Paula Ryan’s apartment in Auckland’s Quay West is just like its owner – small, elegant and perfectly formed.
It’s crammed with expensive furniture, artwork, cushions, side tables and objects, a slightly mad collection in themes of black, white and gold, with a few wild animal prints thrown in for good measure. All immaculate, elegantly staged.
Ryan, at 75, is much the same, an impeccable presence that even soy sauce wouldn’t dare dribble on, or a 60-knot gale wouldn’t dare ruffle. And not much does ruffle her, not even seven figures owing to the business after a liquidation (more on that later). She perches elegantly on a cream couch, with zebras galloping across gold-coloured cushions, to chat.
Ryan oozes glamour, her blond bob, makeup and nails perfect and, of course, clad “one hundred per cent” in Paula Ryan Essentials. So is her daughter Bridget Hope, a taller and similarly immaculate version of her mother.
Ryan and her husband and business partner Rob Dallimore “really” want to retire so Hope has taken over the Paula Ryan licence. The name won’t change and neither will much of the merchandise, much loved by generations of women who have shopped at Smith & Caughey’s and other high-end fashion stores.
Ryan says Hope won’t be on her own. Her daughter rings every morning for a chat and a brainstorm, on her way to work from Hope’s South Canterbury home where she runs two Magpie Style stores, in Christchurch and Rangiora, selling clothing brands, homeware and gifts, and now runs the manufacture and online sales of her mother’s brand.
“She’ll always have that companionship professionally, always,” Ryan says.
At 47, Hope is cool, calm and capable, a working mother of two boys, aged 11 and 12. In a previous life she worked as a publishing director in Singapore, managing Hearst Magazine titles including Harpers Bazaar, Cosmopolitan and Cleo.
She and her husband Gabe Rijpma dealt swiftly with the Covid crisis – hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cancelled Paul Ryan clothing, retail stores closed – and launched online sales in a week. And she’s faced the liquidation of Paula Apparel 2020 - the company licensed to manufacture and sell the Paula Ryan brand - head-on, taking on the manufacturing herself.
Despite Hope’s capability, you get the feeling that Ryan will never really turn her back on her brand. When I ask about the colour of the jacket she’s wearing, which looks like an inky navy, she says “It’s a kind black”. Not dark black, just kind.
And then she can’t resist. “It’s a micro jersey from Italy. It won’t crease. I could wash this jacket and it’s dry in the morning.”
It’s a line that Ryan has delivered perfectly for the past 25 years, patter that passes for conversation rather than a hard sell. Hope, by osmosis, has inherited that skill.
They’re both wearing the micro-jersey ankle pleat Basque pants, a Paul Ryan staple for the past 10 years.
“These pay the rent,” Hope laughs.
Mother and daughter can’t help themselves, finishing each other’s sentences like a performance from a musical.
Ryan: They’re comfortable, they won’t shrink, they’re colour fast, they dry in two hours.”
Hope: “They don’t crease. They’re good if you’ve got big thighs, they’re good if you’ve got skinny legs. They actually suit every single body shape....”
Ryan: “...because they’ve got a very narrow ankle so even if your ankle isn’t narrow you look as though you’ve got a narrow ankle”.
Hope: “If you’re tall, you’re short, they’re the ultimate plane pant because if you spill red wine on them you can just wipe it off with a baby wipe. When you travel this fabric is amazing. You just wash it in the hand basin, hang it, wear it, you don’t have to iron it.”
That’s the reason they’re wearing their plane pants. After the interview Ryan and Hope catch a flight to Los Angeles to visit Hope’s sister Sheila O’Neil who works for Air New Zealand as senior manager Americas Airports. It’s an annual pilgrimage the mother and daughter make – a bit of relaxation and quite a bit of shopping.
They’ll no doubt talk Paula-Ryan-Essentials shop. The clothes were the reason Hope started Magpie Style after a major South Island retailer and buyer of the range, Quinns Merivale, closed in late 2016. Its owner, fashion icon Margaret Quinn, died from breast cancer earlier that year.
Without a retail outlet in Christchurch, Hope started selling Paula Ryan clothes to neighbours and friends, gradually building up sales before opening Magpie Style.
They’ve had some knock-backs, this Ryan-Dallimore-Hope family unit. In 2005 Ryan, then publisher of Simply You fashion magazine, was scammed of $300,000 by someone she trusted like a family member. With a background in graphic design, Ryan and her first husband Don Hope had launched Fashion Quarterly in 1980, sold 10 years later to ACP which in turn was sold to Bauer Media.
Ryan then launched Simply You fashion magazine in 1998 and was putting aside money ready to launch a second magazine, Simply You Living, a few years later.
“As I was working furiously, he [the staff member] was stealing from a bank account,” she says. “That was really a betrayal of trust which saddened me greatly and it took me many years actually to recover from that in terms emotionally and professionally.”
She’s wary now, she says.
“I used to trust everybody, every time on every level. Now I’m far more discerning.”
The nightmare of Covid - retailers cancelling large orders all over the place, piles of stock with nowhere to go, staff to pay – was another blow.
And then another this year when Paula Apparel 2020, trading as Paula Ryan NorthWest, went into liquidation owing, according to the liquidator’s first report, more $1 million to a list of creditors. Dallimore and Ryan won’t say exactly how much they’re owed.
“A lot,” Ryan says. More than $300,000?
“Much. It’s seven figures.”
Does that hurt? The ever-joyful Ryan makes light of it, quipping that it’s changed their travel choices...”what end of the plane we go in”.
Dallimore, who has been sitting quietly in the background, is more vocal. He was running the business and licensing end of the brand so yes, it hurt, he says. He gave Benjamin MacMillan, the sole director and shareholder of Paula Apparel, the opportunity to manufacture the brand under licence in 2020. MacMillan was the company’s general manager for eight years so Dallimore knew him well. The arrangement worked at first, until it didn’t.
“Had they been more open about the debt they were incurring and the difficulty they were getting into we would have been able to help them. We may have even been able to bail them out.”
Dallimore, who’s been in the “rag trade” since he left school, knew the retail fashion industry was going through difficult times. Smith & Caughey’s, a major stockist of the brand, had just announced the closure of both its Auckland stores, since amended to keeping the ground floor of the Queen St store operating.
“So that hurt that we couldn’t take the opportunity to help them through it,” he says.
Ryan laments the effect on the small New Zealand family companies that had been making the clothes for years.
“It has been very sad for us because we’ve dealt with them for 25 years.”
Faced with that disaster, Hope has set up a garment factory in Christchurch and is running the knitwear manufacturing from Auckland. Both mother and daughter are determined the manufacturing will stay in New Zealand. The plan is for Hope to eventually buy Ryan and Dallimore out of the business.
It’s not the first time Hope has had to “pivot” quickly. When Covid and lockdowns meant the retail stores selling Paula Ryan closed, Hope and Rijpma decided to launch the business online, working around the clock during a week in the 2019 lockdown. They met in Singapore when Rijpma was working for Microsoft – who better to help build a website quickly in a crisis.
“And we did. We built paularyan.com in one week,” Hope says.
Stock was sent down to Christchurch, and the Magpie Style team processed orders from home while Hope dispatched courier packages from her garage.
Initially only “essentials” were supposed to be sent round New Zealand during lockdowns so Hope renamed the shipping information “New Zealand Merino essentials”.
When the pink Magpie boxes were held up because they didn’t look essential, Hope ordered 2000 brown boxes to be sent from Auckland. Those got through.
Hope clearly remembers the day that then Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced that all online sales now had approval.
“We pushed the green button and were live,” Hope says. " I think it saved the business.”
Ryan has been thinking about those Covid years and says quietly, “And to Smith & Caughey’s credit, they never cancelled a thing. They are the most honourable company client we’ve ever had and they were the first company to say ‘yes, we want to stock it [the range, in 1997].’”
Now Smith & Caughey’s will be the only retail outlet for Paula Ryan, a marked difference from the days when more than 100 retailers stocked the brand throughout New Zealand and Australia.
Hope says she’s had to contract the business in order to grow, reducing the Paula Ryan Essentials range to around 40 items. She’s sticking with the quality fabrics - New Zealand Merino and Italian micro-jersey, saying she’ll leave “the throwaway fashion” to the shopping malls. After getting the manufacturing sorted, Hope’s next job will be marketing to expand the Paula Ryan fan base and pull in some younger clients.
Dallimore says the conversion to online was inevitable given the shrinking of what was once a strong and vibrant independent fashion retail sector. With the disappearance of New Zealand fashion outlets, the Paula Ryan orders disappeared too.
Over the years the range had ballooned into a multimillion-dollar business as retailers demanded more – fashion clothes, shoes, bags, swimwear, belts, accessories. Kiwi model Kylie Bax was the face of the brand for six years after she returned to New Zealand from New York, her willowy image inspiring women that they, too, could look glamorous wearing Paula Ryan.
At its peak, the brand was running eight seasonal collections a year with around 200 items in each. It’s a legacy that accumulated 4000 patterns, some of which Hope may well reinvent.
Ryan never intended to have her own brand. Her background was in graphic design with some modelling thrown in. She represented New Zealand in the International Rose of Tralee, contest in Ireland in 1969, and a year later won Miss New Zealand Racing at Trentham.
In the late 1990s, while producing fashion mag Simply You she noticed a lack of good-quality basics available for Kiwi women. She approached Canterbury clothing company Lane Walker Rudkin to suggest they create a limited range in merino wool. They liked the idea but wanted Ryan’s name to be part of the brand.
When the company struck hard times, was sold and later went into receivership, Ryan took over her brand and Dallimore came in as an equal partner to look after the business end. They met in 2001 and married four years later in Rarotonga in a ceremony where the guests were asked to wear white; so was Dallimore. The bride wore a green Donna Karan dress with matching shoes and clutch bag.
There are stories that point to Ryan having a mischievous side beneath the flawless veneer. As a teenage boarder at the Catholic girls’ school Teschemakers near Oamaru, Ryan was caught by the nuns smoking in the riding paddock. She was dispatched on a four-hour bus ride home to south Canterbury to confess to her parents.
As Ryan tells it, her father asked her why.
“Why what?” she asked.
“Why did you get caught?” he replied.
Ryan, who describes herself as “nearly an atheist” used to hide in her room so she wouldn’t have to attend chapel.
And then there’s the story that Dallimore tells of Ryan, with her blond bob, pretty looks and Antipodean accent being mistaken for Australian pop singer Olivia Newton-John while in Paris on a fashion shoot years ago.
They turned up at the wildly popular Buddha-Bar with no hope of gaining entry until the man on reception looked at Ryan and said “Olivia?” Ryan just smiled sweetly, the man cleared a table and Ryan’s party spent the rest of the night there.
Now Ryan and Dallimore are looking forward to a more laid-back lifestyle at “the beach” in the home they built at the Coromandel’s seaside settlement of Matarangi.
The Quay West apartment will be kept as a city bolt hole. When the couple moved from a much larger apartment in the Viaduct 10 years ago, the new owners bought most of their furniture. Ryan happily started again, furnishing Quay West within an inch of its life.
“We’re running out of space though,” Dallimore murmurs as though he knows it’s pointless saying it any louder.
Says Ryan with a shrug and a laugh: “I just sort of see things and buy them. I’m a shopper.”
Hope, too, is a dedicated shopper with an eye for the finer things. She plans to add accessories for the home to the paularyan.com website and you can be sure her mother will have some input.
Jane Phare is a senior Auckland-based business, features and investigations journalist, former assistant editor of NZ Herald and former editor of the Weekend Herald and Viva.
Father emigrated to New Zealand with $10 in his pocket then founded a growing business.