California Apparel News

Christina Erteszek may have launched Hermosa by Christina E. loungewear a little more than a year ago, but she’s no newcomer to the women’s apparel trade.

As the daughter of the acclaimed, late lingerie designer Olga Erteszek, founder of the Olga brand, Christina grew up in the business. The West Los Angeles native has done everything in her day from designing sports bras to sewing girdle seams to selling back-support garments on a home-shopping channel.

After a two-year hiatus, Erteszek jumped back in the design game “kind of on a whim.” Her made-in-America collection includes MicroModal racerback tanks, velour leggings, French-terry tunics and V-neck maxis. The pieces are simple, soft and comfy—intended for the woman who wants to kick off her stiletto heels, peel off her Spanx and suit at the end of the work day, and slide into something more comfortable.

While Erteszek declined to release sales figures for the first year, she said Hermosa’s debut exceeded her expectations. Hermosa now is moving to a new manufacturing facility and looking to expand into more specialty stores while maintaining its presence in Nordstrom
department stores, where it has been sold since the start. Plans are underway for the Spring 2013 collections, which will feature pieces in French terry, Modal and a new fabric that Erteszek promises is “the most divine on the planet.”

“One of my greatest pleasures is making women feel good in their own skin,” said Erteszek, the company’s creative director and designer. “It’s the art ofthe simple. I don’t do bling.”

Hermosa designs range in retail price from around $30 to $150. Among the biggest sellers is a basic V-neck top made of Modal that retails for $48. Erteszek said she tries to create designs that won’t go out of style.

“It’s something you keep picking up,” she said, “like your favorite T-shirt.”

Katelyn Qualey, buyer at the Intima lingerie boutique in Los Angeles’ Pacific Palisades neighborhood, said her customers are drawn to the versatility of the pieces.

“We live in a very causal town, and they’re something you can put on when you get home from work or sleep in it. They’re very crossover,” Qualey said. “Someone touches the fabric and they have to have it.”

The Lenzing Modal fabric not only is soft and lightweight, but it’s made from beech trees and is carbon neutral—a fact not lost on the increasingnumber of consumers who value sustainability. Erteszek is even looking at introducing biodegradable fabrics.

“The reason I got into it is I’m so impassioned about walking the walk and sustainability,” she said.

Roots in the industry
The 63-year-old designer never set out to enjoy a long career in the clothing trade, despite her family ties. Her mother, a refugee from
Poland, was a pioneer in undergarments, starting in the 1940s with manufacturing girdles. Olga Erteszek held 28 patents, the most by any woman, and won numerous industry awards.

Erteszek, who has a master’s degree in education and once taught “incorrigible” high school students, agreed to work at Olga for a year at her father’s request. “I had to start at the bottom because he didn’t want to show favoritism,” she said. She served as product manager for the underwear division, called Scoops.

“I went home every night and cried,” she recalled. “I hated it.”

But she stuck with it. In 1981, the company launched Olga’s Christina, with Erteszek as head designer. The division produced more contemporary bras and sleepwear, in contrast to the pretty French lace–trimmed lingerie her mother favored. She came up with several firsts in the bra world—pullover cotton-Lycra sports bras, cotton-Lycra nursing bras, camisoles with built-in bras and a sports bra that could be worn as innerwear as well as outerwear.

“I’m more of a mad scientist than a fashion designer because I’m looking at what hasn’t been done,” Erteszek said. She also designed activewear and jazzercise clothing.

Erteszek left Olga after Warnaco bought the Fortune 500 company for $28 million in 1984. She bounced around to other design jobs, including stints producing sports bras for Gilda Marx and at Intimate Health, which later sold. She also patented and sold on a home-shopping channel back-support garments designed specifically for women. Erteszek and her family moved from Los Angeles’ Topanga Canyon to Durango, Colo., in 2005. She started Hermosa after a two-year break, during which she wrote a memoir called “Dreaming Olga,” which she says is about “the underworld of underwear.”

Expansion plans
Erteszek now has an apartment in Marina del Rey, Calif., and spends most of her time in Los Angeles overseeing Hermosa, which was named for a creek by her family’s cabin in Colorado. The company’s five employees include her husband, Fritz Geisler, cofounder and managing director, and son Hunter Johnson, who handles preproduction, production and sales.

Hermosa’s first loungewear line shipped in July 2011 and has been featured in Nordstrom and several West Coast boutiques, including Intima and Lulu’s in Manhattan Beach, Calif. Erteszek says she is excited about a retail-partnership program that allows her loungewear to be featured in a “shop within a shop” at certain stores.

A huge point of pride for Erteszek is that Hermosa’s knitting and sewing processes are done locally at a factory in Vernon, Calif.

“Hermosa’s cool because it’s made in the U.S.,” said Intima’s Qualey. “So many people are checking labels now.”Erteszek plans to move manufacturing
operations soon—but not offshore. Hermosa is moving to the Commerce Creative facility in Commerce, Calif., which has sewing, shipping, pattern making, embroidery, screen printing and other facilities all under one roof.

“We’re moving because we’re growing to a certain point, and it makes for sense for us and the energy is more to our liking,” she said. λ