Clothing for Full-Figured Women
Written by Patty Rasmussen Tuesday, May 10 2011
Snapshot: Carissa Brown
As a girl, Carissa Brown remembers seeing her mom, Helene, struggle to find clothing that fit her curves. A big-busted woman, Helene often made or tailored her own clothes, a skill she passed to her daughter, who dreamed of developing a clothing line catering to women with hard-to-fit figures. When Helene died suddenly in 2007, Brown turned her grief into inspiration. She started Carissa Rose, a Dallas, Texas-based,online boutique catering to well-endowed women, sizes 4 to 18. The shirts, dresses, and jackets in a variety of classic, tailored styles, have gotten rave reviews from such publications as Oprah Winfrey’s O magazine and Real Simple.
Womenetics: How did your mom’s death become the catalyst for starting Carissa Rose?
Carissa Brown: I had wanted to start a business for years. When my mom passed away in 2007, there was between $5000 and $10,000 that came from her estate. I was going to get furniture or a family room carpet, but a friend of mine said, “You are crazy. You have got to start this business.” Without having that comfort taken away maybe I wouldn’t have done it, but once you walk through that nightmare, you’re ready to live a dream because you never know what tomorrow will bring. I didn’t want to have a dream I hadn’t pursued.
Womenetics: You were a stay-at-home mom when you launched your company, right?
Brown: Yes, and I was a home-schooling mom; I home-schooled my children for six years. I started writing the business plan in November 2007 when my youngest child was 5 months old, six months after my mom passed away. It took me a year to develop the product. I initially launched the company, Bratique Helene, in November 2008. By the summer of 2009 we changed the brand name to Carissa Rose. The Carissa Rose website launched in January 2010.
Womenetics: What sort of business experience did you have?
Brown: I was in software sales before I stayed home with my family, but other than that, I had no experience with developing a business. I developed the business plan on my own, reading books and looking at examples of other business plans. I wrote it in a “dreaming” sort of way. My husband thought it was therapy to deal with my grief after losing my mom. My mom was my best friend. She was going to catch my little baby who was born five weeks after she perished. My dream was to have a chain of stores all targeted to a specific body type. But now our business plan is that we’re an online retailer of pure fashion with shape-specific sizing. It was a process of honing the dream down and increasing the market.
Womenetics: What’s going on with the business right now?
Brown: We’re redoing our website, Clothes for Big Busted Women. Our current tagline is “Fitting the Full Bust,” which so many women identify with. That’s really my heart, fitting those women who struggle, as my mom struggled, to find clothing that fits. But I’ve seen enough women who are B and C cups wear our smaller bust proportion clothing successfully that with the new website we’re changing the tagline to “Fitting the Female Form” and moving forward with a shape-specific or proportion-based sizing instead of just full bust or D-plus cup.
Womenetics: What’s your business philosophy?
Brown: Our mission is to empower women with comfort and confidence to live each day to the fullest. If we’re distracted by a neckline that’s too low or a gaping shirt then we’re not going to focus on the task at hand.
Womenetics: What do your clothes do for a woman emotionally?
Brown: When you feel great in something it affects your psyche. Your posture is better, you have a brighter countenance, and you’re going to be more memorable. If we feel put together and sharp, we’re going to act that way.We tell our clients to try on your shirt, turn out the lights or close your eyes, and just wear it. How does it feel? If it feels good, if you forget about it, that’s the first thing. If you’re tugging and pulling, that’s not a good sign.
Womenetics: What designs do you envision for the future?
Brown: We would love to do jackets or a sheath dress with a one-button blazer combination. Women love dresses but they’re harder to fit because we have to take the lower half of the body into consideration, the hip width, the hemline. We’d love to do a trench dress for the fall, with an A-line silhouette. We definitely go for a “powerful woman” aesthetic because it’s so hard to find for the hard-to-fit body type. We want our women to look as long and lean as possible even though most of them are 5 feet 3 inches and super curvy.
Womenetics: What was the most surprising thing about developing your business?
Brown: How hard it is to find your end consumer and how expensive a great website is.
Womenetics: You reached the point in your business where you needed to stop home schooling your children. Was it a difficult decision?
Brown: It was hard, many tears were shed. It was giving up of one dream to pursue the other. It wasn’t that I thought one dream was more important than the other, but one (the business) was more time sensitive. We’re still in start-up phase, still trying to make it work. If I didn’t give this business my full-time attention as CEO, entrepreneur, burning the midnight oil, I would have regrets. I give myself grace to say I’m not going to regret not home schooling my children at this time.
Womenetics: When you’re not working or chasing kids around, what do you do?
Brown: Right now I cook vegetables and I bake things. Today my staff is eating brownies. It’s not really healthy. Maybe one day I’ll start exercising to blow off steam.
Patty Rasmussen is an Atlanta-based freelance writer. She spent 12 years covering the Atlanta Braves for ChopTalk Magazine and has written for Major League Baseball publications, Georgia Trend magazine, WebMD, and Blue Ridge Country.
