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Wednesday, January 4, 2012 | BREAKING NEWS: VANCOUVERSUN.COM
C3
small business
Barrington Brolly is a shade above
Niche parasol business started by retiree in Gibsons has Hollywood, Victoria’s Secret calling
BY Jenny Lee
Vancouver Sun
J
oan Barrington’s little onewoman retirement business catapulted into the
spotlight when Victoria’s Secret
designers tracked her to her
home in sleepy Gibsons on the
Sunshine Coast and asked her to
make custom parasols for their
$12-million 2011 New York fashion show.
It was a glamorous turn of
events for Barrington, who
started hand-making parasols
and umbrellas after a 27-year
administrative career with the
federal government’s Department of Supply and Services.
“It started with parasols. I
couldn’t find one,” said Barrington, who retired at 57. “I
always knew — you read books
about people as you’re getting
older ­— that it’s not wise to
just retire and [say] ‘that’s it.’
If you’re not involved in doing
volunteering work, or church
work or things like that, you
really should look at developing something to get yourself
involved.”
Barrington had always loved
making things, so she thought
she’d start a business making custom, contemporary
fabric parasols for use as sun
protection.
The result was Barrington
Brolly, which has been in business since 1995.
Sourcing suppliers for
umbrella and parasol components turned out to be a serious
challenge. Barrington didn’t
want to buy several thousand
umbrella frames at a time, but
just a few dozen. She eventually
found tiny, high-quality, niche
manufacturers in Europe. “My
pride and joy is my European
connection,” she said.
Once she’d hand-made a few
parasols, Barrington, then living in Ottawa, sent a news
release to a local television station, which did a local interest
segment. A woman at Parks
Canada saw the show and
introduced Barrington to a costumer who ordered parasols for
Rideau Hall’s historically costumed tour guides. Before long,
Barrington was getting orders
from living history museums all
over the U.S., from Mystic Seaport in Connecticut to Colonial
Williamsburg in Virginia and
The Henry Ford in Michigan,
to name just a few.
While Barrington’s historical
costuming market was keeping
her busy, her early attempts to
woo contemporary customers
at trade shows proved spectacularly unsuccessful. Her $100plus umbrellas and parasols
Glenn Baglo/PNG
Joan Barrington displays some of her handmade custom umbrellas and parasols. The Gibson woman is an expert in parasols dating from the 1700s to the early 1900s
and sells her creations to the historical costuming market, but also does work for theatre productions and, recently, a Victoria’s Secret fashion show.
just couldn’t compete with $10
models.
“I realized the trade show
primarily focused on retailers looking for movement of a
product in and out,” she said.
The parasol is “a centuries-old
idea, but people today don’t like
to carry things. They like to be
hands free. It’s still a very small
niche market.”
So Barrington set about making herself an expert in historical parasols from the early
1700s to the early 1900s,
meticulously following the
fashion changes as parasol and
umbrella rib lengths yo-yoed
from 10 inches to 24 and back.
A 15-and-a-half-inch rib creates a long, elegant My Fair
Lady look. “The ladies used
to flirt with them. They would
have a parasol and kind of peek
out from behind them.”
In the late 1800s, she said,
when a man gave a lady a parasol, that “was considered very
personal and he probably had
intentions because he was protecting her skin.”
Once the suffragette movement started, parasols came to
seem anti-feminist and fell out
of use. It became more fashionable to have tans and be out in
the sun, Barrington said.
“What I’m doing is reminiscent of how they used to put
hats together,” she said of her
sophisticated canopy constructions. She talks happily about
ribs, hinges, spreaders, rib tips,
thread quality, stitch counts
and custom-carved handles.
But Barrington’s immersion
in historical accuracy led her
to lose an exciting commission.
The Pirates of the Caribbean
production asked Barrington to
make Keira Knightley a parasol
for the movie. “For that time
period, the 1700s, you were
looking at wooden [parasol]
ribs,” Barrington said. “I didn’t
want to produce something
that wasn’t historically accurate
and unfortunately, that was my
mistake. They ended up using
an ordinary parasol which I
could have done. It was a good
learning experience.”
But the entertainment business did not forsake her. Some
charity work led to projects
with theatre costume designers on Broadway (Coast of
Utopia and Dracula Bites), as
well as in Washington D.C. and
Chicago.
Then Universal Studios called
and Barrington Brolly ended up
making parasols for Universal
Studios guides dressed as Marilyn Monroe and Lucille Ball, as
well as umbrellas for the movie
A Series of Unfortunate Events
with Jim Carrey.
Barrington has also found a
surprising niche market among
people with lupus, a condition
where sun protection is particularly important. For them,
she makes umbrellas with
Solarweave, a fabric that provides high levels of protection
from the sun.
“One fellow in California has
ordered twice from me now. I
have helped make it possible
for him to go out.”
She’s resisted wedding trade
shows. “I don’t want that to
become my primary source of
work, which I know it could.
“I would like to do more contemporary. I just think when
you see people get all dressed
up and it’s raining and they
have these little cheap flimsy
umbrellas, it’s funny....It just
so totally doesn’t complete the
package. You have to really be
an umbrella nut to understand
it.”
Victoria’s Secret contacted
Barrington in May last year for
its late-November show.
Although she was not paid for
the work, Barrington jumped at
the chance to get credit every
time Victoria’s Secret models
use the parasols or umbrellas.
She’s hoping the exposure will
grow into her long-dreamed-of
contemporary market where
she’d design and make parasols to match contemporary
outfits.
“It has taken me to such wonderful places,” she said of her
business. “Things I would never
have dreamed of.”
She’s not getting rich, she
said, but she’s sure having fun.
Barrington Brolly umbrellas
start at $150 and parasols at
$175.
[email protected]
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Personal Finance
B.C. residents are saving, but fear their investments aren’t secure
Many expect their contributions to RRSPs will be less this year than they socked away in 2011, poll finds
By Tracy Sherlock
B.C. residents are
entering 2012 with
a generally confident
outlook on their future
finances, although
they are somewhat
less positive about
their current financial
situation than they
were a year ago.
Vancouver Sun
A
lthough most British
Columbians are confident
they will save enough for
retirement, nearly three-quarters are worried about the stability of their investments, a BMO
financial group study found.
Sixty per cent of B.C. residents said they are on the right
path to realize their ideal retirement lifestyle, while 72 per cent
said they are growing increasingly nervous about the impact
of market volatility on their
retirement savings.
“It’s good to see that most
British Columbians feel confident about saving for retirement, but it’s not surprising that they are feeling a
little uneasy about their RRSPs
given the past year’s turmoil,”
said Mark Breakspear, regional
sales manager, Vancouver,
BMO Bank of Montreal.
B.C. residents were the most
likely in Canada to say they will
contribute less to their Registered Retirement Savings
Plan than they did last year,
the study found. Thirty-eight
per cent of British Columbians have made or plan to make
a contribution to their RRSP
for the 2011 tax year, but just
68 per cent will contribute
the same or more as last year.
Christina Kramer
CIBC executive
vice-president
Mark van Manen/PNG
Seventy-four per cent of British Columbians say it’s more important today to set financial goals
than it was five years ago, according to a CIBC study.
Just half of British Columbians
have RRSPs, while 61 per cent
of Canadians have them, BMO
said in a news release.
During the 2010 tax year,
Canadians contributed an average of $4,700 to their RRSPs.
The BMO online survey was
conducted by Leger Marketing
from Nov. 21 to 24, 2011, with a
sample of 1,520 Canadians, 18
years of age or older.
Meanwhile, another poll
shows that B.C. residents are
generally confident about their
financial situation, but less so
than one year ago. The CIBC
poll found that 70 per cent
of B.C. residents say they are
confident they will reach their
financial goals, compared to 79
per cent a year ago. The number of B.C. residents feeling
positive about their financial
situation plummeted 18 per
cent from a year ago to 54 per
cent, the lowest in the country.
“B.C. residents are entering
2012 with a generally confident outlook on their future
finances, although they are
somewhat less positive about
their current financial situation than they were a year ago,”
said Christina Kramer, executive vice-president, Retail Distribution and Channel Strategy,
CIBC.
This lack of confidence may
be related to 74 per cent of
British Columbians saying it’s
more important today to set
financial goals than it was five
years ago.
“It’s encouraging to see more
B.C. residents recognizing the
importance of setting financial goals for themselves, and
a good level of confidence in
achieving those goals,” Kramer
said.
Nationally, Canadians are
feeling slightly less optimistic
about their financial situations
at the dawn of 2012 than they
were a year ago — and they’re
less confident the older they
get, according to the poll.
While respondents in all age
groups expressed confidence
that they would achieve their
financial goals, the numbers
fall as the age of the respondents rises.
“For example, among Canadians 18-34, 78 per cent say they
are confident they will reach
their financial goals, however
Canadians nearer to retirement
in ages 55 to 64 were less likely
to be confident, at 68 per cent,”
CIBC said in a news release.
A total of 2,015 Canadians
were surveyed for the poll,
conducted by Harris/Decima
between Nov. 10 and 21. It has
a margin of error of plus or
minus 2.2 per cent, 19 times out
of 20. The B.C. survey included
250 residents and the margin
of error is plus or minus 6.2 per
cent, 19 times out of 20.
[email protected]
With a file from Postmedia News