Last summer, a small company opened its doors here in Ellenville. Named Colorworks, it was a venture by the husband and wife team of Monica and Russ Damsky, residents of Cragsmoor, who work for fashion designers, dyeing clothing to very exacting specifications.

Business began to boom for them this spring.

"A very strange set of circumstances," describes Monica Damsky. "A neighbor of ours up here was in South America, visiting their children, and their children's' friends had parents visiting from somewhere else, who had another daughter, who lived in New York, and who works in fashion and design, and our friend said, 'Oh, you should talk to Monica and Russ, they do that kind of thing too.' And one thing lead to another, and this turned out to be a fabulous connection for us. We are as busy as we possibly can be."

As a result, Colorworks has expanded, is expanding, and will have to expand further yet. To that end, the Damskys have hired three dyers, and are pushing out into a 750 square foot space behind their initial studio on Canal Street in the village.

"That's probably going to be our experimental techniques workshop," says Russ Damsky. "We want to come up with new techniques that we can then offer designers. For instance, we're working now with Shibori Resist-Dyeing. It's a Japanese term, and it's a very sophisticated style of tie-dying. But, we're not looking for the Grateful Dead look here, instead it's much more restrained, just a couple of colors, or shades of one color. It can be very subtle, but very dramatic."

Other things they're looking at are hand-painting on fabric and silk-screening.

"This isn't for mass production," says Russ Damsky, "but just to produce some yardage of interesting fabric that we can sell to designers. This is for the high-end market, the couture market."

The Damskys are doing the high-wire act that all small business owners have to learn: how to grow your business, but not too fast.

"Neither of us have been entrepreneurs before. We are discovering there are facets of business and skills to learn that we never really imagined."

In other words, they're learning how to run a small business while actually doing it.

"We need to expand so we can handle more work, but we have to be very careful about it, so we don't expand too quickly. We're also aware that Colorworks is an anomaly in the business right now. Some of the people we work for come to us after they've had some dye work done offshore and it's not been done very well or it's not accurate. So they come to us to get it done right, and done fast. You see, New York had a huge garment industry, but everything went overseas, and now the designers often find that it's hard to get things done the way they want them from an overseas business.

"So we're hoping that as time goes by we can be a small part of a movement reversing the trend of business moving away for cheaper labor, and bringing some of it back to America."

The other side of this trend involves time. Time equals money in the fashion industry.

"Things are always late," says Monica Damsky. "It is part of the business. So if the fabric is late, then every step of the process is late, and since we are usually the end of the chain, it is our time that gets squeezed."

Obviously that offers an advantage to a small business located here in Ellenville when competing against similar businesses in Shanghai. Russ Damsky offers a perfect example.

"We received an order this morning. The customer needs the stuff at their cutters tomorrow morning by 8:30. So we have to get it done today and ship it back this evening."

And in the event of a real emergency, with an even shorter turnaround time?

"Oh, in that case I'd just take it myself and drive down to the city."

Beat that, Shanghai.

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