Suppose everyone wore a personalized warning label, similar to the ones on cigarette packs, giving fair notice to the world of the risks of involvement with the bearer. In the case of Darleen McFarlan, the message would likely read: Warning! If you believe women in general, and blonds in particular, are weak, wishy-washy or downright dumb, a relationship with this woman may be harmful to your bias.
McFarlan, 45, is a fast-track entrepreneur who found out the hard way that business is a game where survival of the fittest is the only hard and fast rule. She says she`s been beaten to a fiscal pulp and hung out to dry by her past business partners, only to start all over again, sometimes still battered and hurting but, more importantly, refinanced.
Today, McFarlan rules Darleen`s at 616 West 5th Ave., her Naperville-based drapery and decorating business, with an iron fist, which most of the time she keeps under wraps and out of sight in a velvet glove of diplomacy.
McFarlan says she gave up the notion some time ago that being sweet was going to get her anywhere in the take-no-prisoners mentality of modern business. ”Lots of women want to go into business for themselves,” she says, ”but they don`t have the strength to do what it takes to bring a check home. At some point, you have to make up your mind if you`re doing this for love or money. It was hard, but I saw that money was the key.”
Five years ago, McFarlan was designing and sewing quilts and drapes in the basement of her home for a private clientele, sometimes netting only 25 cents per hour for her efforts. This year she expects to gross $475,000 in retail sales, about $200,000 over the 1987 total. Not bad for a woman who without the slightest hint of embarrassment says she hopes ”to be the next Laura Ashley.”
A Darleen McFarlan-owned mill weaving Darleen McFarlan-designed fabric is a dream Darleen McFarlan says she intends to make come true in about 12 years, ”if all goes well.” And, well, why not? she reasons, aloud, because if Laura Ashley did it-and she did-then maybe, just maybe, so can Darleen McFarlan. Already, plans for a Darleen`s catalogue and several franchise shops are in the works, she says. And Darleen`s curtains and drapes are featured in four Chicago area Habersham Plantation furniture and decorating stores.
McFarlan considers herself an artist, not a traditional interior decorator. Fabric is her medium, she says, emphasizing that her skill is a gift from God. Her recently expanded showroom would seem to support her artist-in-residence identity. She has covered nearly every square inch of wall space with her work. In her hands, bolts of material and yards of imported lace are swagged, gathered and ballooned into curtains and drapes that seem like free-floating fabric sculptures that just happen to come to rest over window casings.
McFarlan`s most popular curtains are often described as styled in an upscale-country look. Using several different pastel-print fabrics stitched together, she creates a new blended-pattern textile, which is then lined and layered, sometimes petticoat-style, with yet another fabric, to give fullness to every ruffle and pleat.
Her quilts are one-of-a-kind commissioned pieces of personalized art, some commemorating a birth, an anniversary or a lifetime of memories. She says her creations are more like old friends than objects to her. She keeps photo albums filled with snapshots of her favorites.
One quilt hanging prominently on the wall facing the center of the showroom is not for sale. It`s a tapestry of small bears in ballet poses. This quilt is special, she explains, because it was the catalyst for her current success. The bear quilt captured a blue ribbon at the craft fair at Fox Valley Center about five years ago (and later took first place at a craft show at Illinois Benedictine College in Lisle). Soon after, orders mushroomed for custom-made quilts, she says, and she began to meet the people who today are part of the loyal following that keeps her awash in referrals.
McFarlan makes no apologies for her it`s-my-way-or-the-highway attitude that has already sent several accountants and a series of general managers packing. Their fatal error was underestimating McFarlan`s resolve to run her own show, from showroom to installation. The trek from basement workshop to the 3700-square-foot sales and manufacturing center she opened in August has taught her to be wary of the counsel of high-priced business gurus: ”I know my bottom line. My (accountants) are always trying to tell me how to run my business, but I`ve learned to go with my intuition. Six months ago, my accountant told me not to expand.” In retrospect, it was bad advice, worthy of being ignored, she says.
Nobody, but nobody, knows her business like she does, McFarlan insists, including a banker who tried to put her loan request on permanent hold until she literally took matters into her own hands, grabbing the loan papers off his desk. ”If you can`t believe in me and my business,” she remembers telling the startled official, ”and if you can`t see giving me this money, then don`t waste my time!” She got the loan.
Anyone looking at just the tiger-lady side of McFarlan is seeing only half a woman. McFarlan is proud of her tenacity, her strength and her success, but she celebrates her femininity. It shows in the way she moves, easily worth a charm-school A-plus for evenly measured steps and graceful carriage. It shows in the way she dresses, a style that spurns the designer-trendy look in favor of soft, fluid elegance in a classical silhouette, invariably lace-trimmed. It shows in the way she talks. The spoken word on her lips is so lullaby gentle, so distinctly prepubescent in tone that a listener is tempted to imagine that if a Barbie doll could talk it would sound just like Darleen McFarlan.
Shy by nature, and conditioned to be suspicious, McFarlan is a reluctant interview subject. ”I know we need publicity, but . . . ” She stops abruptly midsentence, winces as though in pain, and then asks, ”Do you have a (hidden) recorder?” Assured that the reporter is armed with only a notebook and pen, she laughs and points to a place where they both can sit down, not at the table where customers and salespersons peruse wallpaper and fabric sample books but at the edge of a big bed smack in the middle of the showroom.
Like a teenager with a new friend, McFarlan spends the next hour talking about her feelings, which fall generally into one of two categories, happy and sad.
Happy is having five children (four from a previous marriage) ranging in age from 6 to 24. Happy is sharing life with second husband Scott McFarlan. Happy is having the money to support her daughter, who is a Mormon missionary in Sweden, and the resources to help her son, who is a Presbyterian youth minister. Happy is helping other women ”find their own special gift, their serendipity,” including 17 seamstresses who sew for Darleen`s (10 in their own homes) for an average wage, she says, of about $6 per hour.
Happy is remembering her childhood in California where she and her cousin Nancy Johnson sewed lace- and ribbon-accented fashions for their dolls and later for themselves, sometimes copying perfectly (without a pattern)
beautiful designer dresses from pictures in magazines or catalogues. (Johnson is now a multimillionaire dress designer, McFarlan notes proudly, whose fashion signature is handmade Battenberg lace and crisp, cutwork embroidery on collars and cuffs.) Happy is just thinking about matching her cousin`s success. (”She`s a couple of years older and has had more time,” McFarlan allows.) And finally, happy is being an entrepreneur, independence from working for someone else.
Sad feelings come from remembering what it was like to exit a ”bad, really bad, first marriage,” with four children in tow, remarry and plunge into a business partnership with friends selling stuffed animals in a store in Utah and subsequently to lose $70,000 in the venture, she recalls bitterly.
”We came to Illinois to open another store, and when we got here, we found out they (the partners) sold the business right out from under us,” she relates looking down at the floor, unable to maintain eye contact.
Sad, too, is talking about the downtown shop, Truffles, she once shared with Naperville business woman Kim Auwema in 1985. The relationship was harmonious at first; ”I trusted her completely,” she says, but the arrangement soured within a few months, until one day, on Jan. 30, 1986, she went to work only to discover that her key no longer worked in the shop lock. She claims she was unjustly evicted from the business (there were no legal papers of partnership, she acknowledges) and sustained loses of about $50,000 from unrecovered inventory and other expenses.
”My only choice was to go to court and fight, or to go on. I don`t know how to fight, but I do know how to build new goals. I can`t function in negatives,” McFarlan says firmly. ”But I function beautifully in the positive.”
(Auwema angrily denied that her relationship was anything more than a rental-space arrangement with McFarlan, and asserted, ”There`s no reason for her to say she lost any money. . . . If we had a partnership, we would have had legal documents. She had nothing to do with Truffles. Truffles was me.”
Auwema admitted to confiscating McFarlan`s inventory saying, ”I ended up with the inventory as (rent) payment.”)
On Feb. 14, two weeks after the Truffles crisis, McFarlan underwent a mastectomy. ”There`s no doubt in my mind that the cancer was caused by the turmoil. I believe I created that illness because I was so overwhelmed, so out of control in that environment.” Within a month, she was back in business, operating once again out of her basement sewing room. A few months later she rented 1,200 square feet of second-floor office space near her present location.
Bad experiences are a form of education, part of the cost of getting business-smart, she says,shrugging. The biggest loss, though, was the ability to trust others openly. Such innocence has no place in business. ”To be successful, first you have to find your God-given gift and then work as hard as you can. And you need a good lawyer and a good accountant. And you don`t start this,” she says pointing to the phrase written in the reporter`s notebook about working with a God-given gift ”until you get this,” she concludes, tapping her finger on the words, lawyer and accountant.
(McFarlan defines good lawyers and accountants, as those who fill in the gaps in her business skills but respect her right to run her company as she sees fit.)
Amid all the disappointments, McFarlan says, the one constant support person in her life has been Scott McFarlan, her husband since 1981. He recently signed on to be the general manager at Darleen`s, a move he says is temporary. (Scott also owns and manages a newspaper subscription-sales business.) He has no intention of being ”Mr. Darleen” for much longer than a year, he says.
”When the numbers are good and I can afford the luxury of stepping down, I will,” Scott says emphatically. ”When I leave depends upon us legitimating or, rather professionalizing, this business on the way we handle people, like our vendors and the IRS, and the way we pay our bills-on time. In the past, Darleen would fill the store with quilts rather than pay the bills. Compared to our sales, the old debt was small potatoes, really. But we`re back on track now. Every problem she ran up against in the last three years was because she set certain things aside that should have been paid. Now she`s got a general manager who isn`t afraid to say no.”
And sometimes it sticks. And sometimes it doesn`t. Darleen has been known to ignore Scott`s advice. She has the final say in everything that has to do with her business, he allows, because ”Hey, it`s her baby.”
Scott describes his wife as a very strong person, and the price, he says, of keeping their marriage on a healthy growth curve while they`re cultivating their business interests is a weekly trip to a family therapist. It`s their time to learn about themselves and each other, he says:
”I`ve learned to think for myself. Darleen is a very dominant person, and I`ve had to learn to be myself, to worry about me first. Darleen taught me that. Now we`re both growing in our relationship. We don`t smother each other.”
But they do spend at least one weekend each month getting away from it all, together, Darleen says, ”because the marriage comes first.”
Asked to name his wife`s greatest strength, Scott answers almost automatically, ”She just doesn`t give up.” Her greatest weakness? ”She doesn`t give up,” he repeats intentionally, then adds, ”Really, her greatest weakness is that she`s impatient.”
Darleen thinks a little impatience is a success booster; she calls it risk taking. Habersham Plantation owner Dave Hixon, who selected McFarlan as the drapery consultant-supplier for his stores in Naperville, Willowbrook, Vernon Hills, and Schaumburg, agrees. He said the willingness to take risks is what sets McFarlan apart from other seamstresses who are would-be entrepreneurs:
”The woman who ends up staying in the basement (sewing) is the woman who decides to wait until her business gets ahead before she takes a risk. Darleen took the risks. She went out and invested the dollars it took, without the sales being there, on the theory she`d make the sales. And obviously, she has.”
McFarlan, who once had to scout around for vendors who would work with her, now has them coming to court her. A case in point: Phil Puschel, president of Schumacher and Co., New York, which is the parent company of Waverly Fabrics, recently visited McFarlan`s showroom-a courtesy call, he said, because McFarlan`s business is one of the company`s ”better and more innovative accounts.” Her designs ”are pretty, colorful and require a lot of fabric, which, of course, is what we like to see,” he said.
In a reflective mood at the Oswego luxury home of customer JoAnn Qualkenbush, wife of builder Donald Qualkenbush, where Darleen`s is doing a whole-house curtain and drapery decorating project, McFarlan reflects on the types of women customers she encounters: ”The easiest woman to please is one who is very comfortable with herself and knows what she likes and dislikes. And she loves life. Professional women who are very comfortable with themselves truly love everything I do. But the woman who never likes anything about her life-even her husband can do no right-will not be happy with my curtains.”
Yes, there is a secret to success, she shares as her mood mellows. It`s simple: ”The price of success is change. If you want to be a success, you have to be excited about change.”
The price of a McFarlan custom-designed window treatment is considerable: $1,600 to $9,000 for a bedroom and $1,000 to $5,000 for a living room. For a whole-house design, which may include coordinated quilts, chair pads, table skirts, bedspreads and upholstery, the price tag can range from about $5,000 to $30,000. (Well-to-do women customers often don`t tell their husbands what the job costs, she whispers, so she makes arrangements that accommodate their generous no-questions-asked household allowances.)
When asked what she hoped people would learn after reading a story about her, McFarlan shot back, ”That we`re not all dumb blonds.”
