Women helping women

Meet Vicki.

By 6 p.m., she's just starting her day, as she dons her royal blue Jan-Pro shirt and a backpack vacuum.

She launched this commercial cleaning business so she could afford to put her son through a private academy. Diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder, he seemed to fall behind in larger, public school classrooms.

Jan-Pro required only a small startup fee, so Vicki Pittman bought a franchise two years ago and started cleaning offices after her midnight shifts as a railroad freight clerk. She enlisted her now 18-year-old son and her two daughters, 19 and 21, to help her.

Then in late 2008, layoffs at her "day job" turned her side business into her mainstay. Pittman, used to working most hours of every day, took the chance to expand her client base at Jan-Pro and to start a residential cleaning service called Family Matters.

Now, meet Barbara.

By 6 p.m., she'll be in New York, the former home where she learned her first lessons in fashion. But before her flight out, she sits on a plush red couch in her home off Rainbow Row, wearing a plum-colored cotton shirt she designed with women like Vicki in mind.

Active in the Center for Women since moving to

Charleston in 2001, Barbara Hearst had a proposition a few months back: Why not start a line of shirts that would fund small loans to female entrepreneurs?

Vicki and Barbara will meet each other next Friday.

Pittman will receive one of the first two of the Center for Women's pilot micro-loans at the annual Women in Business Conference. Thanks to $1,000 provided through Hearst's shirt sales, Pittman plans to set up a home office, complete with a basic computer and software.

"Right now, it consists of boxes and papers thrown all over the floor," she says.

This loan, she adds, could be her chance to put that dusty accounting degree to use for her business.

The other recipient, Corrie Silvers, runs a children's themed party service called Teacups and Trucks. Silvers fits enough costumes and accessories for 15 kids inside her SUV but, with a loan, can purchase a trailer to double her capacity, according to Center for Women Executive Director Jennet Robinson Alterman.

In addition to the loan, both women will receive quarterly assistance from an advisory board that includes a lawyer, an accountant, technical support staff and marketing and human resources professionals, Alterman says.

The shirts-for-loans idea struck Hearst one humid Charleston afternoon as she looked in her closet and found nothing between shorts and formal wear. She wanted a simple but classy cotton dress.

With that idea in mind, Hearst convened with a 7th Avenue tailor, an art director and a marketing expert at New York's River Club. But then the recession hit and they switched focus from dresses to T-... "I'm supposed to call them 'tops,' " Hearst says.

They're fitted and V-necked, with the tiniest shoulder pads, an ever-so-slight collar and three-quarter-length sleeves that curve on the outer elbow and cut in on the other side (so no bunching).

They bear three linked Venus symbols on the bottom of the left sleeve and sell for $68.

Hearst wanted to keep the labor in America and found a factory in New Jersey where she felt the conditions matched her message.

"I can't exploit women at one end and support them on the other," she says.

She bases her business model on the late actor Paul Newman's line of food products, Newman's Own, giving all after-tax profits to Hearst's Good4Women Foundation, which feeds the Center for Women's loan program.

"If I had any sense I would've said this is not the time to start a business," Hearst says. "But this is precisely the time something like this is needed."

She hopes that, as the loan program grows, the recipients will hire other women.

That's one of Pittman's next steps.

"I never dreamt of being self-employed," she says. But in this economy, she gets calls from people looking to work for her.

Pittman remembers how she started -- with her son's education in mind -- and says she hopes one day to be just the right person for someone like herself to meet.

Reach Allyson Bird at 937-5594 or abird@postandcourier.com.