First Class
Sarah Van Aken
TRENDSETTERS
Sarah Van Aken
TRENDSETTERS
Above:
Window
dressing at
SA VA;
Right: Looks
from Van
Aken’s
most recent
collection.
You wouldn’t expect to find
a garment factory in a mid-rise on the 1700 block of
Sansom Street, a few blocks
from Philadelphia’s tony Rit-tenhouse Square, but there’s
no mistaking that’s what this
is. A woman cuts fabric into
scarves at a steel cutting
table; workers hunch over
rows of sewing machines;
and a rolling rack is hung with
finished pieces to be delivered
by elevator to SA VA, the
women’s clothing shop on the
building’s ground level that’s
the public face of designer
and entrepreneur Sarah Van
Aken’s growing empire. In less
than two years, Van Aken has
built one of the nation’s two
directly vertical (not to mention literally vertical)
manufacturing companies.
( The other is Los Angeles-based American Apparel.)
Two years ago, Van Aken
was having di;culties with
the factory she was using in
Bangladesh, and even travel-
ing there three or four times
a year wasn’t enough to man-
age the constant production
issues. She saw the challen-
ges as an opportunity to do
something good for herself
and for her community.
Little Pim Is
Multilingual
Last spring Salma Hayek boasted that her 2 ½-year-old aughter, Valentina, is trilingual, speaking Spanish, Eng- lish and French. Thanks to Little Pim, an award-winning language-teaching DVD series for children, your kids now can learn other languages just like a little jet-setter.
Starting early is the key, and the trademarked Enter- tainment Immersion Method combines animation with live child actors to teach simple words and phrases for everyday situations. The current o;erings include Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, and English as a second language—with more to come. Little Pim is the brainchild of Julia Pimsleur Levine, an award-winning documentary filmmaker and the daughter of Paul Pimsleur, who founded the renowned Pimsleur language courses. littlepim.com
