NV Magazine, January 2000

Christina Kumi Kimball has struck an interesting bargain with bureaucracy. Dressed in the modish black attire that is the uniform of the New York fashion executive, she has tied a bright peach scarf around her neck in a huge bow, as if to thumb her nose at the whole establishment. It is a piece of delectable Egyptian cotton, excess cut from the shirts that are produced by Craig Taylor Shirts, the company that she runs.

On her desk is a sculpture called “The Blue Boy sugar bowl,” an amorphous orange and blue creation by her 8-year-old son, Taaj. There are three pictures of him, caught in various stages as he cracks a puckish grin, thumb-tacked to the corkboard above her desk. Three books —“Buttons,” “Fly Fishing,” and “Jocks & Nerds”— lean lazily against one another right below the board, and there is a messily scribbled note reminding her: “Don’t forget your ice cream! It’s in the freezer.”

Kimball is not your typical CEO. In fact, she is a classically trained dancer who seemingly tripped into the business world after agreeing to fill in for a friend at Craig Taylor Shirts. She rose from temp to the top in just six months, and is credited by founder Craig Taylor as having grown the company from a four-style shirt mail order business to a multi-million dollar corporation.

Craig Taylor Shirts produces finely crafted men’s shirts for women that are sold at Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, and 300 specialty stores nationwide. When then 34-year-old Kimball began working as a temp in 1993, Taylor was making the shirts himself, one a day, and had a staff of one. It was Kimball who discovered 10,000 untapped leads stashed in a drawer, and organized a fashion shoot, mass mailings, and marketing to drum up sales. Taylor was so impressed with her tenacity that he urged her to stay beyond her scheduled two weeks. Six months later, he made her CEO.

“I was just this funky artist with a great idea but no organization,” he says. “Running this business is like chess for Kumi. She’s incredibly disciplined.”

Kimball has taken to business literally like a duck to water, efficiently running the day to day, but doing so effortlessly, without making a ripple. As a result, Craig Taylor’s sales have increased 350 percent over the past three years. Last year, the company sold just under 20,000 shirts at between $170 and $700 a pop. Craig Taylor also recently opened a new factory in California to meet the increased demand for product. A trouser line, as well as a new shirt line — men’s shirts for men — is scheduled to be released next spring.

Kimball has a unique management style, creating a comfortable environment for her employees and concentrating more on product than profit. “There are no set rules as long as the product looks beautiful, you’re delivering on time, and you have enough business savvy to know that you should be making some sort of profit to cover your overhead,” she says. “But it doesn’t have to be a corporate nightmare. It doesn’t have to be so rigid that you don’t care about the people that you work with. You can’t build an empire by yourself. You have to let every person know that they’re valuable.”

Sales manager Shannan Catlett says that Kimball is an appreciative boss. “Kumi has made it so that people like coming to work,” she says. “When you’re away from the office you actually miss it. This is a little like home!”

Kimball has in fact fashioned an office in a spacious downtown loft that is more cozy than corporate. The conference table is a charmingly worn shaker table with church pew chairs. The white walls are splashed with product samples in all the shades of a watercolor palette, while other shirts are displayed in wicker baskets that adorn the top of a partition. There are no cubicles and few offices, so that her in house staff of 15 tends to spread things out so that they overflow into each other’s spaces. But it is this familial atmosphere that Kimball says helps them to create.

“We’re not so stuffy and corporate and cold,” she explains, “we’re here to create the most wonderful things one thing at a time.”

Ironically, it is Kimball’s dance training that helped fashion her executive style. “Your mental as well as your artistic capacity has to be huge when you’re a dancer,” she says. “You have to push past personal barriers. There is a certain amount of focus required.” She began dancing at seven when she won a scholarship to the National Academy of Ballet and Theatre Arts in New York. She then attended the High School for Performing Arts, and has performed with both the Dance Theater of Harlem and Alvin Ailey companies. The latter opportunity was another of her “falls into fortune,” as she snuck into the closed audition, and promptly won herself a place in Ailey’s premiere company.

Kimball also inherited a strong work ethic from her Japanese mother and African American father. Her mother, as she puts it, was a “geisha to go,” who put her own needs aside to provide for her husband and family. But she expected excellence in return. Kimball and her four siblings had no other option but to succeed.

“It’s true, you have loss of face is what the Asians say if you don’t achieve the goal,” Kimball says. “Our family as a minority needed to maintain a standard to do well in an environment that basically doesn’t validate minorities.” Today, she is fanatical about maintaining that standard at Craig Taylor, and especially detailed when it comes to presentation.

“You have 10 seconds to get a new client,” Kimball explains. “We produce this very eclectic custom shirting, but we do it show business style.” She woos clients the old fashioned way, sending out meticulous press kits with fabric swatches in them like an old custom shirting house would. Sample shirts are pressed carefully, wrapped in tissue, and presented to potential buyers in ornate boxes.

“Kumi spares no expense,” says Catlett. “She runs everything like it’s a movie set, everything has to look just so. Other companies are run more for profit. Kumi considers longevity.”

Kimball says that her way of doing things dictates that she stay away from Seventh Avenue, the New York center of the fashion industry. “What we do really doesn’t have anything to do with the fashion world because they don’t think the way we do. They think bottom line, they think ‘how can we make it cheaper?’”

Kimball is currently overseeing the production of Craig Taylor’s spring collection of closely cut shirts, all made in the same vein as previous collections so that they appear to be seamlessly stitched. The company produces three collections of about 50 shirts, three times a year. They are cut from sumptuous fabrics — English satin, Vatican flannel, and sheer Swiss cotton. Buttons are bone and mother of pearl. Colors are of every shade — from midnight blue to a delicious summer yellow.

The company has a following of satisfied customers, including actresses Susan Sarandon and Demi Moore. According to Kimball, many buy up to 20 shirts at a time. This year’s couture line — shirts priced between $500 and $700 — is already sold out.

“Craig Taylor makes the finest women’s shirt in the country,” says Faunelle Turner, a manager at Miss Jackson’s, a Tulsa, Oklahoma boutique. “There is such attention to detail, they use the finest quality cotton that you can find. You can always count on people buying the shirts after they come in and try them on.”

Buyers at Neiman Marcus have echoed the sentiment and are currently constructing boutiques in eight of their stores for the sole purpose of displaying the new Craig Taylor collection. With such a promising future, the company has attracted investors, and Taylor is considering taking it public. But Kimball is content with current sales and with the pace of life that autonomy has afforded her. She relishes the fact that she can usually leave the office at 6.00p.m. and spend time with Taaj after he gets home from school. And her hours give her the freedom to occasionally take a step back into the world of dance and theatre, albeit it brief and in a backstage capacity, rather than center stage.

“We have turned down investors because they would own us,” she says, as she moves around her office, adjusting “Buttons” so that it stands erect, and refolding a patchwork quilt that sits on the back of her black leather couch. “It’s not all about profits — how much money can you spend? People and relationships are the commodity.”