NEW YORK — Rebecca Romero thoroughly researched the contemporary market before launching her collection, Maverick, last spring. She noted, amongst her findings, that the contemporary market was the most competitive sector in the fashion business and, secondly, that it was the most difficult market in which to attempt a fruitful wholesale business.
It was for those reasons that Romero decided to take a retail, not wholesale, approach to launching her collection.
“In the contemporary market, you don’t have much control over merchandising your product when you wholesale,” Romero said. “So, we chose the retail approach. We’re going to open retail stores at a rate of 1 to 2 per year. The more quickly the brand will grow, the more control we retain and the quicker our growth strategy becomes. We’ll have the wholesale [business] piggyback on the retail [business].”
In March, Romero opened the first Maverick boutique here in NoLIta on Mott Street. The 700 square-foot boutique occupies the ground floor of a historical building across from Old St. Patrick’s church. Her plan is to open a store in Los Angeles next, followed by Dallas and/or Miami.
Romero declined to provide a retail projection for 2006.
Only with the fall-winter 2006 Maverick collection will Romero begin targeting a select number of department stores for wholesaling. “We’ll begin targeting stores like Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman,” she said. “Some designers take their collections to the trade shows and the smaller boutiques and grow it from there, but we’d rather finance our own stores and work from there.”
The collection launched one year ago with about 35 pieces. Today, it consists of about 50 pieces including dresses, skirts, and blazers in fabrics such as silk charmeuse and linen. Wholesale prices range from $80 for tops to $350 for jackets. Romero designs the collection here in TriBeCa, and the collection is produced entirely in the U.S. either here or in Los Angeles enabling Romero to, as she puts it, “control the quality.” At the crux of the collection, however, is her passion for breaking into the fashion business.
After 10 years working in finance as a derivatives trader and making a comfortable living doing so, Romero, a Colorado native, realized she had followed a somewhat stable path. “One day I realized, ‘I’m comfortable and I have the things I need, but I need to figure out what I really want.’ I’d accomplished the things I wanted to on Wall Street, so I eased into fashion and didn’t have any second thoughts about it,” she said.
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Thus began her immersion into the world of design. She spent roughly six to eight months researching and developing her contemporary collection. “It was really important for me to learn how to design. That was achieved by trial and error and sitting down with pattern-makers and sample-makers. Every time you work on something you’ve never designed before, you learn something new. I started with the basics of every garment and built it from there,” she said.
Romero elected to name her line Maverick for a number of reasons. Literally, she considers herself a maverick in this industry because she is, in her words, “an outsider.”
“I think I have an outsider’s view. As someone who hasn’t spent their career in fashion, it can seem like a very homogenous place where substance isn’t on the top of the list as to what makes headlines or what is talked about, but it can be a philosophy.
“I think the Maverick woman is sophisticated and confident and attains that in a mature way. She’s well-educated, self-made or self-accomplished,” she said, speaking from experience, of course.