Project
Retail

An innovative fashion outlet
turns heads in New Paltz

By Steve Hopkins

With New York City, a global fashion hub, just a train hop away and sucking most of the homegrown talent into its voracious maw, the Mid-Hudson region is not known as ground zero in the fashion industry — despite the fact that Donna Karan and quite a few other international arbiters of style live at least part-time in communities like Saugerties, Woodstock, Rhinebeck, Hudson and Millbrook. Yet while the majority of women who reside in the region do most of their clothes shopping at mainstream stores like Kohl’s, Sears and Wal-Mart, there exists a definite strain of fashion-conscious striving for individuality among the considerable population of right-brained, arts-oriented female intelligentsia. There is a look of sorts happening that has emanated from the regional centers of 1960s counterculture, a look that has been embraced and is literally embodied by clothing designer Tami Friedman, owner of the Star Real Clothing shop in New Paltz; a look she calls “sophisticated Boho chic.” It is soft and flowing, feminine and romantic, at times woodsy and elfin, comfortable and not at all bulky but loosely following the female form. It’s colorful without being loud and obtrusive.

Friedman, a vivacious and talented woman with a successful background on Wall Street and in real estate before returning to her first love of fashion designing, cashed out and emigrated from Manhattan to New Paltz in 1999, looking for a change of venue and pace. She didn’t realize it at the time, but she had beaten the bursting of both the Clinton-era stock market and real estate bubbles. “I have a little bit of an intuition, and I’m grateful for it, you know?” she says. “When I get a feeling, that this is what I gotta do, I usually listen to it. I think intuition’s there for a reason, you know?”
I know. It’s the same reasoning behind my starting the Chronic, I tell her. We’re bonding, reveling in our kindred entrepreneurial spirit, despite the fact that I am a fashion retard about to attempt writing about the business when all I know about it comes from watching people get systematically eviscerated by the judges on Project Runway.

Friedman’s progress in transforming herself from hotwired Manhattan financial whiz to upstate fashion guru was a carefully plotted affair. She started by scouting on weekends for a place to put down roots. “My horses were looking for a place to live,” she explains. “And I was going back and forth to Woodstock … I really like Woodstock. I used to go up from the city to the monastery up there once in a while. But I just thought it was one little stretch too far. So when I came up one weekend I got off at the New Paltz exit and drove around, and I loved it. I bought a place in Gardiner. This is home now; I love it here.”

She then scouted for a low-impact business that would sustain her and grow without killing her and taking up all her time and energy. “When I moved up here, I needed to make a living,” she says. “I have health issues — fatigue, and something called fibromyalgia — so I needed to do something that wouldn’t take up a lot of time. So I bought a few properties that were rental income, and I started up a real estate rental office where I rent the properties.” She dubbed the company Star Real Rentals.
As the company, fueled by a constant flow of tenants from nearby SUNY New Paltz, did what it was meant to do, she set her sights on opening a clothing design, manufacture and retail sales business, which she named after her successful real estate venture. “Since I’ve housed a lot of the students, they knew the name, because they’ve paid their checks to Star Real Rental,” says Friedman. “My store was going to be ‘Star’ — I didn’t know why — but now it’s just Star Real Clothing. And it’s under the umbrella of my company.
Friedman shows how to wear a one-size-fits-all coat.
(Photo by Steve Hopkins)

A few months into it (the grand opening was in June), her emotions are positive, but mixed. “I needed a creative outlet. I knew I needed that, and this feels good,” she begins. “This is how I look at this little business; it’s in the black, and it’s new. And that’s pretty amazing. I’m not looking to make a million dollars the first year or anything near that, but the fact is that in a bad economy, if you can open a little business and not be in debt for huge amounts of money, to me that’s a good thing.
“I also think it’s good if people can find work up here, and be able to live in a beautiful place,” she continues. “That said, it’s not easy. I have to hire people to run the shop for me, which is difficult. I have my real estate office, but this is what I love to do. Because of my other business, as well as the designing and manufacturing that I do off-site, I can only be here a few hours a day, at most — if that, and that’s not even what I usually do. It usually amounts to one full day a week. If I could be here full-time, it would be fantastic. It’s my thing, it’s my image. I design a lot of the stuff, so when I’m here, sales happen, things happen. It’s busy. When the girls are here, I don’t really know what’s going on.”

“The girls” are students from the college who manage day-to-day operations at the store. She employs others in the region as well. “I do the styles, and I have somebody making patterns in Newburgh, and I have women from Kingston, Wallkill and New Paltz sewing. They do home work. They have their own side businesses, and do their own taxes. So I’m employing a lot of people in the area, and I’m also employing the students who work here. I must be employing about eight to ten people who are local. I’m all about keeping it local; keeping the economy good for the local industry. It’s important.”

Background check

Friedman has had a lot of experience helping women — including herself — transcend adversity and get going in their personal and business lives, including authoring and self-publishing two self-help books through Xlibris: “Four Steps To Manifest Anything” and “Real Estate Rich, Young, & Spiritual,” both available on-line at amazon.com, booktopia.com, flipkart.com and other bookselling sites. The bio blurb accompanying the books begins to flesh out the early part of her career she alluded to in our interview. Brooklyn born, she started in sales at 13, and at 16 was photographed for Avon’s catalog, which jumpstarted an early stint as a showroom model. She studied at F.I.T., and then founded her own company called Heartbreakers, making her family quite a bundle, she says. This led to an offer to help start L.A. Gear Jeans, “the only jeans line ever to be launched from a shoe business.”

Friedman was making $100,000 a year when, according to the bio, “the bottom fell out of her world. Success at a young age came with ill-advised business advisors that left her penniless.” Pressing forward, she “studied for and passed the difficult exam for becoming a stockbroker …” (Friedman tells me she wanted to “sit at a desk and make money”). She then apparently conquered Wall Street, attracting “partnerships with wealthy clients during the prosperous Clinton era.” With her Wall Street earnings, goes the bio, “she purchased distressed real estate and used her creativity to renovate and rejuvenate the properties, using feng shui to heal any defects in the energy, and her eye for fashion to work on the interiors. She used her knowledge on Wall Street to judge the value of the properties and her sense of numbers to know how to structure a deal.”

“With her new abundance under her own control this time, she was able to expand her horizons,” continues the bio. “In 2000, she became certified in hypnotherapy. Along the way, she also learned the benefits of daily meditation. She made pilgrimages to India to experience life in Tibetan Buddhist communities. She developed a stable spiritual practice for herself. Gradually she was able to surpass the prosperity of her early adulthood, and have enough left over for the projects of her heart.”
Those projects include caring for animals, helping women break bad habits, and, back at the ranch, Star Real Clothing Corp.

Clothes make the woman

Still model-slender and not camera-shy, Friedman is comfortable modeling her own creations, which she says are designed to be worn by women of all shapes, age groups, sizes and classes. “It’s a SoHo look; it’s a little edgy,” she says, wrapping herself in a voluminous but somehow form-fitting cloth coat. “But it could be for somebody … anyone from 15 who can carry it off, pull it off, to a woman … I don’t care … 80, if they could wear it. I do a lot of one-size-fits-all that could be for any age. When designing something, I keep all figures and all ages in mind. Because I know that everybody likes fashion. Everybody wants to look good; it’s not just for high-end models on the runway. My coats are made big, so nobody can say ‘I need an extra large.’ They just have my coat. It’s one size; it looks great on thin people, and it looks great on a heavy woman. It looks good on a young girl; it’s for the fall. I custom-make it for people, and the price is ridiculously low. In SoHo, if they saw what I was selling this for, they’d smack me. They’d say ‘How could you give fashion away for so cheap?’ But up here, I have to be very conscious about prices. Something like this is $188. Which, for a custom-made coat in an exotic fabric, with a silk lining, is like, ridiculously low. I’m putting it out there for a little bit more than my cost, to get my name out, to get people to know who I am, and to get my line out. Because this is going to be wholesale. The wholesale price is going to be very similar to this price. That’s the good thing about being a customer in a store where they manufacture and also sell retail.”

“It’s really cute,” she says of the coat while doffing it, satisfied that I got at least one decent shot. “I have my own style; it works for a lot of people. Not everybody, because we can’t be everything to everybody. A lot of people come in here, and they’re like, ‘Wow, I love it!’ And some people walk in and walk out. You know, you can’t please everybody.”

As she says this, a couple of women walk in and stay, perusing the racks, audibly pleased at what they’re looking at. It turns out one of them works at Chronogram, and we are introduced and exchange pleasantries. One of them actually says, “Wow, I love it!” in an unwitting testament to Friedman’s singular sense of intuition, which is starting to seem uncanny.

She makes an appointment for them to return for a consultation. “This is what I’m starting to do is to build a clientele,” she says. “By appointment, I’ll do a fashion consultation, an image consultation, put together a look and a style that they like, at no charge. They buy what they like, period. I can’t be here all the time, so I really want to start taking appointments. Because only then can I really service my clients.”

In the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit here that I was also angling for her to take out an ad. While trumpeting the Chronic’s circulation, I get her talking about Catskill, which she’s particularly jazzed about. “I have a lot of friends from the city who are moving up there. There’s a real arts scene happening.” This digression prompts her to speak of her eventual dreams for the business. “In a perfect world, what I’d love to do is start franchising,” she says. “Sell this business to a local person — very affordable, for way under $50,000. I was thinking more like $30,000, $15,000 for the inventory and the rest to own the name and pay me for my time in helping them start up. Then open up another store in another small town, get it going and sell that one, doing it over and over. I’ll supply them the merchandise. They can buy from my line, and I’ll share my vendors with them — and at reasonable prices. I just have to figure out how to find the right buyer in each town that I go to. You know, find a place, open a little store, get it going so it’s in the black, then sell it. And stay with the people for a month or two, get it going with them, teach them how to run it, and then have my website where they can buy things from. That’s what the goal is.”

“In this economy, I’m thinking of ways to help people as well as help myself. I’m starting to feel it’s more possible, because I have some girls who called me, who want to apprentice with me. And they’re fashion students, and they don’t know what they’re going to do with their degrees. So, a couple of them are from families that could help them. Put a little money into a family business, right? That would be perfect. It might be someone like that. Who knows? I’m open. And you know what? If that doesn’t work out, this is still a great little thing. It’s all good.”

It is all good, and you should check it out and get your Mid-Hudson style on, ASAP stat, in time for the holidays. Star Real Clothing is at 26 North Chestnut Street (Route 32 North) in the Village of New Paltz. The phone number is (845) 255-6868. Tami’s e-mail is tam8888@verizon.net.