A woman finds her calling in quality Hawai'i quilts

By Dan Nakaso
Advertiser Staff Writer

Seven days a week, sometimes 18 hours a day, Linda Foley strides through her windowless, hot and humid factory amid the thumping of machines that make miracles out of cloth and weave her ideas into sales.

When Linda Foley initially bought Island Bias & Quilting, employees such as Wilson Edralin were less than enthusiastic. Now, they are like family. Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser

"This is my time," Foley said last week to the rhythm of the machines at her Island Bias & Quilting on Waimanu Street. "This is when I can secure my financial future and make sure my children don't end up like I once did."

It's been a long trip to success for a woman whose husband died in a car accident 20 years ago and left Foley on welfare in New Hampshire, with four children and a mortgage.

Foley's transformation from frightened widow to successful businesswoman is a testament to a spirit that refused to give up and kept looking for ways to improve life, from getting a business education to moving cross-country.

The breakthrough came when Foley took a chance on a business — then called Island Bias & Trimming — that faced extinction in 1997. Foley took over on Jan. 1, 1998. The company's gross revenue increased from $112,000 per year to $1.75 million just three years later.

The company had long been the Islands' main source for cutting some 200 manufacturers' cloth into "bias" — hems and other kinds of fringe used on nearly every garment produced in Hawai'i. But Foley also fired up the company's dormant quilting machines and helped create a new manufacturing market.

She found a niche for quilts made from Hawaiian prints and designed her own lines of quilt bedspreads, diaper bags, pillows, comforters and other housewares now sold throughout Hawai'i in places such as Macy's, Sears and Wal-Mart and at more than 360 stores on the Mainland.

A cache of admirers

Earlier this month, Foley won the Retail Merchants of Hawaii's Power of Yes Award for Outstanding Growth & Achievement, sponsored by First Hawaiian Bank.

"It's been really nice to have someone like Linda come to town," said one of Foley's clients, Pat Boltz, a sales representative for clothing manufacturer Robert Clancey. "She's got to be one of the hardest working people around town. She gets things done fast, and she gets them done right. She's done more for the market and made it more interesting than any of us have in a long time."

Clancey has been dealing with Island Bias for a quarter century, and Boltz got to know Foley first as a customer. Then they became collaborators in combining Foley's infant quilts with Clancey's baby clothes, which are packaged together and sold at Macy's under the Hawaiian Islands brand and at Sears and JC Penney with the Strawberry Guava label. (Different retailers carry her products under several other brands, including Vintage Hawaii, In Full Bloom, Somewhere Over the Rainbow and Postmarked Paradise.)

New clients get quite a first impression of Foley.

She is just 5 feet 1 and 92 pounds, all topped with a shock of wild gray hair. She'll be 52 on Thursday but dresses like a kid in her signature overalls with the pant legs rolled to her knees.

"I'm different from a lot of people," Foley said.

Her constant companion is a 3-year-old Yorkshire terrier named Rainbow who's no bigger than a loaf of bread and wears a ribbon in her own floppy mop. Rainbow hitches a ride with Foley on every business meeting in a little bag slung under Foley's arm.

"Linda doesn't make herself up to be anything she's not," said Tiffany Kim, who buys Foley's products for Macy's Hawai'i region's island home department and counts herself among Foley's admirers.

Foley rented adjoining space and knocked down walls to expand the original 2,575-square-foot floor space to 4,529 square feet today. She invested $62,000 in a new, custom-made bias machine from the Mainland, bought another used one and cleaned up a third to give her a potential stable of five machines to crank out even more quilts and bedspreads.

Foley wants to spread her quilted Hawaiian prints to wherever she can ship them. But she won't talk about specific markets or new products. Competitors have seen the market for Hawaiian print quilts grow, she said, and she doesn't want to lose her edge.

She believes in meeting clients in person and talks to some of them every day. But she also takes time to be alone.

The child inside

Island Bias' bleak factory gives way to a set of jarring, bright blue stairs that lead into Foley's office. The journey from ground floor to Foley's inner sanctum is like stepping through Alice's looking glass.

Linda Foley has created a quiet, colorful private space at Island Bias & Quilting’s headquarters. When she has a break in her busy schedule, she uses that space to relax and play with her dog, Rainbow. Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser

Surrounded by a sea of pastels, Foley climbed on top of a chair and tucked her bare feet beneath her.

"This room is me," she said. "Not many people get to come up here. This is the child that still lives inside of me."

The child within was forced to grow up awfully quickly to the ways of Island business.

Outsider from the Mainland

She instantly ran into obstacles within her own company and from manufacturers, who didn't like the outsider from the Mainland who suddenly raised their rates.

Foley told them they had been getting a bargain at the risk of her company's future. But Kaunoa Wilson, production planning supervisor for Hilo Hattie, turned to a competing company with slightly lower prices to make Hilo Hattie's piping and covered buttons. After two or three orders, Wilson realized that she wasn't getting a deal.

"Linda's the best," Wilson said. "She's just very, very good. I'd rather go with somebody we know and trust."

Foley had a tougher time with her own employees.

Robert Blake, Island Bias & Trimming's owner, died in 1995 and left two employees to keep the business running for Blake's widow, who had moved to California. When Foley took over, they continued to work but refused to help Foley learn about the business.

"I was haole. I was a woman. I was from the Mainland," Foley said. "There was so much animosity. Resentment isn't really the word for it. They wouldn't show me anything. They wouldn't tell me anything. I felt like I worked for them."

Foley still saw value in the workers, particularly Wilson Edralin who kept the machines running and had earned the respect of clients. She wrapped her arms around Edralin last week and said, "We wanted to kill each other — right, Wilson?"

Edralin, 34, offered a grin and said Foley has made a "big difference." "We're way, way, way busier than before," he said.

The number of workers at Island Bias has grown from two to 12 full- and part-time employees since Foley took over.

Foley, feuds of the past and all, considers each of them family.

"As long as I'm alive," she said, "they'll always have jobs."

All alone all of a sudden

Foley grew up in Queens, N.Y., and studied fashion in Manhattan. She married a New Englander named Jack Foley, moved to Merrimack, N.H., and began raising their children in a two-story, nine-room Cape Cod house.

Linda grew much of the family's food and earned extra money making draperies as she focused on her children by playing Brownie leader and den mother, leading field trips and serving on the PTA. When her husband died in 1982, Linda went to night school to learn about business but still couldn't hold her family's finances together. So she moved to San Francisco in 1986 to live with her mother and got a job with a clothing manufacturer.

Then in 1997 she came across a classified ad offering Island Bias & Trimming for sale, came to Hawai'i and saw potential in the dying business.

She sent letters to all 200 clothing manufacturers throughout the Islands introducing herself as the new, Hawai'i-based owner. She met with customers and offered ideas on how she could trim their costs or expand their lines.

She walked into Wal-Mart and found lots of material in Hawaiian prints, but not a single yard of Hawaiian print quilt. When she asked whether Wal-Mart would buy her quilt prints, Foley also got her first order to make quilt bedspreads.

That turned Island Bias around.

"For Hawaiian quilt prints, it's a relatively new market," said Linda Ogata, the local buyer for six of Sears' Hawai'i stores and one of Foley's clients. "There's really been nothing for bedspreads and comforters."

Foley's line soon evolved into everything from Hawaiian print seat covers to place mats. There are so many designs and items that Foley can't remember them all and hasn't had time to catalog them.

For Macy's, Foley hires local artists to design customized Hawaiian quilt prints. She also works with Macy's to package her quilted pillows and blankets with Macy's bathrobes and other clothes to sell as gift baskets.

Macy's this year has purchased 4,200 units from Foley, mostly Hawaiian print bedspreads.

"Every single shipment that she sends is perfect," Kim said. "She makes no errors, and her quality is immaculate. She's very, very detailed. One person I can count on is her. She's flexible and truly sees her business as being a part of my business."

Fruits of success

At the annual Governor's Fashion Awards this month, Foley was drowning amid leis as she accepted her award. She drank in praise for taking a struggling company to profitability.

But she saw it differently.

"Most people think my greatest accomplishment is creating beautiful bedspreads," she said. "I think my greatest accomplishment is just sticking it out."