Am I Blue?

Two Philly women trademark vintage style.

by Erica Palan

Photographs by Michael Persico • Makeup by Adama Jay • Hair by Jason Tavares from Pierre and Carlo Salon

Liza Goncalves’ face is already glowing from the screen of her slick laptop, but her eyes brighten even more when she looks up suddenly and says, “I want to try using teabags to stain the shirts to give them that real vintage feel.” The words race out of her mouth; she’s clearly excited. Michelle D’Avella, sitting across the table, nods in agreement.

The two women are camped out in the back corner of Higher Grounds, a Northern Liberties coffee shop. It’s only midmorning, but every horizontal surface around them is covered with papers. They’ve been hard at work for a while.

Goncalves and D’Avella are the clothing designer and art director, respectively, behind Vintage Blue, a new clothing line inspired by the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL). The line has piqued the interest of Macy’s and international dealers. Goncalves and her team hope to have it featured in boutiques across this country and others in the next year.

Goncalves is from Boston, but after studying film and video production at Drexel University, she feels like she’s a Philly native. “I came here for college, and just never left. This is my home now,” she explains.

At Drexel she became involved with The Avenue, an underground hip-hop show that ran on DUTV. There she learned the importance of multitasking, a skill that would come in handy a few years later when she started her company and began juggling design, sales and marketing.

“In everything I’ve done I’ve worn all these hats. I was the producer, the director, the editor, the host. I did it all,” she says.

As host of The Avenue, Goncalves nursed the struggling cable access show to success, and in 2000 it won the Billboard Music Video Award for Best Local/Regional Hip-Hop Program. It had already been nominated twice, but this win was especially notable; Goncalves was the first woman to receive the award.

After her stint on DUTV, Goncalves pursued her broadcasting career in New York. She got a job working red carpet events and movie premieres, and eventually became the host of BET’s Saturday afternoon show MAAD Sports, on which athletes hosted a countdown of their favorite rap and R&B videos. It’s a strange jumping off point for a career in fashion, but hating her wardrobe was reason enough to jump into a new industry.

At the time, her husband was a consultant for Mitchell & Ness, a Philadelphia-based sportswear manufacturer. He often received promotional gear from various companies and leagues, and Goncalves, looking for a way to spice up her on-screen look, soon found inspiration in these items.

Designated hitter: Michelle D’Avella is Vintage Blue’s art director.

“He’d get all these nostalgic, retro throwback [jerseys], and I loved the colors. I loved the look and the feel. So I started cutting them up and making dresses, tops and bags, and wore them on TV.”

The response to her new outfits was positive, and Goncalves continued to make clothes to wear both on-screen and off. One evening while she and her husband were dining in a crowded New York City restaurant, the owners of Stall and Dean, a major clothing company based in New York, approached them.

“My husband had his throwback outfit on, and I had on mine in the girl version, and the owners walked up to us [to find out where we got the clothes]. And we just parlayed a deal with them. We told them we made it, and we had a company, and they needed us to design for them,” Goncalves says.

She pauses for a beat and grins.

“We didn’t have a company. We didn’t have anything. I didn’t know how to design, but I was just like, ‘Yeah, you need me. I’m going to design your women’s line.’ And the next thing you know, we had a meeting.”

Goncalves began designing clothes for Stall and Dean, and worked with NFL collections and licenses from other teams, including Grid Iron, the Negro League and the Cuban League. As her clothes showed up on more celebrity fashion icons like Sarah Jessica Parker, Jennifer Lopez and Alicia Keys, the public started to recognize her work. Unfortunately, she soon discovered that while people loved the designs, the high cost of official jerseys—about $300 each—prohibited the company from lowering the price enough for the general consumer.

“That was our biggest problem and what made me start searching for other licenses,” she says.

Homefield advantage: Originally from Boston, Liza Goncalves now lives in Northern Liberties.

A few weeks later she stumbled upon the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, best known from the 1992 film A League of Their Own.

“I just thought it was so cool. No more cutting up men’s teams. Now we had women’s teams, and I knew I could do something from that whole concept,” says Goncalves.

She reached out to the organization, sending a letter to Donna McLin, president of the AAGPBL’s board of directors.

“It’s one of those things where you feel like it’s meant to be,” she says. “We randomly found this lady’s name online and sent her a letter. The day she got the letter, she was walking out the door on the way to a board meeting about licensing. And she was so excited about it.”

The board asked Goncalves to write a proposal, so she got to work developing a business plan for Vintage Blue—named for both Goncalves’ love of all things retro and her husband’s nickname for her. She fleshed out her ideas on how the clothing would look, how the line would be marketed and where it would be sold. She had sketches drawn up, and sent the presentation to the board.

In 2004, after months of negotiation, the AAGPBL board, comprised largely of women who’d played in the original league, granted Goncalves an exclusive license to create apparel for women using the league’s trademarks, logos and team names.

All-American League: The Vintage Blue line is based on the original baseball attire seen in A League of Their Own.

“It was hard at first because they really care about their brand—and that’s great—but it’s very all-American and conservative. We can’t do anything too radical,” D’Avella explains. Though she didn’t join the Vintage Blue team until 2006, she speaks with authority, and it’s obvious she’s become familiar with the story over the last two years.

“Our relationship [with the AAGPBL] is good. We try to be cautious when we’re designing, but we’re always trying to walk that fine line between making them happy and not compromising our ideas and what we see Vintage Blue as,” Goncalves says.

In addition to securing the license, Goncalves faced the challenge of funding her dream.

“Getting money is one of the hardest things. To get someone to believe in your line, see your vision and believe in your passion, and then cut a check and not want to take 80 percent of your company. We’ve had people who’ve cut us checks that bounced, and we’ve been through so much drama.”

Though they’re always looking for additional investors, the line is partially funded through Boston Legacy, a Massachusetts-based investment firm. Like much of what got Vintage Blue where it is today, the investment deal was a result of Goncalves just opening her mouth and letting the charm flow.

“I was with a friend who was putting out a magazine. I was going to be the creative director, and we met with the [Boston Legacy] guys. Somehow we started talking about what I was doing, and then suddenly they just wanted to talk about our line,” Goncalves says. A few days later she sent the company a business plan, and within a week they had agreed to invest in Vintage Blue.

The Vintage Blue line includes super soft T-shirts in both long and short sleeves, with team logos, and stylized dresses inspired by the actual baseball uniforms. There are trouser-style sweatpants and cozy, soft colored hoodies. One of the most popular items is a long vintage-style green-and-white-striped collared dress with wooden buttons.

“A lot of people ask, ‘What if you’re not into baseball?’ or ‘What if you don’t like the movie?’ That’s not really the concept of our company. We create comfortable, fashionable clothes based on different sports, whether it’s tennis, baseball, whatever. We’ll keep building it and letting it grow, and eventually we want the name Vintage Blue to be known as quality and fashionable,” says Goncalves.

Old school: The Vintage Blue line features sweats and Ts with logos from the 1943 All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.

D’Avella and Goncalves maintain that what truly differentiates Vintage Blue from other fashion lines is their attention to detail and their dedication to the vision.

D’Avella explains that Goncalves is particularly devoted to the look of the clothing. “Liza will spend five hours picking out a particular shade of blue,” she says.

Goncalves bursts out laughing. “And the next day, I’ll come in and say it’s still wrong!”

The women, along with a team of about seven board members, including Chris Robinson of Robot Films, originally planned to start selling the line only in boutiques and then expand into department stores, but last month, after showing at Magic, an industry trade show, they’ve reevaluated.

“We had so many buyers from Japan. We sold to a couple buyers across the country, like Sacramento and Fire Island, New York. And Macy’s loved our collection,” D’Avella says proudly.

Though the line won’t be ready for distribution for several more weeks, Goncalves and D’Avella are already working on ideas for new designs, including teabag-stained shirts.

Leaning forward in her overstuffed plush seat, Goncalves admits, “I can just see us filling up my bathtub with water and a hundred teabags, and trying to make these T-shirts look old-fashioned.”

The two women burst into giggles, livening up the otherwise quiet room. Goncalves and D’Avella catch each other’s glances knowingly, and in the back of the small Northern Liberties coffee shop, their excitement is contagious.

»MORE: Designing Women: Local ladies who make the cut.