Final curtain for 15-year creative partnership

THREE Wairarapa businesswomen are looking to face their final curtain after sewing and selling together for 15 years.
Naomi Taucher, Janice Davies and Linda Turley started Creative Curtains in 1992, and are now looking to sell the business and retire.
In their time the sewing sisterhood have made curtains for homes and businesses from Wharekauhau Country Estate in the south to Perth, Australia, in the north although that last job was for Mrs Taucher's sister and most of Creative Curtains' business comes from Wairarapa.
Wharekauhau in South Wairarapa was a big contract that helped the crew get started, and they have also made curtains for schools, businesses and district councils.
The business established accounts with "all the leading suppliers, which you can't get overnight", Mrs Davies said.
The three women, who for years had worked together for the same Masterton sewing business, decided to follow what had been a long-held "pipe dream" in 1992, Mrs Taucher said.
"We could see potential for ourselves."
The women raised enough money to rent a building, buy a van and fill it with tens of thousands of dollars of curtain samples, their major expense.
They were one of the first businesses in the Enterprise Village business area in north Queen Street, where they still work.
The Creative Curtains women produced and delivered thousands of flyers to Wairarapa homes.
"We have to keep advertising because we won't be in the phone book for another year," the women told the Wairarapa Times-Age at the time.
The new businesswomen developed a cunning ploy to get their details known, drawing a happy caterpillar around their phone number.
"We appealed to the kids in the flyer to cut it out and put it in Mum and Dad's phone book," Mrs Taucher said, "and it became our logo, but it wasn't intended to."
Travelling saleswoman Mrs Turley has taken the company van around the region, in the process once into a fish pond and on another occasion almost into Lake Wairarapa.
On one legendary occasion she broke her arm and finished installing the curtains using the other hand and her elbow.
"When I got home I was bawling," Mrs Turley said.
"My husband must have thought I'd had a crash because he went out to look at the van. He couldn't get any sense out of me."
The women enjoy working together and say their agent couldn't believe the same group had stayed together since they began 15 years ago, bringing two staff along for the ride.
"We must be a happy group because when they start with us, they stay with us," Mrs Davies said.
"It's been a great experience; we've had a lot of laughs. Everyone has got on well," Mrs Turley said.
Mrs Taucher said the women have been "very lucky with our health the number of sick days in 15 years you can probably count on one hand", although she said working for yourself is a great motivator.
The women are keen to retire when they sell, but will stay around long enough to help kickstart the business' new owners.
"A lot of people will be wary, because when we leave, we take our experience with us," Mrs Taucher said.
"But we plan to stay and help the buyers get going."