Ponyboy Clothing

By Rachel Raskin-Zrihon

Haroon Rasheed of Vallejo hated the differ ence between the way the owners of Pakistan's

garment factories live compared to the people.

 So when he started a garment design business in Vallejo, he approached the manufacturing arm differently, he said. 

"My family has been in the garment business in Pakistan for 60 years, and I saw how the owners live lavish lifestyles - drive Porches - but the employee's lives were really pathetic," Rasheed sald. *Our pattern maker, for example, is able to create a garment pattern from a photo or a sketch and is highly talented but was making less than $200 per month."

It's different at his facility, he said. "Our factory in Pakistan has 25 full-time and 22 part-time workers, including 15 women," he said. "We pay a living wage and they can bring their children to the school we operate there. We can educate them up to high school, because we take no profit from the factory. It's owned by the employees."

Rasheed's wife and business partner, Chris Davi, said if they could pay the women more than the men without creating a violent backlash, they would.

"The only way out of poverty there is through education," Davi said. "There's no social safety net there."

The couple, who also design and make apparel for others, said they hope to create a second, women-only factory with a school in Pakistan. And they're working on opening a "stitching unit" in Vallejo - possibly on Mare Island - with an on-site childcare and after-school tutoring program.

"It's our dream to spread this out," he said. "It's a big dream but not impossible. You can build an income from a small, reliable order." 

Rasheed and Davi, who said they met at Kinko's in Petaluma, have been working together in Vallejo for seven years.

"And we absolutely love it," Davi said. "We've met a lot of the most wonderful people."

Besides their own designs, which are mostly leather and canvass jackets for the young, hip crowd, sold under their PonyBoy label, they help others create their own garments in smaller runs than are normally possible.

"People come to us with a dream. They tell us what they want made, and we make it," Davi said.

"We met people with ideas of their own but without the large amount of capital needed to manufacture their designs," Rasheed said,

"We realized we could help these people and create a garment they could only describe and make it a reality. We are the perfect match for a startup clothing line or customer looking for their own label."

The couple, who operate PonyBoy Clothing, Swagger Wearhouse and Echo Global Private Label Manufacturing, has created jackets for the Bay Area band Phenomenauts, dinosaur-themed garments for another company and special hooded T-shirts for a local martial arts studio.

"They wanted the color inside the hood to match the design on the front, plus, when you kick and stuft, your foot can get caught in the pockets, so we created hidden pockets for them." 

The couple is working on a girls' prototype jacket for the group and on a line of fashionable T-shirts for larger girls for another firm, they said.

For information, visit ponyboyclothing.com or call (707) 477-1686 or 4707) 246-3461.

Contact stajj writer Rachel Raskin-Zrihen at

(707) 558-6824 or rzrihen@timesheraldonline.com.