On a typical Saturday afternoon, there is a woman outside Pali Wine Co. in the Santa Barbara’s Funk Zone, lightheartedly chatting with customers interested in her wine-inspired T-shirts and tank tops.
The woman is Isa Folkes, a Thousand Oaks native who started her own company, Funk Zone Tees, earlier this year to combine two of her passions: wine and apparel.
“We’ve all heard of the cute little slogans like ‘Make Wine, Not War’ and ‘Save Water, Drink Wine,’” she said. “I knew for certain I wanted to focus on something like that.”
Folkes, a UCSB graduate, started working at Pali Wine Co. on Yanonali and Anacapa streets in 2013. A year later, she felt confident about the wine business, and a seed to start her own wine-inspired clothing company was planted.
Today, she has a small inventory of three different designs on a variety of shirts. For now, she sells her shirts online and outside the Pali Wine Co. tasting room.
“I work with a great graphic designer. It goes from my brain to her fingertips and computers, which I then send to my screen printer,” she said. “She’s very creative so sometimes she’ll have an idea but I would say 90 percent of the designs are my own.”
Folkes, 49, has worked in retail stores before and said that one thing that people will never stop investing in other than food are clothes.
With that knowledge, she took a leap and started the business. She’s had to rely on several screen printers to get her designs finished on time, and it hasn’t always gone as smoothly as she first thought.
Folkes went into business for herself to gain total control over her time and efforts and it took her a while to get comfortable relying on someone else to get her products ready in a timely manner.
“But now, I have someone who’s been doing print-screening for 30 years and he can turn around my products so quickly,” she said with a smile and a sense of relief in her voice. “So he’s my guy.”
Folkes worked as a legal assistant for 15 years and then spent almost two years teaching English in Japan and South Korea before she made her way back to Santa Barbara.
“(In the legal field), I was taking orders and I didn’t have the freedom to do what I wanted,” she said. “It was a great job, but no matter what, the boss was always the boss and I’ve always wanted my own thing.”
Now, Folkes promote her shirts online and has sold more than 100 shirts since she launched the effort.
“I want to eventually have them in all of the wine growing regions — Paso Robles, Sonoma, Los Olivos, Santa Ynez, Napa — all the way up the coast,” she said.
— Noozhawk intern Linda Sturesson can be reached at lsturesson@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.