VERO BEACH — Sitting down for an interview in the spacious front room of their home in Sea Oaks, Tina and Ray Simone seem like a happy couple. And why shouldn’t they be?
They live in a beautiful community, with the lushest of tropical landscaping and 16 tennis courts, play golf or tennis three or four days a week, and own a highly successful women’s clothing company that evolved organically out of their lives.
Married for 34 years, they joke, give each other compliments and look to each other to finish a thought or supply missing information as they talk about Pogues.
Pogues is the manufacturing and wholesale company Tina founded in 2005 when she became dissatisfied with tennis outfits available in shops where they lived in the well-to-do community of Bronxville, New York.
Six years later, Pogues’s upscale line of made-in-America women’s tennis and golf clothing is stocked in thousands of private club shops and exclusive boutiques around the country and the Simones are preparing to expand into cocktail dresses and other types of after-tennis wear.
Tina Simone has retail in her blood. Her great grandfather Henry Pogue founded a major department store under the family name in downtown Cincinnati in the 19th century that expanded into several stylish suburban locations after WWII.
After boarding school in Connecticut, Tina attended the University of New Hampshire where she studied art history for several years before moving to Boston and later New York City, working first as an interior decorator and then as a real estate agent.
Meanwhile, New York City native Ray Simone was making his career as a residential developer across a wide swath of the northeast.
The couple met, got married and raised four girls.
When Tina got bored with the plain-Jane tennis whites available in club shops where she played, the idea of making a better mousetrap emerged.
The enterprise took shape in Vero Beach after the couple moved to Florida in 2005.
They picked Vero because Tina visited relatives here for decades and liked the natural beauty and laid-back lifestyle.
“My aunt owned a home in Johns Island and my parents had a condo in Central Beach, so I came to Vero for vacations and visits for 30 years before moving here,” she says.
Despite her family background, Tina knew nothing about retail or manufacturing when she started.
“We had to figure a lot of things out by trial and error,” she says.
“You wouldn’t believe some of the problems we had with manufacturers,” says Ray. “They would show us samples of their work that looked great but then the clothes they made for us looked nothing like that in terms of fit and finish.
“We made plenty of mistakes, but the key is not to let any of those mistakes take a bite out you. Instead of ordering 1,000 pieces, we would order 50 and see how they turned out.”
The couple also had to find its way through the labyrinth of marketing and sales in a highly competitive business dominated by powerhouse corporations like Nike and Adidas.
Tina remembers her first big sale, made to Gulfstream Bath and Tennis Club in Delrey Beach in 2005.
“It was very exciting!” she says. “Their buyer came up to Vero Beach with his wife and stayed at a hotel and saw samples of our clothes and ended up buying $10,000 worth – that is wholesale prices.”
“They still buy from us today,” says Ray.
“The first sale in Vero was to Libbie Ely, who now owns Penelope’s,” Tina says.
“I had a tennis clothing store and knew a cute tennis outfit when I saw one,” says Ely. “Pogues has beautiful classic tennis cloths with pretty trim. Their clothes sold very well in my shop.”
Since then, Pogues traditional, finely detailed clothes have steadily gained popularity and are now sold in thousands of private club shops and exclusive boutiques.
Pogues has five employees who do planning, ordering, billing and accounting at their office on Beachland Boulevard, but most work is performed by subcontractors.
“We have a cutting facility in Miami where the cloth is cut,” Ray says. “Sewing companies pick up the pieces there, sew the garments in their small factories and bring them back. Sales are handled by independent reps.”
“We use very high quality fabric and the best trim and ribbons,” Tina says. “Our clothes stay bright white for years, hold their shape and wash very well.”
Making the clothes in the U.S.A. has practical as well as patriotic advantages.
“Manufacturers get things wrong all the time, but we are right there to correct the mistakes, which wouldn’t be true if they were made overseas,” says Ray. “If you manufacture overseas, it takes six months to deliver on an order; we deliver in six weeks. And we always deliver on time.”
“I go down and inspect everything personally,” says Tina, who also designs all the clothes. “Our customers are very discriminating and the clothes have to be perfect before we deliver them.”
“Their clothes are very well made,” says Ely.
Pogues’ outfits for children, teens and adults are available in Vero Beach in tennis and golf shops at Johns Island, the Moorings, Sea Oaks and other communities, according to the Simones. And Tina gets a kick out of seeing women and girls wearing her clothes when she plays at barrier island clubs, she says.
“I am on the tennis team at Sea Oaks and sometimes when we play other teams, the opposing players are all dressed in Pogues and don’t realize they are playing against the designer,” she says and laughs. “I never say a word.”
