For Carol Schwebel, last week's nor'easter snowstorm was one more reminder of how a hurricane, flood, or other weather disaster can impact a business that has become increasingly global.
CRANSTON, R.I. — When the nor'easter pummeled Rhode Island with snow and wind on Thursday, store owner Carol Schwebel closed her small Ruth's Lingerie in Rolfe Square for a day.
But a quick return to normalcy on the day after the storm offered a stark contrast to another small business — Va Bien International, in Puerto Rico — that Schwebel has learned is struggling to recover since Hurricane Maria struck in September.
For Schwebel, the Rhode Island storm was one more reminder of how a hurricane, flood, or other weather disaster may impact a business that has become increasingly global.
Va Bien isn’t one of her biggest suppliers. Yet she relies on the company just as her mother, Ruth Lubinsky, used to, for girdles, bras and bodysuits that local customers order. Since the hurricane, Schwebel has been communicating via a hotmail email account and a satellite phone with the company located in the city of Aguas Buenas.
It hasn’t been easy getting her orders to reach the underwear manufacturer, and a phone call from Va Bien just before Christmas offered her new insight into the company's, and Puerto Rico's, continued difficulties, Schwebel said.
She was 8 when her mother founded Ruth’s in 1954, and the store the daughter now owns employs just nine people.
This isn’t the first time that personal stories of hardship connected to weather emergencies have stalled shipments for her Rhode Island customers.
Schwebel said that other incidents have demonstrated, too, just how small the world is.
At the end of December, USA Today reported that the local power company said 55 percent of Puerto Rican households had had their electricity restored. The New York Times reported then that available figures from the government and power company indicated more than 1.5 million people still had no electricity.
The owner of Va Bien called before Christmas to say the company would be closing for a couple of weeks over the holidays. But first, she asked if Ruth’s Lingerie needed any garments, Schwebel said.
Then she talked about how they’ve been operating since Hurricane Maria, and how none of her employees had gotten back their electricity.
The owner told Schwebel how they've fared: “The factory is using a generator, and only half of their employees had water."
Plus, one longtime "picking-room" employee who picks up and packages items to ship to customers like Ruth’s, lost all her personal possessions when the roof of her home was blown off in the hurricane.
One company executive — Gregory Gimble — has started a GoFundMe page on the crowdfunding platform, to raise money for the worker, Laura Acevedo. Schwebel has posted a flier about the GoFundMe effort at Ruth’s.
The family-owned nature of the Puerto Rican business resonates with Schwebel, who spent time as a child in her mother's shop but earned a PhD in education and taught school in Ohio.
Now 71, Schwebel moved home and took over the store ownership after her mother died in 1995: “It’s her name on the door — I couldn’t close the store."
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As she worked Wednesday evening to figure out whether to require her employees to come into work Thursday, Schwebel said: “So everyone will be running for bread and milk tonight, not realizing that [in Puerto Rico] they still have no electricity and no water.”
Va Bien, which has been supplying Ruth’s with merchandise since at least the 1980s, was the same supplier impacted by a previous weather incident.
At that time, Schwebel said she was reluctant to accept a delayed shipment from the company whose bodysuits her mother used to wear. But when the owner called, the woman was surprised by Schwebel’s reluctance and said she thought the Rhode Islander, of all people, would understand the delay.
“The shipment had been delayed because their supplier (Darlington Fabrics, of Westerly) had been flooded and unable to send them the fabric needed to complete the garments I had ordered," Schwebel wrote to The Providence Journal.
Efforts to reach Darlington this week have been unsuccessful, but Schwebel said that flood also apparently affected another order: One that involved bra cups molded in China and stitched in Thailand on German sewing machines before arriving in Rhode Island.
And one other element was involved then, too, Schwebel said.
The lining for the bra cups also came from Darlington Fabrics, one of the brands of the Moore Company. Darlington was Westerly’s fourth largest employer in 2014, with 215 employees, according to state labor data compiled by the city.
Schwebel is fascinated by this international crisscrossing of materials across the globe.
“I have customers upset that I have not been able to fill their requests for a particular style of bra in a timely fashion,” Schwebel said. “Who would have guessed that the delay sometimes starts right here in Rhode Island, then travels to two other countries before reappearing here in Ruth’s Lingerie?”
From home on Thursday, sidelined by the nor’easter, Schwebel reflected on how these stories demonstrate “all the complexities of what our world is.”
Friday, when she arrived at work to find the doors frozen shut, she needed a little help from the Fire Department before she and her employees could get inside and begin helping customers with their lingerie needs.
The GoFundMe page for the Va Bien employee: https://www.gofundme.com/y2k52p-lauras-fund
— kbramson@providencejournal.com
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