By Gerald Witt
Staff WriterGREENSBORO -- Rachel Weeks had to hop off the phone for a lunch appointment Tuesday.
“I’m sorry, I’ll just call back later,” said the 24-year-old Greensboro native and president of School House, a company founded on fair wages for Sri Lankan factory workers and trendy cuts for women and men wearing the threads here.
Lately, Weeks has been busy expanding her line of collegiate-wear beyond the bookstore at her alma mater, Duke University, and on to Harvard, Yale and other schools. On June 26, The Conference Store in Greensboro will begin selling the clothes.
School House sells spirit with styles that go beyond a typical boxy college T-shirt.
Weeks and her creative director, Colleen McCann, designed the clothes on those found in stores such as Abercrombie & Fitch, Hollister or Urban Outfitters.
“The brands that these young women and men are buying right now,” Weeks said, “none of those fits were showing up on the brands of the college bookstore.”
Weeks, a 2003 graduate of Grimsley High School, refined the sensibility of her company as a Fulbright Scholar in Sri Lanka in 2007. While there, she landed contacts and learned about workers in clothing manufacturing. Workers making School House clothes earn enough money to survive, she said, unlike employees at many other factories in developing nations.
“I was a women’s studies major at Duke, and I have been socially conscious and interested in feminist causes,” she said of her motivation to pay fair wages.
Women comprise the majority of employees in the Sri Lankan apparel factories.
Her workers receive at least $160 per month, which she said is more than double what other clothing factories pay.
The appeal of fashion and good business practice to consumers here is evident.
“I think her products — given its uniqueness — it has created its own demand,” said Jim Wilkerson, director of Duke University Stores. He was also the person who gave Weeks her first contract.
Weeks said that Wilkerson and many others have helped as she developed the idea into to a startup and is poised for expansion this summer into Greensboro and up the East Coast.
Wilkerson has long paid attention to what the Duke store sells and how products were made. And plenty of people come to him with ideas on building a better business.
Few of those ideas get off the ground.
Even fewer are successful.
But it appears that Weeks has the drive and pluck to carry on, Wilkerson said.
“She’s achieved a some unusual things thus far,” he said. “I just hopes that she remembers all of us when she becomes rich and famous.”
Contact Gerald Witt at 373-7008 or gerald.witt@news-record.com
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