Adore: Hand-Crafted Contemporary
When Sam Far joined his family’s Los Angeles apparel business five years ago, his goal as a recent college graduate was to rev up sales in the womenswear company his parents founded more than 20 years ago.
One of the first things Far did to guide Adore Apparel into a new direction was to add a more contemporary look to the company’s collection of mostly tops geared for the young and misses market.
Silhouettes, colors and accents grew more fashion-forward and followed the trends of the day. The contemporary concept took the family venture in a new direction, boosting sales and widening the company’s customer base to include women ages 18 to 80.But Far, vice president of design and apparel, wanted to do something unique. He had seen a factory in the southern Chinese apparel hub of Guangzhou that made hand-painted scarves. And he had an idea. Why not apply that hand-painting method to garments? He and his mother, Anita, would create unique designs in Los Angeles and then have them applied to viscose-nylon vests, dresses and sweaters in China.
Adore’s first hand-painted group arrived just in time for the Spring/Summer 2010 season, and it was a winner. “All of our accounts blew out of everything they bought,” said Far, a graduate of California State University, Northridge. “And that was during a bad economy.”
By the time Fall/Winter 2011 rolled around, Adore had expanded the look to cardigans and jackets while keeping the vests and jackets.
The hand-painting process is very labor intensive and keeps the Chinese factory of 500 workers busy. It is almost an assembly-line approach with workers specializing in painting just one or two colors and then passing the garment down. After being painted, each piece is baked to set the paint and then washed six times to set the color. Panels are sewn together after blocks of designs have been executed.“It’s a pretty lengthy process,” Far said, noting it can take up to two days to complete one garment.
Anthropologie has been selling some of the colorful hand-painted vests, which retail for $118. Several boutiques in Las Vegas have picked up the line, too.
Hand-painted apparel now makes up about 40 percent of Adore’s collection and has helped raise company revenues 200 percent in the last two years.
For more information, call (213) 746-1443.—Deborah Belgum
