California Apparel News

Designer Barbara Lesser, who for more than 20 years ran the Barbara Lesser and Fibers by Barbara Lesser labels with her husband, Mark Lesser, is restructuring the company to a smaller model.

In June, the Los Angeles women’s casual contemporary sportswear and dress company notified its sales representatives scattered across the country that the label, which was mostly made in Los Angeles, would not be making deliveries after the Fall season, several sales representatives confirmed.

The headquarters building occupied by the company at 1360 E. 17th St., near downtown Los Angeles, is up for sale at a listed price of $5.4 million. The 20,530-square-foot structure was purchased by Mark and Barbara Lesser in 2003, and shortly after the title was transferred to Mark and Barbara LLC.

Mark Lesser said the company is restructuring. “We are stopping domestic production and focusing on imports and private-label product development,” he said. “We are just changing our business model.”

He said the company could return to producing the Barbara Lesser label again or they could come back with a new line.

The company has been a supplier to catalogs, such as Soft Surroundings, and may move forward supplying that area of retail. But Lesser said he still doesn’t have a clear idea of what form the company will take. “I have a lot of balls up in the air,” he said.

Many of the company’s retailers had been with the company for decades and were stunned to hear the label would not be delivering beyond the Fall season. “We are all sad,” said Jane Walker, the store manager at Texture, a boutique on the upscale shopping street Montana Avenue in Santa Monica, Calif. She has carried the Barbara Lesser label almost since it was founded in 1991. “They are a California icon.”

Ellie Lewin, who owns Chameleon in Sherman Oaks, Calif., had carried the misses label for a decade. “I’m sorry to see them go,” she said. “For my particular store, it was a good niche because they are well priced, and they fit the baby boomers really well.” Tops retailed for about $74 to $147, and dresses were priced at around $105 to $180.

“There is a lot of the line I never bought because it was too matronly,” Lewin added. “But if you have a good eye, you can cut through that and pick pieces that are a little more edgy.”

Trish Kiely, the store manager at New Threads in Corte Madera, Calif., said she was sorry to hear she won’t be able to order more Barbara Lesser goods. “A lot of people loved the fact that it is made in America and is all cotton. Those are the two things that were big pluses for our customers,” Kiely said.

Don Reichman, who had been the West Coast sales rep based in Los Angeles for 19 years with his Reichman Associates showroom in the California Market Center, said he stopped carrying the Barbara Lesser samples right after Los Angeles Fashion Market in mid-June. He said he started calling stores to tell them they might not be getting their complete Fall orders because the label wasn’t cutting everything. “But it was a great relationship,” he said. “They treated us right, and the stores were treated well.”

Diane Frank, who was the Southeast sales rep for more than 15 years with her husband, Alan, was surprised to hear in June that the label wouldn’t be going forward. The last season the company was shipping, she said, was Fall.
“It was really sad. The Barbara Lesser label is a name the stores love here in the Southeast,” she said. “Those stores were pretty devastated.”

Barbara Lesser spent her early years getting her bachelor’s of fine art in fashion design at the Pratt Institute in New York and then started out as a sweater designer. Later she moved to San Francisco, designing for several years for Shirt Works and Esprit.

She and her husband launched Wearable Integrity Inc. in Los Angeles, employing environmentally responsible manufacturing and organic-cotton fabrics. The company is the umbrella entity for the Barbara Lesser labels.