Photo by Shane Leonard
Photo by Shane Leonard
Mad for Madras
A Cape Elizabeth mom’s idea for a home-based business becomes Cape Madras, a high-end lifestyle brand based on one of the world’s happiest fabrics.
Jenna Sisselman, a registered nurse and mother of two, started Cape Madras, her high-end clothing company, with little more than a vision, a belief in her products, and 1,500 pieces of unsold Madras skirts and shorts, financed with maxed-out credit cards and a second mortgage on her Cape Elizabeth home.
Seven years later, her patch Madras clothes, accessories, and home goods generate about $3 million in annual sales in 500 stores. She and her husband, Brian, the firm’s only two employees, have built a factory in Madarapakkam, India, that employs up to 40 villagers—all of whom used to commute 2.5 hours by bus to Chennai, the home of Madras fabric—and have fulfilled her vision by becoming what so many entrepreneurs shoot for, a lifestyle brand.
The Cape Madras idea popped for Sisselman when she was looking at Brian’s old prep school yearbook, with boys in their Madras jackets. It was, she thought, a great fabric, with thousands of years of history. Preppy, classic, and timeless, it makes her—and the customers she just knew were out there—think of summer vacations at the beach.
Next came a Google search and hundreds, if not thousands, of fabric samples from India, none that were quite right. She wanted bright colors, pinks and greens, in a cool but substantive weave. She did get one good lead.
“It was sheer luck,” Sisselman says. “Bala was a master weaver, and he could do anything. I sent him a bunch of colored pencils and said, ‘Put these four together in a plaid, and these four,’ and he thought I was crazy, with these pinks and greens.”
When the first shipment came in, much of it wasn’t up to her quality standards, but one item, her Fun Skirts, was. When she asked why, it turned out they were handmade in Bala’s rural Indian village, by a small crew of tailors he recruited. He told Sisselman he had other tailors but would need machines—which she provided, one by one, as needed—and he’s Cape Madras’s master weaver to this day. As the company grew, they added three more stalls along the village’s dirt road, for the “original four” tailors, then another, and another, and finally built the three-story factory in 2007.
The fabric is largely handmade, on sewing machines and small electric looms. Weavers create the fabric, cut it into strips, and pass it on to seamstresses for patching (creating the brand’s signature trio-of-plaids patterns), and the tailors build the clothes, not by piecework, but as a full garment, yet another way Sisselman achieves her quality goals.
In the beginning, friends and family thought the Sisselmans were “crazy” for ordering 1,500 pieces, but her first call, to one of the first customers she ever envisioned, went well. “I called Murray’s Toggery Shop on Nantucket in December of 2004,” she remembers. “And right after Christmas, the fax machine went off. I went tearing into the office—it had never gone off before—and she ordered 100 pieces!”
Sisselman attended her first trade show the next month, and things started to build, aided by a broad resurgence in Madras clothing that began in 2005. She handled shipping out of the basement, sending out 23,000 items in three years before eventually settling on a warehouser/shipper in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 2007.
Then came the recession. “Retail got really skittish after the stock market tanked, and we knew we’d probably take a hit, so we wanted to find another market. We had picked up some high-end golf course shops and country clubs, so I went to the 2007 PGA golf show in Orlando, and that was huge for us.”
Brian, an adventure and documentary filmmaker, eventually became a full-time employee with film projects on the side. The line grew to 15 styles in 20 colors, and eight sizes for each gender. Last year, Cape Madras added pima cotton sweaters, T-shirts, and tops to the line, along with accessories and some home goods.
“We don’t want to just get bigger,” Jenna Sisselman says. “We want to keep making quality fabrics and products, and become a more well-rounded package for our customers. This year we’ll do twills, and we’ve got a lot of ideas for the home, but we’re taking our time. We have a wonderful life, a “blended” lifestyle, I call it, where we have the business, time for our family, and the Maine lifestyle. It’s all worked out better than I ever imagined.”
While it was necessary to source her product in India, Sisselman says she hires small Maine businesses for photography, her website, printing, and anything else she and Brian can’t do. “Maine businesses do an amazing job,” she says. “They take ownership, and we’ve become a big team.”
In February, Jenna spoke at the Maine Million Dollar Women’s Forum, and was asked about starting a business on a shoestring. “I told them I probably shouldn’t be telling people to start businesses with credit cards,” she says. “But the other people on the panel, women with much larger businesses than I have, just said, ‘But that’s how people start businesses.’
“There’s a big risk, but that’s how it’s done. You’ve got to believe in what you’re doing,” she says. “Have a positive attitude, always. Know your customer. Be willing to work at it. And luck helps, too.”
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