Gift Wrappers Don’t Bow Under Pressure

It’s a gift-wrapping rush-hour pileup on Rodeo Drive--the sterling silver gift boxes that the singer Meatloaf and his wife, Leslie Aday, ordered as Christmas gifts are back from the engraver and now all 23 must be wrapped, beribboned and readied for pickup. In an hour. A courier is preparing to rush them to London the next day.

The Meatloafs can rest easy. In a back room at David Orgell, a Beverly Hills gift ware store, the four staff members presiding over paper and ribbons are the triage docs of gift-wrapping.

All veteran, full-time wrappers (during slow times they polish and clean the store’s silver and antique glass), they break the gift-wrapping task into parts. While one wraps boxes, another makes bows. And no one makes a bow faster or more elaborately than Maria Zamora.

“We work as a team,� she says, taking a look at one of the gleaming boxes, which are engraved on the top with the word “Gratitude� and on the inside “From Meatloaf and Leslie.� “What’s important is to get the order out.�

The afternoon is chilled and rainy. Inside the store, in the heart of the Rodeo Drive shopping district, chandeliers cast a creamy light across Versace china and Waterford crystal, Chopard watches and Mont Blanc pens. There’s a Lucite cube at the front door to deposit your wet umbrella. Priscilla Presley confers with a salesperson; Arnold Schwarzenegger eyes the crystal in a glass wall cabinet.

A narrow hallway provides passage from the languid lushness of the selling floor to the fluorescent-lit bustle of the warehouse-cum-stockroom lined with rows of unfinished wooden shelves holding merchandise.

*

Sandwiched in the middle of these shelves are the gift wrappers, two standing on either side of scarred and scratched counters. Above them, invoices are clipped to metal holders like menu orders in a restaurant. Their supplies cascade down from a kind of industrial scaffolding erected in the middle of the counters. Thick rolls of heavy gold, red, green, and silver moire foil paper are suspended from racks. Below them are spools of ribbon, in colors from mint to purple. At this moment, red, green and gold ribbons made of acetate, moire and mesh are being spun around gift boxes.

“When we order ribbon, we make sure it’s something we can work with,� Zamora says. She prefers the acetate ribbon--not too stiff but not too limp, either--that she’s now grasping between thumb and forefingers in one hand while the other hand rapidly pulls ribbon off the spool. In two minutes she has a giant bow of 18 loops, or “petals.� She splits off a thin strip of ribbon from another spool, ties that around the ends of the bow, using her teeth to pull one end tight. She appraises her work. “I just look at the whole bow and see that it has a nice shape,� says Zamora, who will probably wrap 150 gifts today.

“They break it down to a science,� says Ali Soltani, who owns the store with his father and brother.

The smattering of customers on a rainy weekday afternoon belies the volume of wrapping underway in the back. The store juggles huge corporate orders for gifts to be sent to clients and friends.

A dentist has spent $9,000 to have 150 presents (multiples of several different gifts) wrapped, sent and accompanied by Christmas cards. Insurance companies, production companies, theatrical agencies, veteran customers all leave multiple orders for gifts to be wrapped and shipped. UPS visits twice a day. “We probably have 200 or 300 packages going out today,� Soltani says.

Sometimes, like chefs who resort to store-bought cake mix, the wrappers use bows semi-made by a machine, which makes a neat fold that looks like a bow-tie. The ribbon is secured onto the package and the folds of the ribbon are then plucked into a multi-petaled bow. Zamora, 37, can pluck this kind of bow into shape in about 10 seconds.

Now she starts on a corporate order of 133 gift boxes. She takes an already-wrapped box and zips a ribbon around, starting at the top so the bottom of the package is a flat crisscross of ribbon.

She lets me try.

I get confused about where the ribbon should end up. “It’s because I’m left-handed,� I say.

“I’m left-handed too,� she says with a grin.

*

She starts me on a bow. I crunch a piece of ribbon in one hand and begin making loops of ribbon, but the loops look droopy, and it’s difficult to neatly catch between my thumb and forefinger all the ribbon. I let go of the ribbon, let the bow dissolve and start over. I let go again--the ribbon is beginning to look wrinkled from my false starts--and start over again. My fingers hurt and my concentration is wavering. I tie off my forlorn third-attempt bow with a thin piece of ribbon.

Zamora appraises my handiwork. “OK, I’m going to show you how I teach the new ones,� she says. First she shows me how to make the petals of the bow uniform by measuring the ribbon loops against one another with my forefinger and thumb. I try again.

“You can’t use this,� I say with a sigh, putting the bow down on the counter.

“Oh, no bow gets ruined here,� she says soothingly as her fingers quickly pluck at my hand-made loops and revive the bow, much to my surprise.

But Zamora could make a bow out of anything. After all, this is the woman who went to a baby shower with a gift topped with a bow made of ruffled baby socks.

A big silver chafing dish is placed on a little shelf--�the window�--in the middle of the counters. That means a customer is waiting for it. Salespeople have been known to come back and hover when a customer is anxious for fast gift-wrapping.

“These gals are so trained, they know they have to do it fast,� says floor manager Patricia Dumbrille. “But if I have someone hyper, I’ll come back and see how it’s going.�

Dumbrille tries to explain to customers how elaborate the gift-wrapping is. “We don’t just flop a white bow on a blue box--if you know what I mean,� she says snidely in reference to competitor Tiffany’s famous motif.

Gifts are multiplying like pods in the stock room as the gift wrappers take turns at lunch. Zamora eats hers, rice and vegetables brought from home, at 2:15 p.m. in the tiny drab lunch room area in the back of the stock room, sitting on a folding chair next to a stack of gaily wrapped gifts.

“I’ve been doing corporate for the last six years,� she says. “I always feel like I have to meet the deadline.�

*

She’s thinking about the dentist’s 150 gifts. “If I get them out tomorrow, I will have met my personal goal.�

Zamora, who once worked as a seamstress for a furrier, started as part-time help one summer during a sale. “I thought I was only going to work for 10 days,� she says. “I kept saying, ‘When are they going to send me home?’ Six years later and I’m still here.� The bows adorning the store’s wreaths and the bows on the gifts in the store display window were made by Zamora. Next month, she’ll start making red ribbon roses for Valentine’s Day gifts.

Back on the gift-wrapping front lines, 57-year-old Annette Chavarria, a 15-year employee, is using her scissors to tap in the sharp edges of a box so it won’t tear the paper. Meanwhile, Rose Evangelista, 48, is making a bow. “My fingers are numb,� she says with a laugh. Stella Florendo, 57, who used to wrap at another Beverly Hills gift store, rounds out the gift-wrapping work force.

Evangelista pulls out a silver teapot, scrutinizes it wordlessly for tarnish, then slips on a silversmith glove to clean away any dirt.

They rarely critique the gifts and don’t natter much as they concentrate on the wrapping. But 9 in the morning to 7 at night is a long haul once you’ve mastered the art.

“Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it gets boring,� Chavarria says. “I hum. ‘Amazing Grace.’ That’s what Stella and I both hum. Something to keep your sanity.�