Art Teacher to Fashion Designer
By Bill Spring
Allison Nelson, 28, recently left her job as an art teacher to thread a new career as a designer of funky, handmade fashions for women at her company, Red Threds.
Nelson wasn't always so enthusiastic about home-sewn clothes. "We didn't have a lot of money," she says, remembering family life in rural Quakertown, Pa. "My mom made all of our clothes, and we pretty much hated everything."
Young Nelson dreamed of more stylish outfits. "My dad was a pastor and I would do all these drawings of fancy dresses on the church bulletins."
In high school her first love was acting and theater design, so when she enrolled in Westmont College in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1992 she majored in theater. During a watercolor class her freshman year, she received some praise that changed her life.
"The art professor came over to me and said, 'Allison, I've never seen you act, but I don't think there's any way that you could be as good of an actress as you are an artist.' "
Nelson switched her major to art and never looked back.
While still in college, Nelson combined her love of art with her love for children and took a job as an art instructor for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art's summer camp program. She loved it and decided to go into teaching when she graduated in 1996.
"People told me that there were no positions teaching art," she remembers, "But when I graduated, I was offered four full-time positions!"
She accepted a position at a Santa Barbara Montessori School, teaching art to kids aged 2 to 13. This led to additional teaching positions after she and husband Chad moved to Los Angeles, and then, finally, to their San Francisco home in 1999.
Nelson's work was personally rewarding. "My favorite part was seeing the kids' faces after making something they didn't think they could make," she says.
But the long hours eventually started to wear her down. "The job didn't pay very well, even though it was full-time," she says. "So I had to take all these other jobs teaching after school, and I just got burned out."
At the same time, she inherited a sewing machine from her husband's grandmother. Nelson, who initially couldn't even thread the machine, began making her own clothes, cutting apart and restructuring interesting vintage items she found in flea markets and second-hand shops. "I couldn't afford the clothes that I liked, so I started making clothes for myself."
When she wore the fun and striking designs on the streets of San Francisco, she got attention.
Nelson had created elaborate, layered mixed-media collages and assemblages for years, some of which were shown in galleries in San Francisco and Los Angeles. When she started designing her clothes, she stuck to the same basic idea, creating wearable works of art in contrasting colors and fabrics. She calls it "collagewear."
When people started to stop her on the street and ask where she bought her clothes, she saw the chance to supplement her teaching income. "I began filling orders for people I met on the street," she remembers. "I would go to the grocery store and come back with four orders for the skirt I was wearing."
Nelson's new business, which she pursued at night after a full day of teaching, began making her more money and giving her more satisfaction than her day job.
She gradually cut back on her teaching hours and spending more time at the sewing machine. The arrival of baby Max in November 2001 made the transition to a stay-at-home job even more attractive. The following autumn she cut all ties to her day job, deciding to sink or swim as a clothing designer.
While Nelson was looking for name of her fledgling company, her mother-in-law showed her a Chinese poem. When Nelson read the line "An invisible red thread reaches out around the world and connects each of us to others who will be important in our lives," it stuck with her. Soon her one-woman company was called Red Threds.
By 2002 the business was flourishing. In spring 2002 Nelson produced her first catalog. She also started shopping her one-of-a-kind designs to upscale stores and boutiques in Los Angeles and San Francisco, to enthusiastic response and steady business.
Nelson sews all the clothes herself, only occasionally needing the help of an assistant. She produces a maximum of about 40 pieces per week, and they don't come cheap. "One of my tank tops will cost about $45, and a dress could be anywhere from $150 to $500."
Word of Nelson's talent has gotten out. After reading about her designs on a San Francisco Web site, Sony commissioned her to create a number of items to be used in advertising photos, including a futuristic jacket used to hawk a digital camera.
On the Net: www.redthreds.com.
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