Yahoo Lifestyle How Indie Boutiques Are Luring Luxury Buyers Away From Department Stores
On a weekday morning in June at the Elyse Walker Boutique in Los Angeles, Molly Rabuchin has three racks loaded with provisions for clients who want to come by later that day.
No—it’s four racks. Now five, and it’s barely noon. The black metal contraptions are custom-made for the store and include low white shelves for shoes, like rolling fashion shopping carts. Molly (as her clients know her) ties ribbons around them to protect the goods from the clutches of other shoppers.
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One rack awaits a client who rushed in earlier to prepare for an upcoming trip to Saint-Tropez. She wants loose clothes. “I’m a sweat-er. I don’t want to sweat. I’ll be dancing,” the woman said. Molly has selected a Celine bias-cut dress, various pieces from Ulla Johnson, Johanna Ortiz, and Dolce & Gabbana, bathing suits from Fendi and Saint Laurent, a pile of Bottega Veneta, and Fendi sandals and bags.
A rack near the dressing rooms is reserved for a regular who’s headed to Cannes. There’s another for a customer with closets in the Hamptons, Rome, and L.A. who wants Molly to clean them all out. (She’s happy to oblige.) Molly is packing a tissue-paper-lined box to be delivered to a woman who needn’t trouble herself to come to the store to see a cozy beige reversible Gucci-logo cardigan and a few other temptations. Nearly a third of the Elyse Walker stores’ sales are “on memo” like this one, sent to clients’ homes where they can try on at their leisure and buy what they keep.
Is it any wonder that Elyse Walker and many other independent luxury-fashion sellers are thriving?
A decade ago, logic held that high-end department-store chains, elite online retailers, and brands’ own shops would put an end to independently operated fashion emporiums. The thinking was that indies couldn’t compete with the endless merchandise and full runway collections available at retail Goliaths such as Barneys New York and Neiman Marcus. Big European labels pulled back on wholesale accounts, cutting out smaller specialty stores to develop their own end-to-end distribution chains, enabling them to reap an even bigger share of the profits. At the indies, the hand-wringing became audible.
But it appears that reports of this retail extinction were premature. The venerable Boyds in Philadelphia, owned and run by the same family since its 1938 founding, opened a second space two years ago and in 2023 reported its biggest sales year ever. Elyse Walker, who began with one boutique in 1999, now owns eight shops in wealthy enclaves of California and New York as well as a small e-commerce business; barreling toward $100 million in annual sales, she recently expanded into luxury-fashion rentals. Beth Buccini has built a small empire with seven Kirna Zabête boutiques in New York, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Nashville, Tenn. Meanwhile, private clients spend between six and seven figures a year with Betsy Ross—yes, it’s her real name—without ever stepping into what one would consider a shop. The Mitchells Stores, including Wilkes and Marios, now span from San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Seattle to Greenwich and Westport, Conn., while Hirshleifers, founded in 1910 and still family-owned, is supplying Khaite, Chanel, and Loewe in the Long Island town of Manhasset.
At the same time, Barneys and Matches are gone, living on only as intellectual property. Troubles and struggles abound at Net-a-Porter, Farfetch, and Saks Fifth Avenue. Neiman Marcus only recently emerged from a bankruptcy reorganization, and in July, after years of on-and-off negotiations, Saks parent HBC announced it would acquire the chain, along with its sibling store, the singular Bergdorf Goodman, for $2.65 billion. Amazon is a key investor in the deal, which will create the newly named Saks Global. But whether bigger will translate to better is far from decided.
Meanwhile, the venerable French chain Printemps is preparing to experiment next spring with a venue in Manhattan’s Financial District, where it will swap a something-for-everyone mentality for individuality and service. At 54,000 square feet, the two-level space at One Wall Street seems to be trying to split the difference between the majors and the upstarts. One hallmark of the former that it’s not forsaking: restaurants. Printemps will reportedly have five dining options, from casual to high-end.
Why are the Goliaths failing rather than the Davids? Consider your nearest independent bookstore. In the late 1990s and early aughts, logic held that national chains such as Borders and Barnes & Noble would drive the little guys to an early grave. Instead, Borders was bankrupt by 2011 and Barnes & Noble—now chock-full of tech and gift items—scrambled its strategies but has failed to meet its peak revenues of 2018. Amazon has transformed into a delivery-logistics platform that also sells some books.
“The No. 1 reason we continue to thrive is the relationship we have with clients.”– Andrew Gushner of Boyds
It’s the indies, the ones savvy enough to personally cater to their clientele’s needs and desires, that are flourishing. Membership in the American Booksellers Association (tagline: Helping Indie Bookstores Thrive Since 1900) has nearly doubled since 2016, with a recent count of 2,433 members, more than 200 over the previous year.
The association argues that the success of these small shops comes from the way they act as community hubs, enriching local cultural life and contributing to economically vibrant neighborhoods.
The same can be said—and this is crucial—of indie fashion shops. Those that are succeeding emit a similar kind of social energy as a buzzy restaurant and serve their audience well. Extremely well.
“I only have about 30 minutes, because I’m going to the [museum name redacted] with my client, who’s the chair of the board, to see [major exhibit name redacted],” says Betsy Ross, who dotes on a fortunate list of women from a two-bedroom apartment-cum-salon on East 77th Street in New York. One former bedroom is for her two full-time fitters. Ross has been in business for more than 30 years; her sales, which are by appointment only, have doubled over the past four. “Now I’m having growing pains,” she laments. “I’m backed up for weeks with alterations.”
“I deal with high-powered, high-net-worth women who don’t want to go into stores,” Ross explains. She doesn’t share their names, but their ranks have included a former FLOTUS. All appointments are one at a time. “My clients want privacy. They don’t want to see another person.”
They also want a stylist who understands their taste, social life, professional demands, and—most importantly—their body. Ross’s seamstresses alter at least 80 percent of the apparel she sells. For all that service, clients respond with loyalty and outsize spending.
At Kirna Zabête, Beth Buccini encourages her sales associates to dress shoppers in a mix of labels of varied renown and price points, so a single outfit might include Saint Laurent, Toteme, and Maria McManus, a sustainability-focused label from New York. The aim is to create an individual look that no one but the client is wearing. Buccini built her business on customers’ desire for someone else to more or less tell them what to wear. “That’s what we do: We wardrobe,” she says.
Typically around 4,000 to 8,000 square feet, these digestible emporiums aren’t weighed down by the same leases as a 350,000-square-foot department store, so they don’t have to overbuy just to fill space—and customers don’t have to hike a mile from designer dresses to a shoe department that has its own zip code.
Not to be overlooked is the agility that comes with being a founder- or family-run enterprise. Decisions can be made without passing quarterly board reviews; managers needn’t battle bureaucratic minutiae. There’s room for entrepreneurial originality.
But perhaps most significantly, indies such as Kirna Zabête and Betsy Ross command a loyalty that runs deeper than brand names, because it’s built on real human relationships—something that design houses might consider as they strategize on sales channels. When Dior began canceling wholesale accounts last year, Ross was initially alarmed. She had been selling in excess of $200,000 from the house per year, she says, making it one of her larger vendors.
“Of course I was upset,” Ross admits. But it turns out that her customers are loyal not to Dior but to Ross. “My clients didn’t bat an eye,” she says. Alexander McQueen, Missoni, Erdem, and Giambattista Valli stepped into the breach. “It didn’t hurt my business at all.”
The meaning of community has been diluted in the digital age, with Reddit and Instagram groups forming among desperate people who will never meet. These fashion retailers, though, nurture in-real-life ties that often include generations of family and friendships. At Elyse Walker in June, six acquaintances arrive separately, seemingly by happenstance, but end up shopping as an amoebic unit, undulating around the store while discussing Citizens jeans and a Johanna Ortiz blouse with a clay geometric pattern. An older man wanders through with an aging corgi in a harness, looking for his wife and daughter.
After nearby schools let out for the day, several sales associates grin as a group of middle school–aged boys march single file across the shop to the oversize sofas that turn Walker’s space into something of a family room. No grown-ups appear to corral the boys, though some mom must have introduced one of them to the comfy sitting area at some point. After three or four minutes, they rise and file out. “Why do you like it here so much?” one boy asks the leader, who briefly grabs a Tod’s flip-flop before setting it down again. “Because of the couches,” he replies.
Molly chuckles. At the moment she’s awaiting the widow of a French rock star, who has flown Molly around the world on holidays. One of the racks (there are now six in total) has been well stocked for this Very Important Client. When she finally arrives, svelte in a quilted gold YSL belt and lemon-yellow Wranglers, a taupe Celine bag slung over her shoulder, she peruses her reserved items without a glance at the rest of the meticulously merchandised shop—until she spies a pair of trousers among the Cannes customer’s nearby cache. Molly removes them, along with a top, from the rival rack, saying, “It’s okay, she hasn’t seen it yet.”
The two women search for a Saint Laurent jumpsuit. They chat for an hour. Neither makes a move toward a dressing room. The rack will be delivered on memo to the client’s home. She and Molly agree to meet for dinner the following Tuesday. Bisou bisou.
Molly, a single mother raising a 6-year-old son who sometimes visits her on the job and is affectionately known to many regulars, works on commission. She sells more than $3 million worth of fashion each year, making her one of Walker’s top stylists.
Molly’s roughly 50 regulars rely on her to be their personal dealer, standing by to supply their fashion fix—and manage hurt feelings. This spring, two clients bumped into each other at a wedding in Cabo. One texted Molly, she recalls with an apologetic smile, upset that the other (much better) customer had obtained a particular dress.
“When you’re in my store, we’re little micro-influencers,” Walker says of sales associates like Molly. Their client relationships, and Walker’s nimble oversight, have enabled her business to survive the predatory moves of the big brands. “We had a seven-figure business with Bottega Veneta. Then they opened a store right next door to us,” she recalls, leaving her looking to replace lost revenue at that location. “So we expanded jewelry and added seven new handbag brands.” Walker’s in-store sales grew a healthy 8 percent last year.
Boyds, where sales rose 9 percent in fiscal 2023, is located in Philadelphia and the suburb of Wayne, Penn. But the store takes its best customers on field trips to New York, where they preselect items from wholesale showrooms for the following season. Andrew Gushner, who with his brother Alex represents the family’s fourth generation to join the business (their father, Kent, is president), says, “The No. 1 reason we continue to thrive is the relationships we have with clients.”
That, and alterations. Boyds employs 25 full-time tailors. If you’re skilled with a needle and thread, the store is looking to hire you. To help keep tailors from being poached, the Gushners placed the department not in the typical dreary basement but on the building’s fifth floor, which streams with natural light. “If we could hire 10 more tailors tomorrow, we would,” says Alex. “It’s probably the best place for us to invest money, in my opinion.”
One clue as to how clients view these independents is what happens in a crisis. During the 2008 financial meltdown, when it felt so unseemly to be spending on designer clothes that women were rumored to be skulking out of Hermès with unmarked shopping bags, Ross says new high-profile types sought out the privacy of her boutique. “People were like, ‘Where am I going to shop? I can’t be seen in Bergdorf’s.’”
When Covid shut down brick-and-mortar locations in 2020, revenues at department stores plummeted. Yet many high-end indie retailers experienced their best year ever. Women in need of pandemic wardrobes—cashmere sweatpants and everything that went with them—turned to salespeople like Molly, whose phone numbers were in their contact lists. They made private appointments and received home deliveries on memo. Many never looked back.
“I met people!” Molly says about 2020, when she began posting “flat lays”—photographs of clothes and accessories arranged on the floor as if worn by an invisible 2-D model—on Instagram. Soon strangers were direct-messaging her about what she had that was new. A woman holed up in Florida in one of her four homes stumbled upon the account and became a VIC. They didn’t meet in person until this past spring, when Elyse Walker did a pop-up event in the Sunshine State.
Things are going well enough that Walker feels confident that mega labels such as Prada and Dior, after years of pulling away from the wholesale business, will soon come seeking access to her clients. “The pendulum is going to swing back in two years,” she predicts.
After all, it may be straightforward to buy a handbag online or in a label’s own boutique. But when packing for St. Barts, few shoppers want to spend days assembling a wardrobe by traipsing from store to store, dressing and undressing in changing rooms ad infinitum, and arranging for alterations on their own. They want real help. They want a trusted eye.
They want Molly.
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