DALLAS – There seems to be no end to the number of labels and collections that the Dallas-based contemporary firm Johnny Was can produce.
This month at the Designers & Agents show in New York, the contemporary firm will introduce Dirty Pretty Dolls, a line of deconstructed sheer cotton and polyester knit dresses and T-shirts. Dirty Pretty Dolls brings to eight the number of labels in the Johnny Was stable. The company last year launched four labels: Yellowfield 8, a collection of embroidered cotton and silk tops; 3J Workshop, embellished tailored shirts; JW Los Angeles, embroidered cotton T-shirts, and For Love and Liberty, crystal-studded and appliquéd knit and rayon georgette sportswear.
“It seems like we just keep launching,” said president Deborah Kirkland. “The market is starved for newness, so we take something new and fun and focus on it, like a whole collection of embroidered T-shirts, or a whole collection of embroidered coats. Instead of diluting it within a collection, we focus on it and make it phenomenal.”
Johnny Was has come a long way since it was founded in 1987 in Los Angeles with oversized embroidered T-shirts. The company is perhaps best known for two labels started five years ago: Biya, a collection of elaborately embroidered jackets and coats, and Two Ten Ten Five, a line of embroidered sportswear.
“We do a lot related to denim, but we don’t do the denim,” said Eli Levite, the company’s owner and founder.
Levite, whose wife, son and daughter all help manage the business, declined to discuss annual revenue except to say that it was less than $100 million and that he anticipates a “hefty” boost this year.
“We have increased about 30 percent every year in the last few years, so we are doing something good,” said Levite, who designed clothing and furniture in Israel before moving to California in 1985. “In 2006 I can’t say we will double, but it looks now like we will have a hefty 35 or 40 percent increase.”
The company has 1,600 accounts in the U.S. and 400 overseas, with corporate showrooms nationwide and sales agents across Europe, the Middle East and Japan. It manufactures in China. While each label has its own spin, Johnny Was and its progeny all have a hippie vibe expressed in varying degrees of embroidered flowers, peace signs and slogans. It seems logical given that the company name was lifted from a Bob Marley reggae song: “Johnny Was” rambled through Eli Levite’s head the day he and his family launched the T-shirt company.
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“My daughter played it over and over and over, so it was stuck in my mind,” he said. “It’s a good name.”
Johnny Was’ first big product was a tent-like one-size-fits-all T-shirt embroidered with a sun, fish or the like, said Kirkland, who is not a family member. “It was a huge business for about five years,” she said. “Then everything got smaller and we started sizing. The beginning of the end was when Roseanne [Barr] started wearing them on TV.”
But it was only the end for the muumuu Ts. Johnny Was retooled with feminine printed rayon georgette sportswear in 1995 and then began building its embroidered empire. The buyers forced the firm to expand by objecting to variation in the core Johnny Was styling, Kirkland said. “Every time we tried to change our concept they’d say, ‘That’s not the one I’m looking for.'”
So the company did an experiment in September 2004, introducing cotton knit T-shirts with whimsical embroidery under the JW Los Angeles label at the Fashion Coterie show in New York.
“The two salespeople called at 10:30 a.m. and said, ‘We need help,'” Kirkland recalled.
“It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced in my life,” said Melanie Jennings, Johnny Was’ corporate rep in Dallas, who was working the Coterie booth with another saleswoman. “There were five or six rows of people back from the booth, waiting. It was so amazing.”
Most of the Johnny Was’ labels fall solidly within contemporary pricing, wholesaling from about $36 for a T-shirt to $130 for a jacket or dress, with the bulk of tags between $65 and $99. The exceptions are Biya and Two Ten Ten Five, whose allover embroidery and finer fabrics stretch into bridge- and gold-range pricing. The most expensive three-quarter Biya coat, for instance, wholesales for $385.
Both Biya and Two Ten Ten Five are designed by Biya Ramar. An artist and designer with a flair for embroidery, she joined the company as a partner five years ago.
“We are proud of what we are doing,” Levite said. “The detail is so hard to do – it’s very hard to manufacture. Some items have six or seven processes back and forth to the manufacturer. We are making it harder and harder, but that doesn’t mean that people don’t copy us.”