Career
As a fitness instructor, Smith found a lack of appealing clothes in which to work and started to sew her own.[3][5] She had no formal training in garment production,[16] but had been interested in fashion since a teenager, crocheting bikinis from age 16, customising her clothes from age 18, and from age 21 starting to design and make her own clothes.[17] She began by unpicking a favourite swimsuit and used it to make a pattern out of newspaper, providing the basis for her first leotard design.[5][18] Her students liked her outfits, and started requesting that Smith make clothes for them too.[3][5]
At the age of 24, she returned to Brisbane and continued teaching aerobics, now to classes of hundreds of students.[5] She also continued sewing activewear for herself and on request.[5] Smith enjoyed producing activewear so much that she decided to give up instructing and make it her full-time occupation.[3][5] In 1989, the owner of the gym at which she worked offered her space for a studio above the gym, and also casual work as a receptionist if she needed extra money.[5] She remembers the space as squalid, full of cockroach droppings that would be dislodged by the vibrations of people jumping around in the building.[5] Her mother lent her money to fund increasing production, and to help her with her rent and costs of living.[19]
Smith found that, at the time, nobody believed in her concept of stylish activewear.[20] As she later recalled, even major brands like Nike did not have concept stores for their clothing in those days.[13] When Bill Clarkson showed the products to major department store Myer, their fashion buyers were uninterested and unsure of how to position the garments.[14] He recalls that when he explained the clothes should not be sold in the sports section, "The buyer looked at me like I was crazy. They had no box to put me in."[14] Eventually, Myer bought a small range for five of their stores and stocked it in a corner between swimwear and lingerie.[14] The Lorna Jane corporate website goes so far as to credit Smith with coining the word "activewear" in 1989,[21] although the Merriam-Webster dictionary notes the word's first known usage was in 1924.[22]
Deciding to retail the Lorna Jane label themselves, in 1990, Smith and Clarkson opened their first store,[3][5][16] in an upper floor[14] of Brisbane's Broadway on the Mall shopping centre.[14][24] Early successes confirmed for Smith the viability of her dream. The business covered its first week of rent with its first day of sales,[25] and in 1991, a customer bought the entire stock of the second Lorna Jane store in a single purchase of $25,000[26] with the intention of reselling it.
After establishing the Lorna Jane business, Clarkson studied fashion at TAFE college and was awarded a Diploma of Fashion.[27] She later said that, in hindsight, earning this qualification was unnecessary because of the practical experience she had already gained.[27]
On 11 September[28] 1994, Smith married Clarkson.[14][29]
By 2000, the business required a larger factory, and to fund this expansion, the Clarksons sold their home in the Brisbane suburb of Paddington for $450,000.[13] Clarkson described the house they sold as their "dream home", in which they had planned to spend the rest of their lives.[25] They had spent seven years renovating it, and from its back deck, they could see the church in which they had married.[25] The couple put the money from the sale of their home towards the purchase of a factory building in Fortitude Valley[13] for $465,000.[24][30] They refurbished it for clothes production, and built an apartment living space above it.[13] When they purchased it, the building was "dirty and full of termites",[25]
Clarkson and her husband, Bill, retain a 60% stake in the Lorna Jane brand,[5] after private equity firm CHAMP Ventures purchased a 40% stake in 2010.[31] In 2016, the overall value of the business was estimated at $500 million,[24] with an annual revenue for 2014 estimated at $200 million.[4]
In 2014, the Clarksons considered selling the business, but eventually withdrew when they considered the implications of losing their personal control of what they had built.[32] During a personal appearance the following year, Clarkson said that she would be "half a person without the brand", and "I just don't know what I would do without it."[33]
During 2015, the Lorna Jane company received public criticism over a range of issues, including allegations that a former manager had been bullied at work because of her body shape,[34] and separately, over a job ad the company posted for a receptionist who had to satisfy certain physical characteristics so that she could also work as a fitting model for garment development.[34] A year later, Clarkson said that as stressful as it was for her personally to deal with these issues, she came to see it as a blessing in disguise because it allowed her to expose a fragile, human side to the public.[34]
With the Clarksons spending increasing amounts of time in the United States to oversee the brand's expansion into that country,[35] they bought a property in Santa Monica, California in early 2016. The property has two large houses on it; one in which they live, and the other which they have fitted out as a design studio for Lorna.[36]
Clarkson has published six books on health and wellbeing: Move, Nourish, Believe: The Fit Woman's Secret Revealed (2011), MORE of the Fit Woman's Secrets (2013), NOURISH - The Fit Woman's Cookbook (2014), INSPIRED (2015),[21] Love You (2017), and Eat Good Food (2018).
