Rose Marie (Yancy) Reid

Swimsuit designer and businesswoman whose innovative styling put her at the top of the swimwear industry.

Born Rose Marie Yancey on September 12, 1906, in Cardston, Alberta, Canada; died on December 19, 1978, in Provo, Utah; daughter of Marie Hyde Yancey (a designer and seamstress) and William Elvie Yancey (a Church of Latter-day Saints bishop and grocer); married Garreth Rhynhart (divorced summer 1935); married Jack C. Reid (a swimming pool manager and instructor), on November 30, 1935 (divorced April 10, 1946); children: (second marriage) Bruce (b. January 19, 1937); Sharon Reid Alden (b. October 2, 1938); Carole Reid Burr (b. July 18, 1940).

Relocated with family to Weiser, Idaho (1916); after graduation from high school, worked in family grocery and beauty businesses; after marriage, designed a swim suit that led to orders from a Vancouver department store and launched Holiday Togs, Ltd.; total involvement, creative and managerial, led to company’s name change to Rose Marie Reid; business sales topped $1 million a year for the first time (1946); entered into partnership with Jack Kessler and relocated in California (1947–49); Rose Marie Reid became the leading fashion house and manufacturer of the swimsuit industry (1950s); named one of the top ten women in America by the Los Angeles Times (1955); co-winner of the American Sportswear Design Award for the “Sporting Look of the Year” sponsored by Sports Illustrated (1958); company sales reached $18.4 million, almost 10% of women’s bathing suit sales in the nation (1960); refusing to design bikinis, left the company (1960); sold the rights to her name (1964); shifted to the design and manufacture of synthetic-fiber wigs for women; moved to Provo, Utah, to be with her family; continued civic service involvement, especially as a speaker at university and business meetings, and remained active in the Mormon Church.

Rose Marie Reid learned sewing and design at her mother’s knee. The scraps of material left over from Marie Yancey ‘s work as a seamstress became outfits for the little girl’s dolls, right down to their umbrellas. By the time Reid was a teenager, she had absorbed the intricacies of cutting patterns, sewing, constructing and fitting, as well as Marie’s axiom: “What makes a designer is when one cannot stand anything as it is…. You can always see something that you can do to make it lovelier, more unique, or a fit better.” By then, Reid was reconstructing and restyling clothes for herself and her friends.

Born in 1906, the middle child of seven, Rose Marie Yancey was named after her mother and a great aunt, Rose Hyde . The family lived in Cardston, Alberta, Canada, a border community of homesteaders living the hardscrabble existence of short growing seasons, frigid winters, and hostile winds sweeping unhindered for hundreds of miles across the prairie. But the land was made beautiful by wild geese, mountain grouse, deer, elk, and waving fields of grass and grain. There was not a fence for 2,000 miles.

Reid’s father Elvie Yancey supplemented the farm’s income with carpentry while Marie sewed. The children grew up earning money by doing odd jobs around town. Reid, who wore her hair in golden curls, was a bright student who loved to read. At age eight, considered the age of accountability, she was baptized into the Mormon Church.

Rose Marie was ten in 1916, when the Yanceys moved to Weiser, Idaho, to another farm. The children earned money as fruit packers for other farmers, or worked their own fields, where their father would divert them from the effort with math games and spelling contests. Later, handling the details of business, Reid recalled the exacting use of memory she developed from this quizzing. In the evenings, the children practiced penmanship while listening to their father, a bishop of the Mormon Church, read the scriptures. Marie taught her children to sing trios and duets, while Aunt Rose accompanied them on the piano.

After ten years of toiling on the Weiser farm, Elvie went into the grocery business, and the family at last found success in their combined efforts. The farm years had meanwhile taught Marie another business lesson. In a letter to her sister, she wrote: “If there is a loss to be taken, take it quickly, and go on to other operations that can be profitable.” In 1925, the Weiser newspaper reported the purchase by the Yancey family of a combined millinery and ready-to-wear store, offering a “new hemstitching service” and a beauty parlor. Reid went to Boise to learn the beauty salon trade, then alternated with her sister Marion Heilner in traveling to the small town of Baker City, Oregon, where the family opened up a second beauty salon business. All these enterprises were wiped out during the Depression by the failure of the local bank.

In the summer of 1935, Rose Marie was living in Vancouver, British Columbia, when her marriage to Garreth Rhynhart, an artist-friend of her brother’s, ended in divorce. That November, she married Jack C. Reid, a swimming instructor and manager of a pool. When Jack wanted something to replace the woolly trunks that sagged loosely after only a few minutes in the water, Rose Marie selected non-absorbing fabric of closely-woven duck cloth, and put lacing in the sides for a snugger fit. Swimmers at the pool started to ask where they could get such suits for themselves, and Jack was the first to see the opportunity. With two sample suits, one for men and one for women, created by Rose Marie, they approached the local department store of a national chain. When the buyers gave them an order for ten dozen men’s suits and six dozen women’s, Reid’s Holiday Togs, Ltd., was born.

Reid created six styles of bathing suits and arranged with 16 seamstresses, new owners of Singer sewing machines, to fill the order. After a gross profit of $10,000 in its first year, Holiday Togs moved into a rented factory, where 32 machines turned out Reid’s next designs. She would eventually style more than 100 suits per season. By November 1938, a Vancouver newspaper was reporting the return of Rose Marie Reid from a business trip to Baltimore, Maryland: “With the United States tucked in her pocket … the Reid ‘Skintite’ will be seen in the future at all America’s smartest beaches.” Reid was quoted as saying that 3,000 suits had been shipped to Australia the previous week. But duties levied by U.S. Customs made Reid’s suits twice as expensive as comparable lines in the States, causing the entrepreneur to begin thinking about establishing an American manufacturing base.

Preferring to design on live models, Reid put an emphasis on an improved fit, a concept previously unknown in the swimwear field. As she introduced tummy-tuck panels, stay-down legs, and inside brassieres, women’s swimsuits became a hot fashion item for the first time. In 1937, the name of her suits appeared on swimmers in the British Empire Games in Australia. Operating on the assumption that “a woman should feel as lovely in a swimsuit as she does in an evening gown,” Reid experimented with new fabrics and diversified the market, designing “mother-and-daughter” suits as well as for men and boys, covering all ages. She designed for the bodies of all women, and was the first to provide suits according to women’s dress sizes. Her sales jumped from $30,000 to $300,000 in one year.

Bruce, the first of the Reid children, was born in 1937, as the business was just getting under way. Admitted to the hospital, Reid was still cutting out fabric on her hospital bed while preparing for delivery. Her daughters Sharon and Carole were born in 1938 and 1940, respectively. To help with the raising of the children, Marie Yancey, now widowed, came to live with the family. In a new, competitive business, Reid often worked 16 hour days, but kept close to her children by involving them in her work. When she brought the infant Sharon with her on business to New York, newspapers announced that she was the youngest child to ever fly across the country. When Reid designed children’s swimwear, her own children modeled them for local Canadian businesses. The year totem poles were appliquéd to one style of Reid’s suits, Carole was delegated to cut them out. When the children were older and worked as hired employees, Reid held them to high performance standards, so they would not be seen as taking advantage of family ties.

With both her employees and her outside buyers, Reid’s own enthusiasm for her work was contagious. Charismatic in her business contacts, she developed marketing techniques that buyers and trade representatives knew would be profitable, and they gave her suits top priority. Experimenting with new fabrics and trims, she introduced the use of gabardine and cotton, and applied sequins in ways the public immediately found appealing. She also developed a rapport with bankers, which helped the company’s expansion. Her total immersion in the business justified the shift in the company’s name from Holiday Togs to Rose Marie Reid, which was emblazoned across on the wall of the Vancouver factory. In 1944, with World War II still under way, employment in the company was up to 190, and Rose Marie Reid designs were in more than 500 Canadian retail stores; by 1946, the company controlled more than 50% of the Canadian swimsuit business, and annual sales had grown from $32,000 in 1938 to $834,000 that year; in 1947, they reached $1 million.

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From Lois Hill Titus