SCHOOLGIRL'S ROMANCE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21467, 15 April 1933, Page 3 (Supplement)

SCHOOLGIRL'S ROMANCE

FLOURISHING DRESSMAKER TURNOVER OF £875,000 A schoolgirl who started with a capital of £B7 a few years' ago now has a business with an annual turnover of £875,000 a year. The girl who started with her as her first assistant at £2 a week is now getting a salary of £ls a week. This is the romantic story which Isohel—the young Englishwoman who, it is claimed, has beaten the Parisians at their own game of dressmaking—told to the Sunday Chronicle recently. It is part of her romance that she is known only by the word " Isobel " to her thousands of customers, to her business associates and even to her staff. From her palatial offices in London Tsobel now controls a business which is one of the largest of its type in the world. She sells her products all over the British Empire, and even in hundreds of shops in America. The humble workshop where the two girls first started has now become a great manufactory where over 400 girls and 50 men are employed. She has 15 mannequins and thousands of clients. The rise of Isobel to her supreme position is almost unequalled in the history of business women. " When I was at school," Isobel states, " I had a passion for drawing dress designs, and one day I sent some of them to a famous designer in Paris. Much to my surprise and delight, he replied, enclosing a cheque for those ho had accepted. So I sent more and more, and in this way I saved up my £B7. Then when I was 18 I decided to start on my own." She did so in a tiny room on a top floor in Regent Street, and four years later bought a whole corner site in the same street. " I owe my success partly to being original," Tsobel says. " 1 was among the first to wear the now famous anklelength evening dress."