Sunday, April 22, 2007
Angela Adams still sells hand-tufted wool rugs to wealthy people who can part with $12,000 for one of her signature creations. But lately, Adams is getting excited about privacy curtains strung between hospital beds.
Her interest in health care says something about Maine's best-known fabric designer and where her Portland-based business, Angela Adams Designs LLC, is heading.
The growing list of Angela Adams products pulled in $18 million last year in gross sales, and the company is on target to double revenue this year. Behind the surge are licensing agreements with five national retail and commercial partners, including ones that sell fabrics and carpet to hospitals, schools and other institutions. Two big contracts are in the works this year, and more are likely.
Fashion is fickle and any business built on color and pattern must account for changing tastes. But five years from now, Angela Adams could be a global lifestyle brand, splashing her iconic images across consumer goods from Maine to Macau. That's her aspiration.
But there's a catch. Angela Adams, the down-to-earth island child who was inspired by the sea-worn rocks and rhythmic tides of her home, no longer has time to design. She is chief executive officer of a multi-million dollar business run with her husband, furniture maker Sherwood Hamill, and a staff of 20.
So Adams, 41, is wrestling with some weighty decisions.
How can she achieve the potential of Angela Adams Designs?
Should she sell the company outright, or partner with a major player?
How can she and Hamill get back to doing what they love best: design?
These answers might be months or years away, but one thing seems clear: The Angela Adams name and her nature-inspired brand are big and getting bigger.
In a recent interview, Adams turned away a suggestion that she is Maine's Martha Stewart. But she acknowledged being inspired by the business empire and brand identity Stewart has created.
"We'll definitely be a big company," Adams said. "We're not planning on staying this size."
ENLARGING HER AUDIENCE
The Angela Adams story already is the stuff of legend in Maine's arts community.
Girl grows up on North Haven, painting funky designs on old furniture. Goes away to study art and returns to Maine to transform her designs into high-end rugs. Starts small business in 1998; opens store on Congress Street in 2001. Grows to sell handbags, bedding and designer goods across the country.
In the past year, Adams and Hamill have bought out the venture capitalists who helped fund the business in its early days. Now she's carrying debt, but has regained more control.
Through licensing agreements and strict legal policing against knock-offs, Adams is working to introduce her trademarked "design language" of color, form and pattern to a wider audience.
"You can apply it to everything from tissue boxes to hospital curtains and beach towels," she said.
Angela Adams isn't a household name in Maine; certainly many people have never heard of her. But growing numbers who dwell in the realms of style and fashion are visiting the Portland showroom to buy, or at least covet, the color-drenched, playful geometry and patterns that characterize her rugs, sheets, tiles, handbags and stationary.
Others know the brand through its Web site, or through retailers that carry the Angela Adams line, such as Ann Sacks and Bed Bath & Beyond. These home goods accounted for half of all revenue last year.
But Adams also has cultivated a following with institutional carpet and fabric companies. These firms outfit hotels, hospitals, cruise ships, office buildings -- even prisons. The growth potential is huge.
The nature-inspired images created by Adams mesh perfectly today with the expanding demand for green design and recycled products, according to Jeff West, vice president for marketing at Shaw Contract Group in Dalton, Ga.
A major carpet and flooring maker, Shaw sells lines with high recycled content. Sales of the Adams line are just beginning, West said, but are ahead of projections.
"I think the natural designs connect real well with our environmental products," West said. "They kind of complete the story."
Bonnie Momsen, a marketing vice president at Architex International in Northbrook, Ill., a commercial fabric and upholstery seller, first tuned in to Angela Adams when Momsen was living in Boston. She stopped at Adams' store while visiting a friend on Peaks Island.
She was taken by Adams' sense of color and pattern. She knew that many of the architects and designers she dealt with were aware of Adams, who's well-regarded in the fashion centers of New York and Los Angeles.
"Angela Adams has brought attention to our company," she said. "They think, 'These guys are collaborating with Angela Adams. She's hot. They're partnering with someone who's really an up and coming designer.' "
Architex is launching a line of hospital privacy curtains designed by Adams. Projects like that appeal to her. Hospital rooms tend to be sterile and bland, she said, when color and pattern can create a soothing, healing environment.
Angela Adams' rising star in the commercial market is evident to John Rohman, a principal at WBRC Architects in Bangor. Rohman was reading a trade magazine last month and saw an ad for Shaw carpet and Angela Adams. It's unusual for Shaw to promote a specific designer, Rohman said.
"That just shows what a profile this designer has," he said.
Rohman is a strong promoter of Maine's creative economy, and happens to be decorating his firm's new reception area in Angela Adams carpet and chair fabric.
Adams and her reputation for quality design are raising awareness of the state as a place to do business as well as to visit, he said.
"Look what L.L. Bean has done for the outdoors," he said. "Angela Adams is doing exactly that for design."
BOOSTING MAINE'S RECOGNITION
Adams is boosting Maine's recognition partly through her collection and color names. Some honor family and friends. Others shine a light onto the places and natural features that inspire her: Casco; Portland; Munjoy; Pine; Urchin.
For an artist who uses the Maine coast as her muse, Angela Adams seems firmly rooted here, living and working on Portland's Munjoy Hill and staying plugged in to her island heritage.
But can she continue to draw from these landscapes while negotiating licensing contracts and jetting around the country to meet clients?
Can she maintain the artistic freedom to explore new edges of her craft, while designing for the mass market?
This is where Adams is seeking balance. As an artist lifted up by fresh ideas, Adams is finding herself weighted down by the details of production and licensing agreements.
Her desire to refocus on design, and her recognition of the rigors of business management, might compel her to partner with a major retailer that has the capital and marketing reach to take the brand worldwide.
That's what Calvin Klein has done, Adams said, and yes, Martha Stewart, the business magnate, homemaking diva and Maine summer resident. They created a cohesive brand identity and applied it to different products.
"People understand the brand's DNA," Adams said. "People buy into a lifestyle when they buy the products."
People also identify Martha Stewart, the person, with her products. And it's not hard to imagine Angela Adams following this path.
Adams comes across as instantly likable and authentic, and her Maine island origins give her a very real, very marketable story to tell. In her store and at trade shows, she plays a documentary filled with the coastal scenery and images that drive her designs. It includes interviews with her lobster-fishing family. With Downeast accents as thick as fog in the Fox Islands Thorofare, some of her subjects appear above subtitles, so they can be understood.
In the short term, Adams is positioned well to benefit from the licensing agreements that are in motion. Despite the cost of the investor buyback, the company will be profitable this year, and that has not always been so.
The agreements are expected to ramp up revenue in the years ahead. That should provide Adams with a measure of security, and the option to achieve what many artists do not -- financial and creative success.
"We really are starting to look at what our exit opportunities might be," she said.
Staff writer Tux Turkel can be contacted at 791-6462 or
Reader comments
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I also know of people who spend thousands of dollars on Pat's tickets. However, the average family in Maine who may not smoke or drink can't afford such lavish rugs and purses.
This woman is getting rich. I would like to know how much of her wealth is given to charity.report abuse
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