A busy little corner of show business is quietly humming away on the Gibsons waterfront, creating unique accessories for stage and screen, and an international clientele.
Joan Barrington has run her one-person operation from her Bay Road home for 15 years, after moving to the Sunshine Coast from Ottawa, where she started Barrington Brolly in 1995. Since then she has produced one-of-a-kind parasols and umbrellas not just for the entertainment industry, but for hundreds of private customers around the world through her website.
Among those seeking her singular skills have been Broadway and Hollywood art and set designers – like those for the recent Bette Midler stage revival of Hello Dolly – along with buyers and organizations looking for that something special.
“A show’s designers will send drawings and fabric samples,” Barrington said in an interview. “They provide all the materials, all the trims. There can be a lot of back and forth. There’s quite a bit of money involved, so they don’t leave anything to chance.”
Barrington said she also has grown a reputation as a stickler for accuracy in her period pieces.
“I do a lot for historical re-enactors like the Jane Austen Society, for Colonial Williamsburg [in Virginia], and I did work for [installations in] Washington state when they had their 200th anniversary,” she said. “When I make something it’s not like, ‘This is OK, it will do.’ If I’m making it, it has to be right.”
Most umbrella makers are mass manufacturers, so individual designs are a niche business, one that Barrington settled on out of happenstance, over several years. It started after her family emigrated to Ontario from the U.K. when she was a child. In that first summer, with the family unaccustomed to the stultifying heat of Central Canada, the four-year-old, blonde, fair-skinned Barrington passed out from sunstroke.
“Right after, my mother bought me a paper parasol. There was an idea planted there, I guess.”
Barrington worked full-time for the federal government from the 1970s until the ’90s, eventually earning a marketing diploma at night school. Looking ahead to retirement, she was keen to find a unique product to work with, and again a hot Ottawa summer played a role. Not one to wear hats, and recalling her childhood “sun-screen,” Barrington searched diligently for a fabric parasol, but to her amazement could not find one anywhere. “That’s how it all finally started,” she said.
Barrington buys the assembled mechanical part of her umbrellas wholesale and then hand-makes the canopy portion, a process she spent decades perfecting. It requires patience, and highly specialized seamstress skills – which she admits apply only to umbrella- and parasol-making and little else.
“I would give anything to be able to sew a piece of clothing,” Barrington said.
She is sworn to confidentiality about the details of upcoming productions but hinted that more Barrington Brolly creations will be featured in a new musical opening on Broadway in early 2019, and in a U.K.-produced film set for release at about the same time.
