My Account
From the power dressing days of the 1980s to this season’s hottest fashion looks, Charisma owner Beryl Clark has enjoyed the challenge of keeping on trend. Although Beryl had spent less than a year in clothing retail before opening her own store, her business has survived tough economic times and recently celebrated its 30th anniversary. At home in rural Wainui, 73-year-old Beryl trades heels for gumboots and gets stuck into the garden – and her passion for travel has seen her go through several passports. She spoke to Terry Moore.
I have always been interested in clothes and used to make my husband’s shirts and clothes for our four children. However, I’d only worked for nine months in a retail fashion shop before opening my own store, so I must have been mad! Back then, the bank wouldn’t lend to women unless they had assets in their own name so I set up the shop with just $10,000 that came from my mother’s estate. It’s much more difficult to start a business these days unless you’ve got a lot of money behind you. In the early 1980s when I opened Charisma in Orewa, I worked there six days a week. It was next door to where Subway is now on Hibiscus Coast Highway – and the shop was only seven feet wide and about 20 feet long. I had a business colleague for the first six months, after which it was my sole business. At the time there were far fewer shops: the supermarket was there and Moana Court and The Village had been built but the shops in Bakehouse Lane and Westpac Plaza were not there then. The only other business that’s still there and that I remember from the early days is another clothing store, Cobblestones – Vera has been around the same time as me, if not longer, and we had what you could call a ‘friendly rivalry’. Des Adams had the chemist shop when we opened the store and he took over from Jonathan Rigg’s father, who was a chemist. Our building and all the premises right back to Bin Inn are owned by Jack and Norma Houghton and Olive Millar – Norma and Olive are sisters and they inherited the shops from their father.
My business started well and I was in my element picking and choosing which labels to stock. It was the same kind of fashion that we are selling now – somewhere between a chain store and designer boutique. It’s what most people actually wear, which is why I think it’s been so successful. Since we’ve had the business I’ve seen the fashion go from the power dressing look, with huge shoulder pads in jackets and bright colours in the 1980s, to more subdued and now back to bright again. The biggest change was a couple of years ago when everyone was wearing tunics and boots – a look that was updated from the 1970s. Originally most of our stock was New Zealand made but now about half is made in China. New Zealand clothing has always been very well made and New Zealand seamstresses do a very good job. The Chinese stuff varies from the cheaply made to high-end fashion that is very good quality. After we’d only been open two years, we had the 1984 crash and rather than indenting (forward ordering) I took myself up to the city once a week in my station wagon and went around most of the wholesalers and took what they had. This meant I could order what I wanted but not plan too far ahead as things were very uncertain. We were just marking time really. A lot of people lost a lot of money and it made everyone cautious in their spending – customers are like that now, but not to the same extreme. We just tightened our belt and didn’t overstock and that worked well to see us through tough times. Fashion is a tricky business because you have to be right up with the trends and what people want as well as predicting what they’ll buy next season. I was only in the little shop two or three years and then moved into bigger premises where Subway is now. It was a photography shop that went broke and had originally been a fruit and vegie store. The landlord eventually expanded it and put in a back door. I was there for seven or eight years. I remember coming back from a holiday overseas and it was really exciting seeing the For Lease signs on what had been a music shop with guitars and pianos and sheet music. I knew it would be perfect for Charisma and we have been in that store ever since – for the past 20 years.
My father was a market gardener, and I was brought up in Pukekohe. My husband Ross was a nurseryman and farmer, growing trees and shrubs in the open ground and selling them bare rooted, before the days when they were sold in plastic. He’s 78 now and semi-retired. Travelling is my passion and I guess I’ve been to most places in the world, including trips by myself, with Ross, with our children and now grandchildren. In recent years we’ve been mainly to Europe and Africa, South Africa, America, Turkey and China. When I’m with my husband we like to go off the beaten track and explore. In 1990 we went backpacking in China, which was pretty hair-raising as no one spoke English where we were and tours didn’t generally go there. I wanted to go there because it was different. I lost a lot of weight because I didn’t like the food – you would go into a restaurant and point at something and they’d cook it and often you didn’t know exactly what it was. One night a Chinese waitress kept saying “chilli” to Ross and he kept nodding, which he lived to regret with a ferociously hot meal. My first ever trip was to the Olympic Games in 1956 in Melbourne when I was in my last year at high school. When my daughters Rhonda and Sandra were in their early teens we went to Europe for three months and in 1976 I took the three youngest children to America for a month including a Greyhound bus trip and visiting Yosemite National Park, San Diego, Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Last year Sandy and I “did the three Queens”, cruising on the Queen Elizabeth, Queen Victoria and Queen Mary to Ireland, Europe, Scandanavia and Russia. Over the last few years I’ve been taking my three oldest granddaughters to places in the Pacific such as Norfolk Island, Fiji and New Caledonia. Travel is not so important now for young ones because the world comes to them via television and the internet, but nothing can replace going there. You have to smell a place, particularly places like Africa and Asia – and see people from all walks of life, including the very poor.
Ross and I have four children and nine grandchildren. By the time I started the store my daughter Rhonda was in the 5th form and Sandra in the 6th form and they were very independent – not wanting to work in the shop at all. Rhonda didn’t get involved until the early 1990s when she came back from Australia and was looking for a job. I took her on some buying trips with me and found that she has a good eye. She also took on the window displays and is still in the business. Sandra had a serious health scare 14 years ago and could no longer drive. It was a terrible time, but I helped out with the children and driving. Five years ago she started doing our computer work out the back and does all the record keeping now. My husband has had his fourth hip replacement (two in each hip) and is slowing down a bit so I’m staying close to home, as well as helping at Charisma. We’ve lived on our 500-acre farm in Wainui for more than 40 years. We have an enormous garden, which I love, and if I hadn’t gone to work at the shop it would be even bigger. Because Ross was a nurseryman we planted a lot of trees and shrubs that he used for cuttings, so our place is surrounded by large trees, including a pair of 40-year-old golden totara. I like a bit of colour, so I started planting annuals and roses and other flowering plants. We don’t have a vegetable garden because it would produce far too much for the two of us to eat and I’d rather grow flowers. When we moved to this property 44 years ago the tarseal stopped at our farm and the rest was metal roads. I used to go into Silverdale to buy my groceries from a store where the Bendon factory shop is now. We haven’t been touched by the huge growth in the area as yet, but soon there will be houses right up to the motorway, so eventually it’s bound to affect us.
Orewa was always popular. From day one, I opened Charisma on Saturday mornings and not many stores at that time had Saturday opening – only Orewa and Browns Bay – so we were always frantically busy. Now lots of businesses, including ours, open on Sundays as well. We didn’t have any problem when the motorway by-passed Orewa – the main thing to affect trade in the last 20 years has been the building of Albany Mall. When that went in we noticed a significant drop in our business. The future of Charisma is something I’m giving a bit of thought to, and working on at the moment. The store will definitely remain in some form – if I retired I might consider selling it, but not at this stage. I’m still in the background, not working exactly, but overseeing and being there for the girls. I also enjoy the contribution we make to the community – for the last six years we have supported Hibiscus Hospice with a fashion parade and I’ve organised fashion parades for fundraisers for local kindergartens and schools over the years. Owning a business has never seemed like work because it’s always been fun – I’ve loved all 30 years of it.
