Tara Lynn Scheidet, Vermont SBA Young Entrepreneur of the Year
by Kate Herrington (from the SBA website)
If you’ve ever wondered whether your clothes were produced in a sweat shop or whether the dyes were safe for rivers and streams, you’ve tuned in to the mindset of Tara Lynn, an ecology-conscious fashion designer in Sutton, Vermont. In business since 2005, Tara Lynn designs and creates wearable art jackets embellished with embroidery, appliqué, crochet and macramé. She also designs custom, natural fiber wedding gowns made of hemp and silk, hemp and cotton, organic cotton and hemp linen. In her spare time, she even does alterations, including the replacement of zippers in hunting suits. Her studio is solar-powered, her fabrics are organic, natural, or re-purposed natural fibers, and her wearable art jackets portray the lives of endangered species, such as the North American Diana butterfly. She also donates 5% of her annual profits to help protect and save the specific species depicted on her jackets.
For her demonstrated entrepreneurial success and marketing creativity, Tara Lynn Scheidet, owner and founder of “Tara Lynn,” Sutton, VT, has been selected by the U.S. Small Business Administration as Vermont’s 2009 Young Entrepreneur of the Year.
At the age of 25, Tara Lynn started her business on the top floor of a large garage she and her husband built to compensate for their tiny home, a log cabin in Sutton. Later that year, the VT Women’s Business Center offered free marketing classes for artists in the Northeast Kingdom, and Tara Lynn decided to attend. “That’s when I learned how to get my work into the juried art shows,” she said, “and that was a big part of how I positioned my marketing when I first started.”
Since then, her work has appeared in a variety of art shows, including the Paradise City Art Show in Northampton, Mass. and Philadelphia; Art Rider in New York and New Jersey; Sugarloaf Crafts Festival in Connecticut; One of a Kind Show in Chicago; Eco-Petal Fashion Show in West Hollywood; Go Green Expo in New York City, as well as local Vermont shows in Burke, Stowe and Danville.
According to Tara Lynn, art shows attract fairly wealthy customers who often place custom orders or purchase her clothing right off the rack, including her $800 wearable art jackets. In the past, it had not been unusual to earn between $4,000 and $15,000 at an art show, and Tara Lynn’s overall sales had significantly increased each year since start-up. However, the economic downturn forced a number of art show cancellations in 2008 and left Tara Lynn facing serious income deficiencies. While she normally spent the winter months filling custom orders, she focused on marketing last winter. To highlight her wedding gowns and bring them forth on “first-click” web searches, she optimized her website and made the most of winter.
“It totally paid off,” Tara Lynn said. “My orders for custom wedding gowns have quadrupled, and it’s a direct result of optimizing my website.” Braced with wedding dress orders through November, 2009, Tara Lynn feels she is successfully weathering the downturn in art shows.
Born on Long Island and having pursued the art of sewing through all levels of school from the elementary grades up, she enrolled in fashion design classes at Boces, a vocational arts center in New York. While simultaneously attending high school and Boces, she sought out and worked for a number of New York designers who taught her their line of specialty sewing. From one, she learned the precision of sewing perfect stitches on leather, from another, how to sew evening dresses made of fine silk, and from another, wedding gowns and prom dresses. “I just had my heart set on pursuing fashion,” she said. Following high school, she entered the New York Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT).
However, when her studies revealed the fashion industry’s dark side, its sweat shops, its toxic chemicals and the harmful, heavy metals in dyes, she was ready to drop it all and switch to environmental science. “When I researched sweat shops, I learned people were working in very hazardous conditions,” said Tara Lynn. “Women were working in dye shops with their babies beside them. They were getting cancer and lung diseases in their 30s because they’d started working in these factories when they were very young, breathing harmful fumes and working in horrible conditions.”
Fortunately, Tara Lynn discovered color organic cotton as a student at FIT. “Growers of color organic cotton don’t use any pesticides, and they cross-breed it to produce natural colors,” she explained. “That means you don’t have to dye the cotton, so you’re not polluting the water with heavy metals.” Relieved to discover the existence of safe, natural fibers, Tara Lynn was convinced she could fulfill her fashion design dreams without also compromising her integrity.
With conviction that she could make it happen, and while taking classes at FIT, she decided to work in a store featuring color, organic cotton. She literally walked the streets of New York for an entire day until she discovered two stores selling an eco-friendly fiber called “hemp.” She got the job she wanted at a store called “Hemp Instead.”
Having researched the hemp industry, Tara Lynn learned it had once been the U.S. textile of choice before petroleum-based synthetics took over the market. Of the two, she says industrial hemp is the more desirable because it grows well in both warm and cool climates, it requires no pesticides, and its uses include paper, fuel, cosmetics, and of course, beautiful fabrics. It can also be used to replace products that require processing with hazardous chemicals, such as paper made from trees. There was just one catch. “Hemp is legal to grow in every other country in the world, except for the U.S.,” said Tara Lynn. Consequently, she now purchases high-quality hemp and hemp blends from Rumania and China.
In 2001, Tara Lynn earned a B.A. degree in Fashion Design from FIT and moved with her husband to Vermont, a state she’d fallen in love with when she was 12 years old. “I loved the mountains, the farm fields, and the lakes, and I just had my heart set on Vermont,” she exclaimed. She and her husband bought 93 acres of land with a small cabin minus water and electricity, and settled in. Over time, they added a foundation, solar power, running water, and built a solar-powered garage housing her husband’s mechanics shop on the ground floor and Tara Lynn’s studio on the top floor. They plan to lay the foundation for a larger studio this summer. “I think in the next two years, everything will have expanded to the point where I can hire two or three people full-time and finish my wedding gown collection,” Tara Lynn said.
Tara Lynn Scheidet will be honored by the U.S. Small Business Administration at a ceremony and reception presented by Vermont Business Magazine. The event will take place at Burlington’s Waterfront Park, June 10, 2009, 4:00 to 7:00 p.m.