Fabel Headwear LLC

Identical twins Lori Meyer and Lisa Anderson are the dynamos behind Fabel Headwear, the Snohomish-based company that designs and sells a line of distinctive hats for winter sports enthusiasts.

Now is its second year of business, Fabel is a childhood dream come true for the sisters, who both teach at the Seattle Art Institute and are raising families while building the Fabel brand. The two women, who financed the business through savings, work out of offices from their respective homes. Meyer handles design, while Anderson takes care of logistics. And both work on sales and marketing.

The Fabel brand, now sold in nine stores, could be in as many as 40 in the coming year. The company is working to design a spring line of women’s hats for its Japanese market.

Here’s a look how the business got started and what the sisters have learned:

Question: What was behind your decision to start a clothing company?

Meyer: I’ve been a designer for 12 years working for other companies as a consultant and then just in corporate America as a head designer for several companies. Lisa and I have had a design consultant business for six years, helping businesses build their businesses … so we just go to the point where we were ready.

Question: Why hats?

Meyer: We did research on the market and looked for where there’s room and holes in the market and decided there is definitely some growth in the hat industry. There are ways to make us stand out from the crowd. … What we try to do with our hats is use really nice wools, really nice weaves, really high quality. And I’ve been working overseas for 10 years, so I know the factories that know how to basically save money, and we give that money back to our customers.

Question: Who makes your hats?

Meyer: The manufacturing is done in Shanghai, China. We have a really great factory. It’s really small; it’s just a family – the husband and wife, they run the whole factory. I’ve been to the factory, and they have great work. We’re really lucky, though, to find a factory that has low minimums (quantity orders), because we’re not at the point in our business where we manufacture a lot, but we’ve found a factory that can give us low minimums and still keep great quality.

Anderson: And it’s nice to know that she’s been there, so when people say, “Are you sure it’s a good factory, that they meet all the codes?” and stuff like that (she can tell them from firsthand experience).

Question: What about marketing? You’re in a number of stores across the country now – how do you get your foot in the door?

Meyer: We have representatives in each territory … in the Northwest, in the Midwest and Alaska. We also have representation, distribution in Korea and Japan, and we just hired a rep/distribution person in Australia. We’d like to get in Australia because they are opposite seasons of us; we could have a different shipping time.

Anderson: For the first year, we had friends and us going into stores (and marketing) our line, and people liked our hats.

Question: What’s the hardest thing about running your own business?

Anderson: You’re never done.

Meyer: You’re never done; you’re never finished. You’re working at midnight trying to get some sales numbers from a store in California – e-mailing and calling them. So it’s just something that you’re never done with, but if you have a passion for it like we do, then it’s always fun.

Question: Are you looking to expand?

Meyer: We are going to build in more of a higher-end boutique line … and I think that should open a lot more doors for us. We are going to be doing a core snowboarding hat line, but that’s what we currently have, and then we’re building onto that, (with) a women’s high-end line – some men’s but mostly women’s. And then we’re also, for Japan, building a spring hat line for women for 2008.

Question: I’ve got to imagine that starting out without debt is a wonderful place to be.

Meyer: It is. I’ve worked with a lot of companies as a designer and consultant; we both have. Watching other companies, where you have bank loans, you have that urgent stress and you feel like you need (a certain level of success) so badly. We wanted to be where we could make the right decisions that were the right decisions for us as a family and for us as business people that don’t have anything to do with financing but have to do with building a strong base of a business.

Anderson: We’ve also seen companies that have a fabulous product and then they build too fast, and they can’t take care of it, or they can’t control it.

Meyer: We want to be able to have this company for the long term and make decisions that are ethical.

Anderson: Our little sister has a degree (in social work from the University of Phoenix), so once we do get to a certain level, we want to help her open up a self-esteem builder retreat camp for kids.

Meyer: That is our all-time goal, our all-time dream goal. We want to make enough to survive and do well, but we want to be to do this for a reason. We’ve had great careers, and we have a great life, and we feel blessed, and we want to give that back to other people and other kids and other families.