business decision Nance made was to invest in new
equipment. “Every year we would set aside money and I would
go to the trade shows and I would make one major purchase. It would
either be a new sewing machine or something. We had a set amount
of money we would invest back into the business in equipment that
would turn around and make us more efficient and quicker. We did
that for several years.”
The Nances sold the business two years ago when Margie had the opportunity
to become more involved in the CHF School. The workroom was sold
to Cathy Berst, one of those community college students who first
came by on a field trip. Berst and her husband still run the business,
which is successful and growing.
IT’S ALL ABOUT TEACHING
Nance now finds teaching and helping others not to struggle as she
and others have even more rewarding than running a workroom. It
also has expanded her network of friends and comrades. “It
seems as if for everyone that I know in the business it’s all
about teaching people. That’s what makes me so happy about
being around my friends,” she says.
Nance’s advise to anyone starting out today is something she
learned several years ago. “I read that the only way to grow
as a person and a business is by doing two things, network and never
stop learning.” After 12 years in the business she is still
doing both.
“I’m not joking when I say I used to go to bed with a
Graber catalog,” she laughs. “I studied everything I could
put my hands on, and I did that also with patterns. That’s
a big part of what I do. I can look at a photograph and tell you
exactly how it’s made. It didn’t happen overnight. I studied
pattern pieces for years.
“I’m a researcher. If I can find a book or a magazine
or an article, I’m going to read it and I’m going to try
to retain as much of it as I can because it’s going to come
into play someday.
“I don’t stop learning. I’m still always looking
for the newest book, going through magazines to see what the newest
style is and trying to stay current because I have to. Instead of
being in the trenches as I was, I’m now looking at it from
another side, but it’s more important for me to stay current
to help people who are starting out.”
And those just starting out could hardly find a better teacher,
or a better inspiration. “It’s so easy when people ask
me if they are doing the right thing, can they make money dong this,”
Nance says. “I can honestly tell them yes, it’s a great
business and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
TOTAL EXPERIENCE
Perhaps Nance’s most exciting current project is leading the
Custom Home Furnishings School’s “Total Experience at
the Biltmore.” It embodies everything Nance loves to do: create
interiors, organize the workroom fabrication and teach others.
The Biltmore Estate is the largest home in the United States with
250 rooms and a four-acre floor plan. It was built by George W.
Vanderbilt and completed in 1895. It sits among the Blue Ridge Mountains
of Asheville, NC. Its current 8,000-acre site also has guesthouses
built at about the same time as the main house.
“The Biltmore people gave us a home there to work on, to use
as a canvas for our classes,” Nance explains. For a week at
a time, the CHF School takes four to eight students onto the property
(the current project is the guesthouse near the estate’s winery)
to work on one room at a time. The Vanderbilts apparently had a
different notion of a guesthouse than what might come to mind today.
The house has three rooms downstairs (kitchen, living room and dining
room) and four bedrooms upstairs.
CHF classes have completed the downstairs and are beginning work
on the first of the bedrooms. “They let us go in and choose
window treatments and fabrics, and we get students to come and we
teach them what it’s like to work with a retail client. It’s
something I don’t think anyone has ever done anything like
it before,” Nance says.
“The students go in and we show them what they need to do in
order to sell that client, as
far as what information they need to record while they are there,
how do you decide what kind of window treatment it needs to be .
. . They go through all those steps and we go back to the school
and we talk about the treatments.
“People are amazed. We start a window treatment and within
three days it’s hanging in the home. We knock it out. It’s
because I’m used to the production. When I had my workroom
we were high production, so I know how to get people moving in the
right direction and who needs to do what in order to get it done.
Everybody at the end of the class sits back and says, ‘I can’t
believe we did that!’”
And they get to add having worked on the Biltmore Estate to their
résumés.
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