Lorna Jane Clarkson Biography
Lorna Jane Clarkson is a fashion designer, businesswoman, and novelist from Australia. She created the Lorna Jane brand of activewear for women and has a shop chain that sells the clothing.
How old is Lorna Jane Clarkson? – Age
She is 58 years old as of 24 November 2022. She was born in 1964 in Lancashire, United Kingdom.
Lorna Jane Clarkson Family – Education
She is the eldest of two sisters. Her mother, a secretary named Jean Hale, reared the girls as a single mom. Lorna was ten years old when her family moved to Brisbane, Australia. She learned ballet as a child, played netball, and was a school cheerleader. She went to Springwood State High School and worked at Mathers shoe store in Woodridge Plaza as a teenager. She intended to be a journalist after high school, but her mother discouraged her, so she became a dental technician instead. Smith began teaching aerobics at night while studying dental therapy.
Lorna Jane Clarkson Wife
Clarkson married Smith on September 11, 1994. They had spent seven years remodeling it, and they could see the church where they were married from its back deck. The proceeds from the sale of their property were used to acquire a $465, 000 factory building in Fortitude Valley. Clarkson and her husband, Bill, still own 60% of the Lorna Jane brand.
Lorna Jane Clarkson Books
Clarkson is the author of six health and wellness books, including Move, Nourish, Believe: The Fit Woman’s Secret Revealed (2011), MORE of the Fit Woman’s Secrets (2013), NOURISH – The Fit Woman’s Cookbook (2014), INSPIRED (2015), Love You (2017), and Eat Good Food (2018).
Lorna Jane Clarkson House
The Clarksons spent $10.3 million for a riverfront home in Hamilton, making it Brisbane’s most expensive residential property transaction in 2010. It was still the fourth-most expensive residential property purchase in Brisbane history as of May 2015.
Clarkson incorporates daily rituals into her life to ensure that she makes time for the things that most to her. She has laid out her activewear for the next day every night “for as long as [she] can remember” as a reminder to change into it as soon as she wakes up. She is an early riser who starts her day with an hour of “me time” followed by physical activity such as yoga, weight lifting, or walking her dog.
Lorna Jane Clarkson Weight Loss
This daily ritual provides her with energy and a pleasant mentality throughout the day. She was practicing weight training twice a week, yoga or stretching “every single day” and two or three fitness sessions per week in 2014. She was also trying out barre fitness as a new hobby. She claims that the majority of her design inspiration comes to her while she is exercising.
Lorna Jane Clarkson Career
Smith started sewing her own clothes because, as a fitness instructor, she couldn’t find work clothes that looked good. She didn’t have any formal training in the production of clothes, but she had been interested in fashion since she was a teenager. She started crocheting bikinis when she was 16, customized her clothes when she was 18, and started designing and making her own clothes when she was 21. She began by removing a favorite swimsuit and using it as a template for a newspaper pattern, which served as the foundation for her first leotard design. Because they liked her clothes, her students started asking Smith to make clothes for them as well.
She returned to Brisbane at the age of 24 to continue teaching aerobics to classes of hundreds of students. She also kept making activewear for herself and for people who asked for it. Smith decided to make activewear manufacturing her full-time occupation and quit teaching because she enjoyed it so much. In 1989, the gym owner she worked for offered her a studio above the gym and occasional receptionist work if she needed extra cash. She recalls the dimly lit room as littered with cockroach droppings that would be dislodged by the building’s bouncing movements. Her mother lent her money to assist her with paying her rent and living expenses in addition to funding increased production.
Smith discovered that nobody at the time supported her idea of fashionable activewear. She later recalled that in those days, concept stores for clothing did not exist for even major brands like Nike. The fashion buyers at the major department store Myer were uninterested and unsure of how to position the garments when Bill Clarkson showed them the products. He recalls that “The buyer looked at me like I was crazy” when he explained that the clothes shouldn’t be sold in the sports section. They couldn’t put me in a box. In the end, Myer purchased a small selection for five of their stores and placed it in a corner between lingerie and swimwear. Even though the Merriam-Webster dictionary states that the term “activewear” was first used in 1924, the Lorna Jane corporate website claims that Smith invented the term in 1989.
In 1990, Smith and Clarkson opened their first store in Brisbane’s Broadway on the Mall shopping center on the upper floor after deciding to sell the Lorna Jane label themselves. Smith’s early successes demonstrated the dream’s viability. In 1991, a customer paid $25,000 for all of the stock in the second Lorna Jane store with the intention of reselling it. This helped the business pay for its first week of rent. Smith and Clarkson were overjoyed by the gain until they realized they were out of stock. A well-known anecdote about the business’s early successes has Clarkson riding back to Smith’s workshop on a bicycle with $25,000 cash in a bag.
Clarkson studied fashion at TAFE college and received a Diploma of Fashion after starting the Lorna Jane company. She later stated that, looking back, it was unnecessary for her to earn this qualification due to the practical experience she already had. The Clarksons sold their home in Brisbane’s Paddington for $450,000 to finance the company’s need for a larger factory by 2000. Clarkson called the house they sold their “dream home,” saying that it was where they planned to live for the rest of their lives. They had been renovating it for seven years, and from its back deck, they could see the church where they had tied the knot. The couple used the proceeds from the sale of their home to purchase a Fortitude Valley factory building for $465,000. They renovated it for the production of clothing and built an apartment above it. The building was “dirty and full of termites” when they bought it, but within two years, its value had increased to $4 million, which the Clarksons were able to use as collateral for further expansion.
Clarkson and her better half, Bill, hold a 60% stake in the Lorna Jane brand, after confidential value firm Winner Adventures bought a 40% stake in 2010. The company’s total value was estimated to be $500 million in 2016, and its 2014 revenue was estimated to be $200 million. In 2014, the Clarksons thought about selling the company, but they eventually pulled out because they realized what would happen if they lost personal control of what they had built.
The Lorna Jane company came under fire from the public in 2015 for a variety of reasons, including allegations that a former manager had been bullied at work because of her body shape and, separately, a job ad that the company posted for a receptionist who had to meet certain physical characteristics so that she could also work as a fitting model for garment development. Both of these issues led to public outcry against the company. After a year, Clarkson expressed that however unpleasant as it seemed to be for her by and by to manage these issues, she came to see it as a surprisingly good turn of events since it permitted her to uncover a delicate, human side to people in general.
In order to oversee the brand’s expansion into the United States, the Clarksons purchased a property in Santa Monica, California, at the beginning of 2016. The property has two enormous houses on it; one of them serves as their home and the other as a design studio for Lorna.