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Cover Story
One Thing Leads To Another
Jill Stanbro learns as she goes and develops as a person, a workroom,
an employer and a friend.
By Howard Shingle
There’s a common
thread running through Jill Stanbro’s career. It has to do
with being in the right place at the right time. Some people would
call that luck, even she admits to being lucky at several steps
along the way. But attributing to luck a career that has kept growing
and expanding over the last 20 years doesn’t take into account—or
fully appreciate—the fact that most of us make our own luck.
If you follow the thread you’ll happen upon job offers, acquaintances,
business associations, the Internet and, finally, Cheryl Strickland’s
workroom school and educational conference. All of these helped
guide and shape Stanbro’s career. It runs something like this:
Stanbro learned sewing basics in high school and lived next to a
neighbor, an avid seamstress, who later rekindled her interest in
sewing. A family connection led to a job in the workroom of a local
drapery retail store. Friends encouraged her to start her own home-based
business at a time when her children were too old for babysitters
and too young to be on their own. Her daughter’s softball coach
was a decorator and became Stanbro’s Draperies’ first
client. An installer, in turn, told other decorators about her work
and she soon had “more business than I could handle.”
Shortly after getting her first computer, Stanbro was contacted
via e-mail by a group of workrooms wanting to start an online forum.
Through the forum she met Stacy McWilliams who encouraged Stanbro
to write articles for Strickland’s SewWhat? Newsletter, which
led to her teaching at the school and annual educational conference.
Luck? Being in the right place at the right time? Well, yes, but
only if you discount the experience she received making high-end
top treatments in the drapery workroom; her practical way of thinking,
which helped her “figure things out” (such as pleating
formulas and pattern layouts) when the only other seamstress in
the workroom quit; her talent for fabricating treatments, which
caught the eye of an appreciative installer; her gumption to go
out and solicit business when she started off on her own; her willingness
to mentor and give freely of her time and knowledge; and her ability
to explain how to make things, which helped not only her own workroom
employees, but several others whom she has taught or advised.
From this vantage point, luck seems to have had little to do with
it.
THE SPECIALIST
Stanbro’s Draperies, Canton, OH, is something of an oddity:
It’s a mid-size workroom with six employees in a 1,875-square-foot
facility. Most other workrooms out there are one-person, home-based
shops, and that is how Stanbro started out in 1984, with two used
industrial machines, a converted ping-pong table and no customers.
“I had in mind to design, sell, sew and install the treatments,”
she recalls. “Very early on I discovered that I did not enjoy
the selling and meeting with homeowner clients. I was happy to sit
in my basement and sew.”
So virtually from the very beginning, Stanbro concentrated on the
decorator/wholesale business. It was a good thing she did, too.
“I can say to a decorator, ‘Are you nuts?’ That is
not going to work with a homeowner; you can’t say that!”
she laughs. Last year her company produced treatments for 34 different
decorators, many of whom have been with her from the start.
Working solely with decorators can be tricky. Stanbro has had to
point out to more than a few that just because they can draw it
doesn’t mean it can be made of fabric—or made quickly
and simply.
“I had one customer that I actually cut her order out and asked
her to come down to look at how many pieces went into it. She understood
better then. She’s thinking it’s a simple valance; well,
it actually took 21 pieces to put together this one valance. She
had no knowledge of the fact that it was way more complicated than
the way it looked when it was finished,” she says.
“I’d rather they fax me the order before they ever order
the fabric, let me figure it out for them, and then they order the
fabric. That takes about five to 10 minutes of my time, unless you’re
talking about a whole house. Then when the order comes in, everything
is on there that I need. I know what the repeat is, I know how much
yardage has been ordered, I know that enough yardage has been ordered
. . .”
Stanbro describes herself as something of a specialist. Using a
football analogy, she calls herself the place kicker who comes in
at the last minute and wins the game after everyone else has worked
so hard. “My girls do all the hard work; they cut, they sew,
they whatever. I go over and dress the swag in five minutes and
it looks wonderful! I probably have the greatest group of employees
in this business. I could not do this without them. This group of
six has been here for years. The one with the least seniority has
been here for 12 years,” she says.
GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS
There are two ways to start a business: the “text book”
way and the “doing-it-by-the-seat-of-your-pants” way.
Stanbro has mostly followed the latter, although it’s hard
to imagine anyone recommending that method today.
Stanbro describes her mother and two grandmothers as “beautiful
seamstresses,” yet she didn’t learn to sew until a senior
in high school when she took a semester of sewing. She followed
that up with a tailoring class after graduation. In 1979, an opening
in a drapery shop workroom provided Stanbro with basic training
on high-end top treatments. She then was plunged into the thick
of things when the only other seamstress quit and Stanbro was left
on her own to figure things out. “This is why I am glad that
I have a practical mind rather than an artistic one. I think it
really helps with the problem-solving aspect of this business,”
she says.
After five years in the workroom Stanbro was encouraged by friends
to start her own business—not usually a good sign. But she
explains, “We needed my income and the five of us lived in
a very small house, so my taking up the lower level would really
cramp our living quarters.” So in 1984, “with more determination
than sense,” Stanbro started off on her own.
In three short years she had outgrown her space and needed to hire
help. “I was working day and night and weekends trying to keep
up,” she remembers. “I cannot tell you how much I learned
those first three years. Yes, I knew how to make the products, but
I had never owned a business before. One of the hardest things for
me was learning to tell people ‘No’ and stick to it when
their requests were unreasonable.”
She still had much more to learn. “Suddenly I was not only
a business owner, I was also an employer!” she says. “I
had never been an employer. I had no idea that they paid two kinds
of unemployment tax, that they matched your Social Security . .
. I had no idea that all that existed,” she adds. Even without
formal business training or experience, Stanbro did have the good
sense to hire an accountant. “I have a great accountant. In
the beginning he laid down some guidelines for how I need things
broken down, but I do the biggest part of the bookwork myself. Having
a practical mind has helped a lot. I can easily learn this stuff
along the way.”
If there is a regret, it has to be that Stanbro now spends less
time doing what got her started in the first place. “I spend
much more time on the business end of the company now than the sewing
end, and that’s hard because I love that part of it,”
she says. “Sewing, to me, is therapeutic. Doing office work
is not, but that is what I have to do more often than not. I still,
though, am the first step in any order. I interpret what the decorator
wants into language that the cutter and sewer understand.”
Teaching someone else how to cut an order was one of the hardest
things Stanbro has had to do because that is such a critical part
of any order and must be done right. Yet, taking that step may have
gone a long way toward leading Stanbro to the next phase of her
career.
SHARING
Mentoring has always meant a lot to Stanbro and she confesses to
being “a great believer in helping others.” Passing along
to others what she has learned is a large, and fulfilling, part
of her life.
Stanbro offers help without expecting anything in return, but the
returns she gets often are very special. “I had a customer
who, due to the unexpected death of a decorator, was left with customers
and only an inexperienced employee to handle them. So for months
I helped her figure yardages and styles and even went on some sales
calls with her. I figured that if I didn’t help, I would lose
a customer with a lot of potential. When I was trying to decide
how I could possibly afford to move out of my house, rent a building,
hire employees and immediately double my business, the owner of
this company offered me an interest-free loan to do it. They still
are one of my most valued customers.”
Stanbro started teaching at the Custom Home Furnishing Industry
Educational Conference and Trade Show in 2000. That experience came
after writing articles for the SewWhat? Newsletter and teaching
Drapery 101 (switching to Drapery 102 last year) at Cheryl Strickland’s
school. Her teaching ability seems to come as a natural extension
of her efforts to guide workroom employees through new procedures.
But Stanbro says it comes just as much “from being a natural-born
yakker.”
Her willingness to help others can be found online as well. She
is a regular and active member of Strickland’s online interactive
forum. “I go on the online forum at least three times a day
and see whose questions I can answer,” Stanbro says. “Sometimes
I ask a question because I’m still a student, too. The great
part about the forum is that probably within 10 minutes to a half
hour you’re going to have at least one answer if not a half
dozen from all over the country. When I tell people in other businesses
that this all goes on, they can’t believe it. They can’t
believe our business is so free in sharing the information.”
This free sharing of help may be what keeps the workroom industry
going until a new generation of sewers takes over. As the industry
increases its training, education and professionalism it will begin
to attract young people looking to express their creativity and
make a living doing it—that’s the hope, at least. In the
meantime, Stanbro thinks the immediate future of workrooms may be
in the hands of retirees. “It really surprises me how many
are wanting to do this later in life, like a second career. A lot
of people are retiring at 50 now. They went to work for some corporation
when they were 20 years old, worked 30 years and they have their
retirement time in. You never know where they’re going to come
from.”
Just about the same thing can be said about where Stanbro’s
career is headed. “I honestly don’t know. I’ll probably
be doing the exact same thing I’m doing now. Although five
years ago I would not have foreseen me doing this.” Whatever
comes next, it’s a safe bet that Stanbro will have done something
to ensure she is in the right place at the right time.
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