Annie does New York:
Purple sleeveless draped dress (Banana Republic)
Nude peep-toe platforms (Marc Jacobs)
Oversized sunglasses (Nina Ricci)
Blue patent leather tote bag (DKNY)
Total est. cost: $920 (Ooops)
‘Everyone has setbacks.’
Bright sunshine peeped through the small blind-free window of the tiny kitchen-meets-sitting room, waking Annie at the ungodly hour of five the next morning. But as it was 11a.m. in Britain, she felt as if she’d had a luxurious lie-in.
Despite having to cope with a new sleeping partner in a cramped bed, Annie had slept soundly. She glanced over at Lana and saw that her daughter was still fast asleep, despite the noise of the bin-men now rattling and clanking metal dustbins down in the street below.
She broke into an excited grin. Even the noise of dustbins being emptied was thrilling because they were New York dustbins … trash cans, she remembered.
Annie stole out of bed quietly and after a visit to the pocket-sized bathroom, stuffed with more toiletries and products than Annie had seen in many chemist shops, she clicked on the coffee machine, sat down at the tiny café table and decided that Elena couldn’t mind too much if she took a look through the large pink files all neatly labelled: Perfect Dress.
Despite a talk with Elena about the business yesterday evening, Annie felt she needed to see all the documents, the invoices, the facts and figures. Only then would she really have a clear idea of how to launch a rescue plan.
Besides, she’d been invited in as a partner. Surely, there couldn’t be a problem with looking through the books?
She suspected Elena would be asleep for at least another two hours. After crying on first Annie and then Lana’s shoulder, Elena had dressed up and headed out for her last evening with Sye before he left for Venezuela. Annie knew that Elena had come home because her bag and leather jacket were slung over the other café chair.
Sipping at her coffee, Annie looked through pages and pages of orders, invoices and printouts of email exchanges. Then she came to the photocopied papers with the latest dress designs. A talented Italian designer, based in London, was the person who translated Elena and Svetlana’s ‘creative vision’ into the kind of paper patterns which factories could use.
Annie looked through the pages carefully with her seasoned shopper’s eye. The drawings were beautiful. Truly lovely designs that managed to combine fashionable with classic, stylish with wearable. So very clever. Annie remembered what had made her invest some of her own money in the Perfect Dress label.
Svetlana and Elena’s inspired idea was to make comfortable dresses which could be dressed up or down for every occasion. These were swishy, fluid shirtdresses and wraps in bright colours and luxurious but machine-washable fabrics. Dresses that could do the school run in boots and a denim jacket, but then a dinner party in heels and a necklace.
They hovered between the £200 and £300 mark: just above the high street, but below designer label prices.
From her understanding of the files in front of her, Elena had tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of orders to fulfil but debts with her factories and now absolutely no money left in the bank. What she needed was to raise some advance cash, money which would let her make the dresses to meet these orders. When the order money came in, she’d be able to pay off her factory debts, then her creditors, and she’d still have money in the bank to get next season’s dresses lined up.
Despite the financial hiccups, Annie was convinced the dress label was still a great idea. Look how many shops had placed orders! Bloomingdale’s had ordered close to ninety dresses for the period between September and February. Annie remembered now that Sye’s mother had something to do with Bloomingdale’s and this was how Perfect Dress had gained its first foothold in the US.
So, in a nutshell: they just had to raise some serious funds and find a dress factory that would run their order … that was all.
Annie glanced again at the Bloomingdale’s order to see when the first dresses were expected. In three weeks’ time!! So what on earth was Elena doing lying in bed at 5.45 in the morning? She needed to be up, drinking coffee and starting a full day of phone hustling on both sides of the Atlantic.
Lana sat up on the couch. ‘Hi, Mum. You keeping busy?’
‘As a bee. I’m going to work all day today, love. What do you want to do with yourself?’
Lana flicked a glance at the large clock on the wall.
‘I think I’ll have a shower, then head straight up Sixth Avenue to be first in line at the Empire State Building. It opens at 8a.m.’
‘No! You’re not allowed to go up it without me!’
‘Mum, I am,’ Lana insisted. ‘I’ll go up this morning and then you can come up with me when you’ve got the time. I’m going up more than once. Greta says it’s the best thing in New York.’
‘It is,’ Annie agreed. ‘Ed and I went up at sunset and the city below was all golden …’
‘Very romantic,’ Lana said, nipping embarrassingly dreamy memories in the bud. ‘Did you sleep OK?’
‘Yeah fine, you?’
‘Not bad. I was so tired but as for you … you snore! Did you know that?’
‘I do not snore. There is no way I snore. Ed has never complained about me snoring.’
She must have said this a little too loudly, for the bedroom door opened and, floral dressing gown flung about her once more, Elena slouched moodily into the kitchen.
‘Vat time is it?’ she said, eyes screwed up against the sunshine.
‘Just after six,’ Annie said brightly, as if this was a totally reasonable time to wake up the person who’s been forced to have you to stay for four weeks.
‘Six!’ Elena hissed.
‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’
Elena shrugged her shoulders, which Annie interpreted as a yes. She turned to the coffee machine and tried not to sigh too audibly; just as the one moody girl in her life seemed to have finally cheered up, she’d landed herself with another.
Elena perched on the end of the sofa bed because there wasn’t enough space for her to get across the room to the table.
‘I’ve been looking through the company books,’ Annie said, pointing to the files, ‘I hope you don’t mind. The orders are fantastic. You’ve got to be pleased about that.’
‘Ya, but vat point if no dresses?’ Elena gave another listless shrug.
‘Hey, this isn’t like you,’ Annie said, wanting to inspire a bit more confidence and optimism, ‘and this definitely isn’t like Svetlana. If your mother was facing a problem like this, she would do something. She would be on the phone every minute of the day trying to solve this. That’s what you and I need to do. Get on the phone, get talking to people and think of a way to raise some money.
‘If we could just find a new factory …’ Annie added.
Elena laughed at this.
‘If you could get enough money together to make the first run of dresses …’
Elena laughed at this too.
‘But once the money for those first orders comes in, you’ll be back in business,’ Annie persisted.
Elena shrugged and took her coffee cup back to her bedroom.
She didn’t come out again until she heard the front door close. Maybe she thought Annie and Lana had both gone out together, when it was Lana setting off for the Empire State Building. Annie was still waiting at the table, fresh coffee cup in hand, to give Elena another team talk.
‘OK. Sit down beside me and listen,’ Annie began. ‘We need the list of all the people who put money into Perfect Dress in the first place. Then you, me and Svetlana will call them all up and ask for just a small further investment. We’ll say we have an incredible amount of orders – which is true – and a minor cash-flow problem – which is also true. We’ll tell them they’re going to get this money back in just two months’ time, with interest.’
Elena, still in her dressing gown, looked at Annie with a pale and uncertain face, then took the seat offered to her.
‘Elena, you’ve got a book full of orders and people are expecting dresses in three weeks’ time,’ Annie said sternly. ‘I’m really sorry about the woman who messed things up for you … but we have to do something before it’s too late.’
‘Juno Harper. Not even her real name,’ Elena muttered in disgust.
‘I’m sorry this has happened to you. But it doesn’t have to be the end of the world unless you want to make it the end of the world. You can get out of this. Your mother wants to help you, and so do I.’
Elena sighed, ran a hand through her long hair and looked dangerously as if she was about to cry.
‘Everyone has setbacks,’ Annie continued, ‘believe me, I’ve had plenty, and especially in business, I promise you. Handling success is easy-peasy, it’s how you handle the setbacks that marks you out. Hey, I bet even Ralph Lauren and Donna Karan had some really bad times. I bet they’ve sat at the kitchen table in pyjamas wondering how on earth they were going to make it work from here.’
Elena gave a little slip of a smile at this.
‘Why don’t you have a shower?’ Annie suggested: ‘wash your hair, do your make-up and put on one of your Perfect Dresses. Remind yourself how good they are. Get a little bit of fire back in your belly. Surely your inner Ukrainian doesn’t want to go down without a fight?’
Elena smiled more broadly at this. ‘You right,’ she agreed finally, ‘not without a fight.’
‘How much money do we need to make the dresses for these orders?’ Annie asked.
After several moments’ thought, Elena replied: ‘At current factory and material prices, we need about £30,000.’
‘Easy,’ Annie said immediately, but really she wasn’t so sure. ‘Go shower and dress, I’ll phone Svetlana.’
By the time Annie had spoken to Svetlana back in London and they’d divided up the list of previous investors between them, Elena had washed, dried her hair, applied the recommended make-up and put on a pale lilac dress.
As she stepped out of her bedroom again, she looked almost cheerful.
‘You look gorgeous,’ Annie told her, which was true. ‘Now, here’s your list. The first person to get an investment has lunch bought for them … Talking of lunch, is there anything we could have for breakfast, babes? I’m really not at my best on an empty stomach.’
‘Café two doors along sells muffins to die for.’
‘Shall I go?’
‘Yes, I make start on calls.’
The Village Bakery was indeed a muffin-eater’s paradise. Unable to narrow down the choice, Annie brought back two bagfuls: white chocolate chip, cinnamon and apple, maple and pecan, blueberry and finally banana. Along with two steaming lattes.
She’d thought the muffins would be divided out between herself, Elena and, later, even Lana.
She hadn’t counted on Elena nibbling at barely half of a blueberry muffin and leaving her latte untouched. So, in between the tricky phone calls in which she tried to make funding Perfect Dress sound as positive, breezy and tempting as possible, Annie somehow managed to chew her way through three New York sized muffins.
As one New York sized muffin is the size of a baby’s head that was a lot of muffin.
By the end of the first hour, sixteen calls were made: ten by Elena, six by Annie – she found that she could keep people talking for longer – but not one single penny was reeled in.
The second hour was tougher. To keep her spirits bright and her enthusiasm up, Annie put Elena’s latte in the microwave and used it to wash her way through muffins four … five and then … oh good grief, six.
‘But we already have the orders,’ she explained patiently to the grumpy man at the end of the line, ‘I’d hate for you to be sorry when this is a thriving business and you could have made the big money by getting in early …’
‘The only thing I’m sorry about is lending Svetlana £10,000 in the first place,’ he retorted. ‘So far, I’ve only had £3,000 back and there’s no word about when the rest is coming. So don’t even think about asking me to risk more!’
The line went dead.
When Elena put down her phone, the two looked at each other. ‘I’m depressed,’ Elena said.
‘Well … this is only the first morning.’ Annie tried to sound more upbeat than she really felt.
‘But we do everyone on the list. There are no more names to try,’ Elena pointed out.
‘Shall we phone Svetlana? Maybe she’s had some luck with her names.’ Then Annie had to ask: ‘Couldn’t she give us some money to cover this tricky patch?’
‘She gave as much as she could when the business start,’ Elena replied, ‘now she has no more liquid cash for “tax reasons” or something … when you are as rich as Svetlana, money is always complicated. Anyway, I make this problem, I want to solve this problem.’
‘Right …’ Annie tried to understand, but really, if she wanted to, Svetlana could probably just sell off some tiny, unloved earring to cover this shortfall.
The call to Svetlana’s phone registered busy. But Annie’s phone began to buzz in her hand with a text.
‘Still on top of ESB. Brilliant! Cm join me!! L xx’
ESB … it took a second to register that this was Lana texting from the top of the Empire State Building. Maybe she should go. Sunshine was streaming in through the kitchen window; it was another amazing day in this unbelievable city. Maybe Annie should get out there. If she and Elena had called every name on their lists, they’d have to think of another idea, and what better place to go for inspiration than the Empire State Building?
‘We need a break,’ she told Elena, ‘I’m going to go and join Lana. Then let’s meet up somewhere bright and inspiring and see what else we can think of.’
As she headed to the tiny bathroom, to reapply lipstick and make all the other little adjustments required before she was ready to face the immaculately groomed streets of New York, Annie wondered out loud:
‘Is there any factory anywhere that might give us the credit, based on our order books? Then we would just need to find money for the material. Just a two-month credit window? Even one month, if we could get everyone to pay on delivery …’
Once again, Elena shrugged. ‘No,’ she said in a deep and mournful tone: ‘I think is hopeless.’