One Runner’s View: A Moving History (Part 1) August 29
by Ellen Wessel
I was born in 1951. In 1974 I quit smoking for good for the second time and started running.
With my first step onto a 22-laps-to-the-mile horizontal hamster wheel of a track suspended above a YMCA basketball court, I was no longer A SMOKER. I became AN ATHLETE. By 1976, I was logging 70 miles a week.
Yes, I had swapped one dependency for another, but this one launched a career. The transformation from female smoker to female runner was the spark for Moving Comfort. Seventy miles a week translated into dozens of hours of creative conversation with my marathon training partner. Focused as we were on getting stronger and faster, performance-enhancing shoes and clothes were an intense interest.
We at first attributed the shortcomings of our shorts to not being skinny enough. It took longer than it should have to figure out that the clothes would never fit us properly. They were made for skinny men. With the convergence of three key elements, a business was born:
- We loved running.
- We didn’t love our jobs.
- No one else was bothering to make running clothes for women.
We had no plan other than to make custom clothing for the women in our running club and other friends in the running community. It’s an understatement to say that we were open to suggestion and we reacted instantly when retailers started asking for product.
I wrote an article about the marathon-running mayor of Newark, NJ, for the May 1977 issue of newly launched Running Times magazine. I was offered ad space instead of money, so we slapped together one about our new business. Within several weeks of publication, we got letters from five running shops requesting our catalog. I wrote back immediately with what would quickly become the truth: The “catalog” was in production and would be sent asap. (Those that are still in existence are still customers—Marathon Sports, Track Shack, Foot Works and Fleet Feet.)
By the summer of 1977, our direction was established: We were manufacturers designing and distributing women’s athletic apparel to specialty retailers.
Our first women’s running shorts were extreme modifications of a commercial pattern for women’s Bermuda shorts. We bought fabric, thread and buttons (for our then-unique back pocket) at a local sewing shop. We cut the fabric on the kitchen table and put the fabric pieces along with thread and button into individual sandwich-size plastic baggies. We had built a tiny network of home sewers who inconveniently lived far from each other in the D.C. area, requiring a day at the beginning and end of each week to drop off the parts and to pick up and pay for the sewn garments.
In retrospect, our growth was inevitable since we were the only company making women’s running clothes. Moving Comfort grew rapidly along with the growing numbers of women runners. By our third year we had exceeded $1 million in sales.
Predictably the frenzied running market attracted new suppliers. By 1983, we were up against a flood of closeout product, making it nearly impossible to sell product at a survivable margin. We were in a persistent state of hyperventilation, suspended over the pit of bankruptcy for several years. A number of our competitors then aren’t here anymore: International Sports, Another Dimension, Women on the Run, Pantera, and MarathonHer/Sir.
These were frightening, tense, miserable years. Through attrition (abandoning a certain-to-sink ship was more like it), our staff withered down to 10 people from 21. That cut our overhead significantly. We stopped advertising. We re-negotiated terms with our bank. We dropped our office cleaning service and cleaned the toilets ourselves. The truth is we didn’t know how to go out of business, so we didn’t. We returned to profitability in 1986.
In spite of continued growth and profitability, we were nearly buried again in the late 90’s. We had a big growth spurt in the mid 90’s, prompting the need to quickly accelerate our volume. At the same time, retailers were consolidating at a rapid rate, manufacturing was heading offshore and competitors were spending a lot of money marketing to women. We ultimately concluded that Moving Comfort’s long term success required the resources of a large company. In 2002, we sold Moving Comfort to Russsell Corporation. In June 2006, my business partner Elizabeth Goeke and I chose to step out of our day-to-day operational roles.
It’s been 32 years since I took my first running steps. It’s been 29 years since we founded Moving Comfort. I’m still running (along with yoga, Pilates, and weight training). Moving Comfort is still growing, fueled by women athletes of all abilities who can now work out far more comfortably than they could in 1977.
Ellen Wessel, co-founder of Moving Comfort, now lives in the country in Orange, Virginia. She remains active as a consultant to Moving Comfort, writes, is an active community volunteer and speaks to organizations and businesses on her entrepreneurial experiences in business, her being present at the beginning of the running boom and the evolving role of women in sports (http://darmangroup.com/bios/wessel.htm).