Clothes encounters with Clint: Eastwood collaborates with Fashion Vet on apparel line.

• Position: Small Biz - Brief Article

NANCY HALEY DOESN'T TAKE ALL THE CREDIT WHEN THINGS GO WELL. SALES FOR Tehama, her Lakewood-based sportswear company, reached $7.5 million the first year. Second-year sales topped $12.5 million. But she doesn't point to her years of experience to explain the success. Neither does she spew you-can-live-your-dream motivational insights.

NORA CALEY

Instead she credits her business partner, who has very little experience in retail. Almost none, actually. "There's not a more recognized person on the planet," she says of Tehama's co-owner, Clint Eastwood. 'One reason it was so easy to make this a quickly recognizable brand was Clint."

Not that Eastwood has connections among the buyers at Nordstrom and Barney's. Haley already had those. Haley founded Sport Haley, a golf apparel company, as a home-based business in 1 986. She took that company public in 1992. Sport Haley eventually grew to $20 million in annual sales.

She retired in 1996 and said she would play golf. She and her husband Tony had known Eastwood socially; they'd golfed in California and skied in Colorado. When the Haleys visited Eastwood at his Mission Ranch resort in Carmel, Calif., Eastwood asked her to start an apparel business with him.

Thus, her retirement lasted less than a year.

Haley and Eastwood got a small-business loan from a bank. They introduced.

Tehama -- the name is a Native American word that means "abundance of nature" -- at the Professional Golfers' Association Show in Las Vegas in August 1997. They began shipping product in December 1997.

Haley allows that her years of schmoozing department store buyers and learning how to market to an upscale audience have also helped. While she grew Sport Haley...