A self-described “creative spirit,” Broach, an Atlanta native, majored in music at Queens College in North Carolina before becoming a teacher. She enjoyed teaching but knew all along that something wasn‘t quite right. “I wanted more freedom,” she says. She had always had an entrepreneurial instinct, and after considering several business ideas, she picked a business that played to one of her talents: sewing.  

Broach has an advanced degree, a master’s degree in education from Western Carolina University, but no formal business training. She knew little about production sewing when she decided to quit teaching and start making custom clothing for children. Her overall strategy was to sell directly to buyers, as opposed to delving into a wholesale business, which at first meant selling to family and friends. “If you retail it yourself, you don’t have to be so big and you can still make money,” she says. Over time, in the spirit of keeping her overhead low, she developed an interesting home-based business plan: she recruited salespeople, whom she then called “hostesses” (they are now “sales consultants”) to sell Just Ducky’s custom-made clothes to customers in their areas. Hostesses presented a selection of samples at a home party—several dress styles, for example, and a wide variety of fabrics and embroidery options—and then they sent orders back to Just Ducky headquarters where Broach and a team of seamstresses would stitch together the personalized items. 

In the early years, Broach’s best-selling items were bright and basic like Crayola crayons. Pink was definitely out. She sold hundreds of bright red reversible jumpers for girls, or overalls for little boys. (About 80 percent of her sales are girls’ clothes, 20 percent are boys’.) The traditional looks appealed to Midwesterners and Southerners, who still make up most of her clients. She eventually had enough orders to employ several seamstresses in a factory on Riverside Drive in Asheville. Now that factory has grown, and Broach has opened two retail shops—one in Waynesville and one in downtown Asheville—where she sells, at a 30 percent discount, the sample items her salespeople use at home parties. Over time, the two retail shops have taken off as well, accounting for ten to 15 percent of her overall sales. The stores sell other high-end clothing lines like Peaches and Cream, Vineyard Vines and Kissy Kissy. 

Broach buys much of her raw fabric from South America and China, and her full-time seamstresses cut the patterns at the factory in Alexander. But she ships nothing out of Western North Carolina for finishing or production, relying mostly on local contract employees, around 25 predominantly rural women who do much of the detail work in their homes. “We have lots of people in lots of far-off places that sew for us. They may not want—or be able to—come into town for a job. Especially as factories have closed down, a lot of them have come to sew for us,” she says. She speculates that if the Just Ducky factory was located in a more urban environment, it might be harder to find seamstresses. “It’s kind of a dying art, but we keep finding new people.” 

Aside from her interest in supporting the local economy, Broach finds that there are practical reasons for keeping things close to home. Just Ducky is known for intricate embroidery and detailed custom work like ribbons and rickrack trim, so it’s important for her to communicate often with the seamstresses. “It’s not production sewing, per se, where you sit in a factory all day and make sleeves,” she says. “It’s really the completion of a whole garment.”

While outsourcing may have other pitfalls, Broach finds the idea of losing control of her operation particularly unsettling. “I like being in control of my production,” she says. “It’s an informal kind of system, I guess, but it really works.” If someone needs time off, they take it—as long as they complete their garment on time. Still, she feels she and her employees are “kind of in balance with each other.” The employees get respect and have a good deal of freedom, but there’s still a sense that everyone is in it together. She says her role models in entrepreneurship are the happy hippies Ben and Jerry. 

Being a business owner in trying economic times is sometimes more about preserving one’s sanity than fretting over the bottom line, which means Broach’s laid-back approach will likely come in handy. Broach says her sales were down by 15-20 percent for 2008, and pondering the future of retail, she is pragmatic. “A lot of status buying is over,” she says. “You’re just not going to make a sale if your prices are out of sight.”

But she also doesn’t seem too ruffled by the drop-off in sales. After all, her business has made it through several upturns and downturns in nearly 30 years. “It sounds sort of cliché…I want to make a good living, I want to have a good business, but it is not all about the profit,” she says. “It’s that day-to-day thing, when you go in to work and love what you do and like who you work with.” Besides, people are always going to buy clothes for their kids, she says. “I still sit around and try to come up with the answer to: what is so cute people can’t resist it?”  

To see Just Ducky’s spring 2009 collection or to learn more about the company, visit justduckyoriginals.com or call 800-772-8534.