Success was 40 years in making
Maree’s sewing school means so much more for her many students
FORTY years of guiding, motivating and inspiring generations of Geelong dressmakers has dulled neither the creativity nor passion of sewing school queen Maree Pigdon.
“I still have so much enthusiasm and so many ideas that just roll out of the top of my head all day, every day,” Ms Pigdon said.
For her, creativity “just happens” and sharing her lifetime of knowledge is what life is about.
“Even now I can teach sewing all day every day. I love the people, they enrich my life,” she said.
At 68, she is planning to ease her teaching load at the award-winning Mt Duneed business, but only to allow more time to develop products to increasing the sewing school’s online inventory with her daughter, Jaqueline, who joined the business 15 years ago.
“I want to leave a legacy,” Ms Pigdon said. “After all of my years of experience and knowledge and ideas and techniques, I want to put them into a format so I can sell those all over the world so it doesn’t die.”
A business coach with an IT background, Jacqueline has refined the business’s systems, developed its website and offered an online beginner’s course that has attracted clients across 12 countries.
It has allowed her mother to focus on what she does best in the homely Maree Pigdon Sewing School that for the past 21 years has been based in the beautiful and peaceful surroundings of the Rosewood Cottage on the family’s Mt Duneed property.
It is with unbridled passion for her craft and her calling that Ms Pigdon is celebrating 40 years in business, starting out as offering night classes at a fabric store in 1978 before setting up a sewing room in the garage of her house.
“My husband gave me $200 to get started and I bought two sewing machines on lay-by,” Ms Pigdon said.
A year later she moved into a store in Belmont with about 25 to 30 students a week on the books and a local institution was up and running, even if there were some lean times to navigate.
Her love of sewing, however, started much earlier.
“I was born with it,” she said. “I just knew, I worked out the shapes.”
The daughter of European migrants and a mother who didn’t sew, Ms Pigdon recalled spending much of her three shillings a week pocket money buying fabric remnants at Geelong drapery store Lindsay and McKenzie.
“I would get the best ones I could, and cut them up and start making things,” she said.
“I never used a pattern until 11 or 12, that’s when my father saw the potential and bought me a sewing machine.”
In Grade 6 she made her mum a dress and herself a shirt with the leftover fabric, and so fashionable were her early products, they led to wider interest from family and friends.
She was entrusted to make her first bridal gown at 17.
“I had this uncanny knack. I would come up with a colour or design and make it, and the next season it is fashionable. I still do it,” she said.
Having a dogged persistence has been critical to the business’s survival.
“In the earlier days it wasn’t a lucrative business, and what money I made I put back into the business to buy the machines,” Ms Pigdon said.
“As things got better, and as Jacquie got involved, it helped turn the business around.”
In the late 1990s, Ms Pigdon defied a doctor’s health warning to close the school, then based in Newtown, after she was affected by chronic fatigue syndrome.
“It was overwork … children at school and I was working enormous hours,” she said.
Instead she kept the business alive, moving it to Mt Duneed and into a converted shed.
In addition to removing overheads, it crucially created a relaxed, creative sanctuary for her loyal students.
“Our retention rate is about 95 per cent,” Ms Pigdon said.
“They come here, they’ve made friends, they’re creating, they have lunch here.
“They can be themselves. They can talk sewing and fabric and everyone one wants to hear about it.”
Becoming a friend and confidante to many of her students, Ms Pigdon has seen how women with body issues have gained confidence and self-esteem by creating their own garments.
About half the clientele, which over the years has included a handful of men, is now women in their 30s and there is growing demand for children’s classes.
Some of the youngsters represent the third generation of sewing school students.
Ms Pigdon said that the whole journey, including the setbacks from which she had learnt and grown, had been amazing.
“I feel that I have been blessed because I have been part of these people’s lives and I have shared my skills and my passion for sewing,” she said.
Now she hopes that former students might make contact to join the celebration of her 40-year milestone.
Celebrations are planned to be held around Easter next year.
“I want to contact past students and clients and customers to invite them to take part in this celebration.” Ms Pigdon said.
“I would so love to see some of those people.”