For one week only, a room on the lower level of Ellen Zegarra's Seven Hills home has been turned into a fashion showroom, complete with display racks and hundreds of samples by The Worth Collection, a New York City-based designer and manufacturer of luxury clothing.
The northern Ohio divisional sales manager is using the temporary setup to recruit and train entrepreneurial sales associates in the region to sell the $100 million company's high-end couture creations and more moderately priced WorthWear, a line comparable to the "bridge collections" put out by the likes of Ellen Tracy, Dana Buchman and Eileen Fisher.
Four times a year, for one week at a time, the entrepreneurs Zegarra has recruited will turn a room in their homes or a retail space they've rented into similar showrooms, where clients experience a direct-sales model that sales associate Pamela Bellin of Hudson describes as "kind of like catalog shopping in person."
And northern Ohio, as Zegarra sees it, is the land of opportunity. Although Worth has approximately 900 sales associates from coast to coast, only seven of them are in her territory.
"There's no representation in western Cuyahoga County or northwest Ohio," the 33-year-old former event planner and mother of two says. "I have target markets such as Westlake, Avon, Toledo and Perrysburg. But there are also openings in Canton, Massillon, Medina."
One of Worth's most successful sales associates is Bellin, a former vice president of sales for soccer-gear manufacturer Umbro, who decided to stay home with the kids when she moved to Hudson with her husband in 1995. She initially balked when a friend employed as a Worth recruiting manager asked her to consider selling the company's couture collection, unsure whether she had the time or local women had the money to support a line of pricey ladies' apparel. But several months later, in 2000, she agreed to sell the new WorthWear collection, armed only with a list of 250 friends and acquaintances and some used retail fixtures.
Today, Bellin sends out approximately 400 professionally printed invitations to every show. Each mailing yields 75 to 80 hour-long appointments made by women eager to see and try on the samples in her family room-turned-showroom. Bellin orders their purchases and ships them to their homes or hers for pickup.
Marketing is strictly by word of mouth, spurred by the $25 credit she gives clients for each new referral they provide. The appeal, she says, lies as much in the attention she lavishes on each client as the high-quality and timeless-yet-fashionable style of the clothes.
"This really is personalized shopping," she emphasizes. "The one thing that people see — I certainly see it, having been in the retail business forever — is you just can't get service anymore."
Zegarra says sales associates earn a commission on each piece they sell, as well as incentives for meeting and surpassing sales goals and prompt payment of invoices. Those in her territory make $40,000 to $120,000 a year — not bad for a one-time investment of $2,000 for the couture line and $1,100 for the WorthWear line, an amount that includes everything from in-person and over-the-phone training to sales materials and display racks.
"Most sales associates whom I've worked with have recovered that in the early days of their first show," Zegarra says.
Although top sellers have first dibs on the sample sets during the company's four nine-week selling seasons, all sales associates are given the opportunity to indicate preferred weeks for setting up shop in their homes — "just one of the ways we really work around women's lifestyles," Zegarra adds.