No ebb in sight From November 1, 2007
Robin Cowie Nalepa - THE STATE
GREENVILLE - Standing on a street corner in downtown Greenville, Allen Stephenson looks like an out-of-place college student.
He sports flip-flops, khaki shorts and a light-blue polo-style shirt of his own design.
Stephenson, hands tucked casually in his pockets, waits for a visitor in front of the nondescript building where he spends most of his time. His head swivels as he looks up and down the street.
But make no mistake: This 24-year-old knows exactly which direction he's headed -- even if he arrived at this spot through impetus and detours. His unassuming manner conceals a driving ambition and entrepreneurial spirit.
Stephenson, the creative force building Southern Tide clothing company as an aspiring rival to Polo and Lacoste, grounds himself in tradition, keeps a close eye on the details and has his sights set on success.
'DRESSING IS EVERYTHING'
In Stephenson's office, framed prints of puppies, ducks and Confederate generals sit on the floor, tops leaning against a wall. A long windowsill holds an Italian dictionary, sales books and a Pantone color fan. A makeshift desk holds an Apple desktop computer and charging BlackBerry but little else.
On a recent fall afternoon, Stephenson alternately stood and sat behind the desk as he talked about how he'd come to be there -- like the scissors incident.
It's a little fuzzy in his memory, but ridding his father's jeans pocket of a stitched-on tag was the objective. He isn't sure how old he was at the time, but he remembers looking up at the pocket.
The unsuccessful cut and run asserted Stephenson's own aesthetics.
The Greenville native, son of a lawyer and nurse, developed a taste for the finer things early.
At six years old, he wore his first tuxedo to an uncle's wedding. When it came time to return the rental suit, little Allen asked his mother if he could keep it.
"I thought that it was so funny that a kid would want a tuxedo," said his mother, Dianne Stephenson. "He just loved it."
Allen remembers looking in the mirror while wearing the tux and feeling important.
"I've always known dressing is everything," he said. "I mean, if you're wearing a suit versus a sweat suit, the man with the suit is going to get a lot more respect regardless of his attitude or what his intentions really are."
Clothes weren't the only thing on young Allen's mind, though.
At seven, he took apart his walkie-talkie, rewired it and built a fan. He sold snow cones in his neighborhood and made $20 in one day. He took to the woods and waterways, learning to hunt and fish with his father, grandfather and uncles.
Shoes made an impression on Stephenson while he was in middle school and high school.
He easily could rattle off the current and past (years past) shoes styles worn by his friends.
"I wouldn't mean to (remember)," he said. "I have a memory for the design."
While in high school, he sharpened his business skills and earned money by cutting lawns. With the help of friends hired for $10 to $12 an hour, Stephenson grew his venture to dozens of lawns per week. At $40 a yard, he made a lot of pocket change.
He spent some of his earnings on a beat-up Jeep. He put in a new transmission and installed a lift kit, added a roll cage "to make it safer," replaced rubber and metal and prepared it to be painted. For two years, he worked on his repairs and redesign in his parents' driveway.
"No one had a Jeep like mine and had done what I had to do, but I still figured out a way to do it," Stephenson said.
He still drives the red Jeep four-wheeling off road, whenever he can. Otherwise, he drives an older-model Mercedes, but he removed the manufacturer's lettering off the trunk for a cleaner look.
As a biology major at USC, he planned on following the lead of his grandfather and the four generations before him and becoming a doctor. He'd build a career around plastic surgery.
Life was proceeding as planned.
A GENTLEMAN WITH AN ITALIAN MIND SHIFT
Stephenson is a self-admitted girl-chaser.
One girl. One chase.
But that chase landed him in Florence, Italy, for five months in a study-abroad program.
He hadn't planned on the trip. Hadn't planned on dating a determined young woman set on studying in Rome. But with a little trickery, he found himself in Europe, only an hour train ride from the object of his affection, Rebecca Burbank.
"He played it off very well, implying he would go to Germany or another country," said Burbank, laughing.
The pair met while working as House pages for then-Speaker of the House David Wilkins. Their first date was to a Kappa Alpha fraternity "Old South Weekend."
Three years later, Stephenson still opens doors for Burbank, rises when she leaves the table and even taught himself to make her favorite meal, eggs Benedict with homemade hollandaise sauce.
While in Italy, Burbank watched as Stephenson soaked up the experience. He learned to speak a little of the language. The country's culture and design enthralled him.
The Italians translated their world into their designs, from clothes to cars, Stephenson said.
His time away also gave him fresh eyes.
"I think life in Europe gave me perspective," Stephenson said in an e-mail. "It gave me a different place to view my homeland from."
A NEW DIRECTION
By the time Stephenson returned to USC from Italy, he'd begun thinking of ways to reconcile his passion for design with his current life path.
Creating and building came more easily to him than molecular biology and the answers to his medical school prep books. It always had. It also made him happier.
In the fall of his senior year, a class project for a speech class had Stephenson speaking about an imaginary chocolate factory. Instead, he winged it.
He presented an idea that grew from his European adventure: a clothing design company called Southern Tide. He showed sketches, talked of his concept for working with stores and producing high-quality classic clothing.
Stephenson remembers the instructor asking, "What are you doing sitting in my business introductory speech class?"
"That was the end of college," Stephenson said.
He packed up his dorm room and headed home to Greenville that night.
For months, Stephenson holed up in his boyhood bedroom, working feverishly. He deconstructed polo shirts, studying every aspect from the material to stitching. He taught himself a computer graphics program to design emblems and logos inspired by icons of his Southern heritage, like fishing-lure hang tags (he calls them hang toys).
He then designed everything about the Southern Tide shirt -- from the blue skipjack emblem to the brushed-cotton interior and the amount of thread used on the button. He researched factories and manufacturers. He paid for prototypes, rejected some, modified others and tweaked his design constantly.
In March 2007, Southern Tide launched its first shirt to compete with other high-end brands in upscale men's retail stores.
"I've had a lot of people, especially before I actually had shirts in stores, think that I was just playing business," Stephenson said.
Stephenson's mother, who is a partner in Southern Tide and one of her son's biggest fans, said she always believed he would succeed, even when others weren't so sure. She's adamant about her son's dedication to his vision.
"Every possible square inch of that shirt is what Allen designed," Dianne Stephenson said. "He's a perfectionist, and his work represents him. It's a personal thing."
For almost six months, Southern Tide "world headquarters" operated out of Stephenson's parents' home. Thousands of shirts and boxes covered tables, lined walls and filled rooms.
"It used to just be a madhouse of me thinking, 'One more day of this, and we are going to break through," Stephenson said.
When Stephenson hit a roadblock or had a question, he didn't panic. He picked up the phone or sent e-mails to successful business owners across the country.
One person Stephenson consulted with recently is Steven Hahn, owner of Greenville-based GudFud, a maker of marshmallow candy.
"He is very courageous and that sort of ambition is rare," Hahn said of the Southern Tide owner. "The best thing he can do to help himself is listen to people around him."
In only eight months since the launch, the company has changed significantly. The less-than-homey digs of a run-down building house operations. Shirts now sell in as many as 65 stores across the country. And several new employees share the workload.
James Comfort ("as in Southern") contacted Stephenson about a job after the 22-year-old bought a Southern Tide shirt from the M. H. Frank store in Clemson. Comfort loved the shirt so much, he went back to the retailer to learn more about the company. Now, the Spanish and international trade major is part of the team in both name and look (he, too, wore flip-flops, khakis and a Southern Tide shirt on a recent workday).
"Everyone gets it," Comfort said. "We want (success) to happen just as much as Allen and Dianne do."
The company is launching new clothing pieces, including women's shirts and pants.
"The shirt is just my start," Stephenson said. "I'm just going to make more complicated things that blow people's minds more."
Reach Nalepa at (803) 771-8507.
Article source at The State
