Colorado clothing company underscores Sino-US business cooperation

BOULDER - When Rhonda Swenson - founder and CEO of boutique women's clothing business Krimson Klover - first went to Shanghai in 1984, China's biggest city "had mostly bicycles" on its streets, and "Pudong was just a big field".

It was a historic time for China - when Chinese policymakers innovatively started the reform and opening-up policy in the late '80s.

Such reforms have transformed the world's most populous nation into a manufacturing juggernaut it is today, and offer Swenson a unique view of China's economic rise.

When Swenson launched one of her four successful businesses, she went to China again and found Jenny Zhang, who had just opened a small factory in Shanghai's Pudong.

Zhang, a former clothing sales representative, knew the trade and the manufacturing side.

Swenson said she had soon discovered that China could make just about anything, make it well, and meet delivery deadlines - better than just about any one. "The Chinese are just great business partners."

Moving in consort with China's growth, Swenson's Colorado-based clothing business saw profits rise as trade relationship deepened between her startup and a small factory in Shanghai across the Pacific Ocean, some 10,791 km apart.

The partnership, which endured and thrived for both women to this day, gave Zhang the wealth to send her son to a US college, and Swenson, the chance to watch her clothing company grow and prosper.

Over the years - in typical Chinese business fashion - the two trans-Pacific business partners have shared dozens of meals together, with family and friends, and have developed a deep trust and confidence in each other, according to Swenson.

Zhang and Swenson have enjoyed a somewhat typical business relationship together - deeper than most Westerners might understand, yet a true "win-win" business paradigm.

"When the tariffs hit, our factories in China were forced to meet difficult deadlines to produce some of our clothing. If not for these established relationships, it would not have happened," Krimson Klover's COO Gail Ross noted.

With the recent White House's Sept 1 tariff hike on apparel from China announced only a few weeks before it hit, Swenson and her team ramped up production and called on their Chinese partners to deliver.

"And they did - they beat the deadline and saved us money. They delivered again, like they always do," Ross said.

"Only because of our close business relationship did we get this done," Swenson agreed.