The education of Tunji Dada

Part 2

by Ellen Barry

The house of Tunji Dada is located in Roxbury's Dudley Square, over the Manhattan Square Fashion dress shop and down the street from the Tea House of the Almighty. It consists of a) Tunji Dada and b) unpaid interns. This is not a situation that lends itself to major commercial success; he could electrify all the major buyers in town (if there were major buyers in town) and still only be able to produce between 20 and 30 pieces of clothing a month.

Among the mistakes that Tunji Dada has learned from in the last several years was this one: on a trip to London to visit friends, he trekked all the way to Paris with a suitcase full of samples to show a boutique buyer.

The buyer liked what he saw, and asked how soon he could have a bulk order. Tunji Dada stood there, thinking of his one-needle operation over Manhattan Square Fashion and trying to save face.

"What was I supposed to say?" he remembers, laughing. "That I had traveled all the way to Paris so he could buy my samples?"

Welcome to the education of Tunji Dada. He's at the point in his career where good designers fail -- although he has a customer base reliable enough to support himself, he doesn't have the money to pay a factory to make his clothes in bulk.

Exposure is no longer an issue for him, he says; manufacturing is. Nadine, who owns the Newbury Street boutique Concrete and has been buying from Dada since she opened two years ago, finds this situation maddening. Enough with the volunteer models, enough with the $5000 shows, enough with the approval of Globe reporters, she tells him. It's time to do business.

"He's already done Boston. Boston knows," says Nadine, who dropped her last name years ago. "If you're a designer, you want to put yourself out there. . . . What do you do in Boston? You leave. You make your mistakes here, and then you leave."

So -- thanks to the encouragement of friends like Nadine -- this is the year Dada is learning to think like a businessman. The basis of his strategy is moving to the kind of place where the kind of people who wear his clothes live. But first, he's looking for investors to donate a sum his manager estimates at at least $100,000, without which he can't send his patterns to an Italian factory, without which there is no Fall '98 show to announce his arrival anywhere. Which would leave him right here in Boston, hogtied, stitching pieces one by one for Nadine.

"I'm in a bind," says Tunji Dada. He's not kidding.

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Ellen Barry can be reached at ebarry[a]phx.com.