Page 20 of Sunny Side Up

eight

Avery was already seated in my office by the time I arrived back at work on Monday, notebook open, fine-tuning her to-do list for the day. She perked up when I walked in, eager for the vacation recap.

“You’re glowing! Tell me everything,” she said.

“Well, Avery,” I decided to jump right in.

“I’m excited to say that I’m coming back from vacation with more than just a stunningly even tan.

” I dropped down into my desk chair and swiveled to face her.

“I have a business proposal. You know those swimsuits that Kateryna and I were playing around with? I’m going to start making more… and I want you to help me.”

I spent all of last night researching to make sure I wasn’t kidding myself about this, or that I just hadn’t known where to look, but no: There was an enormous gap in the extended-size swim market and no one had been able to execute it so far…

so why not me? Why not us? Why couldn’t we be the ones to do this?

As soon as I landed in New York, I texted Kateryna to see if she wanted to make this partnership official.

She wrote back immediately: “Okay”—her version of an enthusiastic, all-caps, LET’S DO THIS.

“I love this, I’m in, no questions asked,” Avery said, turning to a fresh page in her notebook.

“A start-up is a lot of work, though. Especially in apparel… You need so much overhead going into it…” I tapped my fingers on my desk, keeping my eyes on her.

“It will mean a spring filled with a whole new slew of tasks you didn’t sign up for when you joined Lbr.

We can absolutely update the job description together to make sure you’re up for it, but I would love your help.

I’ll pay your overtime, of course, but I don’t want to sugarcoat this.

It’s going to be a lot of juggling, especially because it will be a separate company. ”

“I’m more than up for it,” Avery said, nodding so quickly it was like she was bopping along to an imaginary song playing on an imaginary radio station.

“Sunny, I graduated with a dual degree in business and fashion design. This is exactly what I went to school for. I was born to help you with this. I’m so excited! ”

“Excellent. You’re hired. Again. I have a meeting on the eighteenth with a potential backer, Fieldstone Capital, which Brooke helped set up.

I have enough in my savings to get us started for now, and my hope is to raise a small round of family-and-friends funding.

But the business can’t take off for real for real without a major investor, so this meeting could really make all the difference in how fast this all happens.

From what Brooke said, the guy who’s meeting us has been looking for something just like this to add to his portfolio. ”

It had been one of those stars-aligning moments: When Brooke got home after the flight, her kids still mercifully, shockingly with Ezra, she’d agreed to a last-minute packing consultation with her new Greenwich client.

During their FaceTime session, he’d mentioned that the reason he needed so many outfits was that he was spending the month of February taking meetings with all sorts of hopeful founders looking for backers.

His fund had made a new commitment to invest heavily in female-founded-and-run brands with “a disruptive edge,” intended for a female audience.

This guy was so grateful that Brooke had taken his call on a Sunday, she felt like she could get away with a quick pitch on behalf of a friend. “I made your swim line sound a little further along than it really is—”

“Brooke. It’s not even a ‘line.’ It’s a pile of fabric and sketches and one prototype, which we need to make from scratch, not someone else’s design, if this is going to be legit. I don’t even have a business plan yet.”

“Sunny, I saw you working on a business plan the entire flight home.”

“Those were just notes and doodles.”

“I know you. Sit down with your notes for one hour: It’s a business plan. And you don’t need one for me to make an intro.”

Brooke sent the email connecting us. He wrote back five minutes later: Anyone Brooke recommends is a star in my book. Let’s set up a meeting. My assistant will send the details.—TM

“Okay, so Avery—”

“Yes, ma’am!”

I laughed. “We need to start building out a legitimate business plan, and I have some notes started, but—”

“Easy. Done.”

Her naive enthusiasm was endearing. And contagious.

“Okay, but , we’re also a few days out from New York Fashion Week, with red carpet season on its heels.

We have two different accounts doing brand presentations, two with major activations, an endless rotation of stylists coming in and out of the office while they’re in town from LA—What I’m saying is that we have way less time than we think to get this business plan in order.

We have to do real market research. More than what I did last night.

We have to figure out what the company’s goals are—while making sure that those goals (A) speak to women who’ve never found luxury swimsuits that fit their bodies and their personalities before, and (B) speak to some old guy who just cares about the bottom line.

We have to figure out what products we’re actually going to sell, outline a marketing plan, a sales plan, do a whole financial analysis, make projections, we need way more convincing sketches… ”

My head was starting to spin. “Oh my god. How are we going to do this with basically no time?”

“Sunny, we’re just going to do what you always tell me when I get overwhelmed: ‘Take it one step at a time.’ I have no plans tonight. I’m ready to start when you are.”

We spent every evening that week brainstorming.

Once our duties for Le Ballon Rouge were done for the day, we’d order dinner and transition to start-up dreaming in the conference room down the hall.

I’d even bought us classroom-sized dry-erase boards, on which we documented our fast-moving thoughts before they had a chance to evaporate.

Our motto became Write it down now; photograph the board once full; edit later —lest one of us say something brilliant, then forget what it was five minutes later.

We were Cady Heron and Kevin Gnapoor studying for the mathletes. Masters of the proverbial chalkboard.

By happy hour on Friday, we had a finished business plan, an accompanying presentation deck, and a name: SONNY.

It was clean. Simple. The spelling made it feel less predictable and gave a nod to my dad, his Godfather obsession, and the etymology of my name.

I could see it next to any other designer swimwear brand, at any of the top luxury retailers.

Avery, who turned out to be a natural at graphic design, had created the logo: SONNY in a simple yet inviting font.

Black lettering and a white background. The designs were going to be colorful and wild, and I wanted the logo to be simple and chic.

It was perfect. Immediately, Avery replicated the logo as a drawing on the whiteboard, and I got to work forming the LLC.

We would start with a line of six suits.

Three one-pieces and three two-pieces, in three colorways each, in straight through extended sizing.

I had my lawyer write up a proper contract for Kateryna and her apprentice, Jacob, a sewing and tailoring savant who had one more year until he graduated from FIT.

I had her write up a separate contract for Avery, too, because I wanted to keep things clean and tidy.

A friend of mine who was a designer for a giant lingerie and sleepwear line in Los Angeles gave me the names of her favorite agencies that worked with seasoned fit models in a variety of sizes.

Avery contacted all of them and set up a go-see for us in March, the same month we were meeting with potential factories.

We’d probably end up working with three fit models total—one who wore straight sizes and two who wore extended sizes.

Given my Bergdorf breakdown that had been the catalyst for SONNY and the open ocean of opportunity in this space, our fit across the spectrum of sizes had to be p-e-r-f-e-c-t .

(One of the most helpful things my lingerie-designing friend told me: A truly great fit model is not only the ideal size from which you scale all other sizes up and down, but also someone who offers helpful critiques and feedback from the point of view of a person actually wearing the clothes.)

Thanks to a spiderweb-worth of introductions from a few of my own clients with whom I’d grown close over the years, I had (extremely) preliminary interest from a few larger online retailers and a few small but very chic New York boutiques.

The boutiques excited me most, because while big orders from online retailers meant a larger order volume (and therefore large profit potential…

or loss potential, I suppose, but I was choosing to plan as though this couldn’t fail), what I really cared most about was the in-store customer experience for women who wore extended sizes.

I just kept coming back to my North Star—part of the opening monologue I would give during my presentation to Brooke’s client Ted Manns: This line of suits was for everyone who wanted to buy and wear them, yes, but it was especially made for the women who were sick of feeling like they had to apologize for their sizes; who knew what it was like to be side-eyed at fancy department stores; who were sick of being told to “check the website for more sizes”; and who were all too familiar with that dingy, dusty, back-corner, sad rack for the one, always ugly , “plus-size” style— if a store even carried it.

I wanted the women who normally avoided dressing rooms to run to them with excitement when SONNY hit stores.

First stop, New York City. Next stop: a bougie local boutique near you.