At a house in the suburb of Orange, CA, forty-something-year-old John Paul sits at a paper-strewn table as he speaks to current and future customers, negotiating a chord between the perennial seriousness of business conversation and the inherent light-heartedness of the business he helped built. Across from him, his father spryly taps at a calculator to assess the latest accounting. In the corner, a tireless woman lifts and drops a sketching pencil on a piece of paper.

Monique du Rock
"Finally, it is beautiful," she exclaims as she pencils in the last mark on the sketch of the versatile cardigan. The piece revealed the broad shoulders of the graphite woman, and it elegantly sloped down in wavelike ruffle. "Let's make it happen."

Monique du Rock, her husband Jack, and their son John had set a main goal in mind when they founded Monique du Rock, a producer of fine yet affordable designers knits whose clothes dot boutiques around the country. "To make beautiful things, of course," explains Monique. "To me, beauty is simplicity. All that I try to do when I create is mimic that spark of pure beauty I have found everywhere."

When Monique says "everywhere," she is short of exaggeration. Monique, born to an middle-class family in the Middle East, fled the region amid increasing conflict when she was a child. Her family moved to the Caribbean island of Haiti, where her eyes were opened to the richness of another culture for the first time. Afterward, she obtained her visa and moved to southern California, where she married Jack, who'd fled from the Middle East to Canada and had recently moved to California. "Incredibly, I landed a job as a fashion coordinator for Valentino, where my understanding and love of clothing fully began to mature." After eleven years on the job, she at last thought she could express her own style rather selling other peoples' designs. "And make the clothes in a smarter, fairer way, as well!" she added. And so she founded Monique du Rock in 2004.

After a career spent in the mortgage industry, her son John closed his mortgage banking business in the Great Recession of 2007 and 2008. Rather than sit and do nothing, John decided to take this devastation and use it as an opportunity to at last pursue his passion for fashion and photography; he joined his mother as an owner of Monique du Rock in 2009 as its lead business person.

Monique defined economic fairness and environmentalism as the core values of her company. Monique du Rock, Inc. pays fair wages to the employees who hand-loom its garments in Peru and insists on only using eco-friendly fabric, primarily its high-quality cotton imported from Austria.

Monique's fashion has been lauded as simultaneously sophisticated and youthful, and Monique prides herself on how she has successfully incorporated many styles from across the world in her clothes. "By far, the reason why I most like this business is the way a customer looks after she puts on a garment of mine," says Monique. "Not the look of the clothing, necessarily, but the look on her face when she sees herself. Monique du Rock knits have a knack for bringing out the natural beauty that every woman has."