Nellie's Big Night

Into the ballroom of Kansas City's Hotel President, one night last week, swept a trim, greying woman in a ruby red satin dress, with a U.S. Senator on one arm and a retired judge on the other. In the room was just about everybody who was anybody in Kansas City, and they gave a five-minute ovation to 59-year-old Dressmaker Nellie Donnelly.

Nellie, whose famed "Nellie Don" dresses last year rang up $12 million in sales in U.S. department stores, ordinarily wears them (retail price: $8.50 to $19.95) herself. But this time she wore a Hattie Carnegie creation ("I'll have to sell a lot of my own to pay for it"). The big occasion: Nellie's party to celebrate the opening of her new $1,000,000 factory. Said Nellie proudly: "It's the biggest garment factory in the world under one roof."

In the Convent. This was many a million dresses away from the attic business that Nellie Quinlan Donnelly, a young housewife, started in 1916. At the Parsons (Kans.) convent where she went to school, the second youngest of 13 Quinlans, she told her roommates: "When I'm a housewife I'm certainly not going to look such a sight as a lot of women do."

Paul Donnelly, credit manager for a shoe company, made her a housewife at 17, and she began making neat, ruffled little "apron frocks" for herself. She decided to start the Donnelly Garment Co. --with $1,270 in savings and two power sewing machines--after a Kansas City store sold out a test order of Nellie's dresses in a few hours. Before long the business was grossing $1,000,000. After that, nothing slowed her up much.

She weathered slumps (by upping volume and cutting prices) and other storms, including the divorce of her first husband. When she was kidnaped in 1931, Nellie refused to pay a $75,000 ransom. She was released, ransom-free, soon married her lawyer, Missouri's aged (73) ex-U.S. Senator James A. Reed (who died eleven years later).

Down at the Club. Until Nellie Donnelly came along, most cheap cotton dresses were dowdy calico prints, which housewives wrapped around themselves like sacks. Nellie designed her own prints for manufacturers to make, trained her seamstresses to turn them into neat, form-fitting styles.

When she decided to build her new factory, she laid it out with some of her own shrewd ideas of how to eliminate waste motion (e.g., it has tilted tables down which workpieces slide from one worker to another without having to be carried). By such production-boosting devices she expects to step up her gross next year to $14 million (her net is Nellie's own secret).

But she also laid out the factory with an eye to the comfort of her 1,000 workers; it has tinted windows to eliminate glare, a drive-in entrance with a long canopy to keep workers dry on rainy days. Nellie's workers have their own five-acre country club, where they can entertain friends at luncheons and parties. They can get good meals at Nellie's cafeteria at 1938 prices (the difference is Nellie's loss).

This is not all altruism: there is no union at Nellie's, despite the determined efforts of Dave Dubinsky's International Ladies Garment Workers Union to organize the plant. Nellie has made sure that her employees see no need to join.

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