By Chris Lombardi

As 2007 ended, city planners quietly took their next step toward remaking the Garment District by launching a “Fashion Marketing Support Study,” soliciting bids from experts to help them find the best way to develop the District.

Working in conjunction with the Department of City Planning and the New York Industrial Retention Network, the New York City Economic Development Corporation issued a request for proposals (RFP) to consultants to conduct the study. The consultants were required to respond to the RFP by year’s end.

The three groups have been investigating the needs of small producers in the District for some time, and their findings will help the chosen consultant in its work.

While the study has the support of the Garment Industry Development Corporation (GIDC), which has fought proposed zoning changes that might imperil small businesses, many local suppliers were skeptical that anything called a “marketing study” would help address the core issues that make it harder for them to stay in the “fashion capital of the world.”

The New York City Economic Development Corporation issued the RFP in November, seven months after Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden announced that major changes in the Garment District would soon be under way. In the nine months since, a group of savvy Garment District business owners, working under the title Save the Garment Center, has managed to stall DCP’s initial efforts at rezoning the Special Garment District (SGD), which was established in 1987 to preserve the city’s apparel industry and severely limits the total square footage that District buildings can rent to non-apparel uses.

In the 20 years since the SGD was established, a lot has changed. “Everyone knows the area needs to be rezoned,” said Danielle DeCerbo, of the office of City Council Speaker Quinn, “but no one’s figured out how to do it yet in a way that protects the businesses that are there.” Perhaps the new EDC study, DeCerbo told Chelsea Now last month, would shed some light.

Participants at a garment workers rally back in May

As reported by Chelsea Now in March, early last year DCP began presenting a tentative rezoning plan to community boards, drawn from a 2006 report by the Fashion Center Business Improvement District, which would have allowed more square footage to be used for Class B office space, hotels and destination retail. But their proposal stalled in the face of opposition from the District’s current business owners, whose artisan-style shops (boasting from 10 to 500 employees) produce samples, trims, markers and other products essential to design studios.

These businesses, whose clients range from independent designers like the Brooklyn-based Barbara Garner to Ralph Lauren, have grown slowly even as the District’s famous “sweatshops” largely moved overseas, and are central to the complex web of suppliers and services that enable New York’s fashion industry to survive. Uniting as Save the Garment Center, they confronted community boards and held public protests such as “Pin Day” back in July (volunteers wore embroidered pins with the group’s name).

Throughout, SGC stated that its businesses, while thriving, cannot compete with glitzy law firms or hotels, and thus still need protection from the raw edges of the market; that the current zoning is rarely enforced, with illegal tenants already driving up rents; and that its continued presence in the District is essential to the more glamorous faces of New York fashion, like Fashion Week or the TV show “Project Runway.” After Women’s Wear Daily and the New York Times ran sympathetic articles, DCP’s spring 2007 proposal was suspended, and DCP began to talk to the Garment Industry Development Corporation and to UNITE, a union representing garment industry workers, about finding a solution all could live with.

Meanwhile, representatives of EDC and the New York Industrial Retention Network began, along with DCP, to visit District businesses. “The city considers this one of our key industries,” EDC’s Janel Patterson told Chelsea Now last week. “We’re working with City Planning, and have interviewed more than 20 businesses so far.”

Asked to comment on the collaboration and on EDC’s new consultant, DCP press officer Jennifer Torres referred us back to EDC, adding only: “We continue to work closely on combined efforts to support and enhance businesses in the Garment District.”

Among the suppliers interviewed by the three agencies are some SGC members, including designers Celeste and Anthony Lilore and costume supplier Helen Uffner, who was forced out of her 7,000-foot studio on West 37th Street last summer when her building, which had been removed from Garment District protections by the Hudson Yards rezoning, was slated for demolition.


No poster child here

Helen Uffner Vintage Clothing is just one of scores of companies that have felt forced to leave the District, as the Times reported in December: “Custom Accessories, a belt maker, moved to Florida in 2002. Great Buttons moved to Forest Hills, Queens, in July. TQC Cutting moved to Sunset Park, Brooklyn, last month. Art Max Fabrics, Felsen Fabrics and La Button Boutique are among the many that have closed entirely.” With each such departure, SGC members warn, the close supplier-client relationships that make up the fashion business are further damaged.

Uffner, who moved her shop and its vast collection of vintage clothing to Long Island City last summer, told Chelsea Now last week that “I felt quite a bit of trepidation” when the team turned up at her new loft. For one thing, she said, she didn’t want to be seen as “the poster child for successfully moving a garment-industry related business to the outer boroughs.”

The representatives mostly asked Uffner about her business model, asking “‘How does it all run?’ and about the relative importance of the neighborhood, proximity to clients, and availability of close transportation,” she said.

Uffner tried to turn the conversation back to the stress on the District, including other costume companies still working there, like Tricorn and Creative Costume, Inc. “They just got their new leases, with immense increases,” said Uffner. “They’re not sure they’ll make it.”

Overall, District businesses interviewed by Chelsea Now were unimpressed by the questions asked by EDC and the other agencies. “These are people who don’t understand the industry,” said SCG co-founder Samanta Cortes, who said that the three-agency team had not come by her 38th Street embroidery shop, but she had interacted often with all three agencies, as well as with the Fashion Center BID. Until contacted by Chelsea Now, none of the businesses were aware that the EDC was hiring a new consultant, or that the study RFP suggested that the Garment District’s woes can be best addressed with improved marketing.

Could face rental pressure

In the 110-page RFP for its new team, EDC seeks a consultant with “extensive experience with the fashion Industry” who is skilled in “developing marketing communications plans” and “identifying and seizing business opportunities.” (Also on the list of “preferred skills” are new-media tools like Website design and viral marketing.)

Real estate woes of companies like Uffner’s are referenced only obliquely, in one of its Background sections: “Production/supplier companies are feeling economic pressures because of the shift to offshore manufacturing. With enhancements to the neighborhood, it is expected that many could face rental pressure and may need to move to upper floors, which are far less accessible, or potentially relocate from the Garment Center altogether.”

While the future tense may appear unnecessary to some, the word “enhancements” echoes the earlier 2006 study from the Fashion Center BID, which led to the now-suspended DCP zoning proposal. The RFP explicitly offers the 2006 study, in addition to a “2007 supplier study” (presumably including last year’s interviews), to the prospective consultant as required reading.

The answer to this dilemma, and the task of the consultant, is to set up “marketing initiatives” such as an instantly searchable database for suppliers, clients and customers to find one another, as available in other “fashion capitals” like Milan and Tokyo. This and other marketing and business plans will aim to “support and grow fashion trade shows, fashion showrooms, production companies, suppliers and others in the Garment Center and throughout the city.”

The old model is broken

Magda Aboufadl, enforcement director for the Garment Industry Development Corporation and a member of Community Board 5, said that the RFP’s emphasis was not entirely unwelcome. “Marketing is certainly no replacement for a stable supply of affordable space,” said Aboufadl, “but given that some displacement of suppliers from ground-level spaces is inevitable, better marketing can’t hurt.” She added that she has heard people in the industry say that “contractors would do well to change the way they do business; they are still used to the old model, where work came to them from the union or by word of mouth.”

Aboufadl also endorsed EDC’s proposed database, even though GIDC has a similar service. City support for a “Made-in-New-York”–style marketing campaign for locally made clothing would be “great,” she added, as it could “increase sales and therefore work placed in factories.”

A colorful Band-Aid, a deeper wound

With the RFP’s Dec. 31 closing date for the bids and a projected 12-week timeline, the plans being developed by the not-yet-hired consultant will almost certainly not be ready before the one-year anniversary of DCP Commissioner Burden’s announcement of her planned Garment District overhaul. It was still not clear, at press time, whether DCP intends to wait for those plans before moving ahead with its next rezoning proposal, or whether the plans are intended to mitigate the effect of the “enhancements” created by any new zoning.

To the SGC members polled last week, though, the RFP mostly suggests that EDC has drawn the wrong lessons from all those trips into the bowels of garment-industry shops.

“I think it stinks. I think it’s a waste of money,” said Cortes. She dismissed EDC’s proposed new database, noting that both the Fashion Center BID, FIT and GIDC already maintain such databases, and that industry people do use them. “The people who are working in the industry already have their clients and networks keeping them busy,” said Cortes. “Who else are you trying to market to, and why?”

At bottom, said the suppliers, the most important point is the first made above by Aboufadl: that marketing initiatives are no substitute for “a stable supply of affordable space.” Without a city commitment to ensuring such space is available, said Uffner, any marketing campaign “is like a colorful Band-Aid to hide a much deeper wound.”

“I would imagine there are far fewer numbers of street-level vendors and far greater numbers of displaced upper-floor businesses who could use the marketing help,” said Uffner. “Especially those displaced out of the Garment Center altogether.”