Kevin Aeh. Photographs Nicole Radja.
Walk on Halsted Street, just a couple of blocks north of Armitage Avenue, and you’ll notice the popular shopping street isn’t as bustling as it was earlier this decade. Trendy denim shop DNA 2050, Betsey Johnson and Abercrombie & Fitch are all gone. Barbara Phillips was determined not to let her nearby shop, B Boutique, suffer the same fate. Instead of closing for good, she (as well as a couple of other boutique owners) changed her store’s concept to weather the storm.
Going local
Phillips’s reason for opening B Boutique (1117 W Armitage Ave, 773-665-1102, b-chicago.com) in January 2007 was simple: She wanted somewhere she and her friends could shop. “I was thinking about women 40 and over who were tired of wearing Eileen Fisher and didn’t want to shop at Chico’s or have a closet full of Talbots,” she says. With her background as a civil-rights lawyer, Phillips also envisioned a place where women could attend workshops and networking events. While her events were well-attended, Phillips wasn’t seeing results at the cash register. “What I began to understand about operating a boutique for women over 40 is that they already have full closets,” she says. “So, the combination of the economy and a new understanding of the shopper forced me to reflect on the original concept.”
Over the 2008 holiday season, Phillips closed the boutique and reopened in the middle of January with a new direction: a gallery with a heavy focus on Chicago designers. Keeping back stock low, the new store is like a showroom of designers’ (local lines featured in the space include Tennille White, Steven Rosengard and Alice Berry) items that customers can special order in their size. To illustrate her new concept to customers, Phillips changed the look of the store, adding a sectional mirror, a platform to show items and a mahogany display case for jewelry.
The shop has also cut its hours, from six days a week to Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and by appointment only, and Phillips plans to have a rotating roster of designers visit the shop each Saturday. “The excitement is about the designers,” Phillips says, “and the chance [for customers] to build relationships with them.” She continues to host events in the space and invites her designers to use the shop as a place to meet with their clients.
Business is picking up. “From an entrepreneurial point of view, this is a lot more energizing for me,” she says. “I mean, how much fun is it to stick with the usual model and desperately hang on until the economy turns around?”
The price is right
When shoppers visit Hip Fit (1513 W Foster Ave, 773-878-4447, hipfitandersonville.com) for the first time, they always ask owner Jennifer Rozenberg if the Andersonville men’s and women’s clothing shop is new. And even though Hip Fit has been around since 2005, she can now say that, yes, it is kind of new. After last year’s holiday season failed to produce the kind of sales Rozenberg needed to recover from a slow fall, she decided to go out of business in February. “That was a really hard decision,” she says, “but I thought it’s better to just close because I was losing money like crazy.” Then something unexpected happened. During her deeply discounted close-out sale in January and February, Rozenberg logged record profits. “By the end of February, I was like, Wait a second, maybe I can figure something out,” she says.
Rozenberg realized that, especially in this economy, people are hungry for great deals. She reopened on May 2 under the same name, in the same space (with a new paint job and shelving) with a new concept: Instead of selling seasonal items, she’s now buying off-season merchandise and overstock items in order to turn around and sell them at discounted rates. Many of the brands are the same (including Loyal Army and T-shirts by Heavy Rotation), but while LTB jeans were around $99 at the old Hip Fit, now they’re sold for $69. It’s only been a few weeks since the store launched anew, and Rozenberg says she’s still getting the word out about the new format. “My returning customers are happy to see me back, and it’s exciting to be able to reopen full-force.”
Think small
“When you open a new business, you try to cover every single aspect,” Claudia Kleiner says. “You feel like you can do everything and it will be great—and the reality is that it’s not.” When Kleiner opened Malabar in 2006 on Damen Avenue in Bucktown, the two-story shop featured men’s and women’s clothing, shoes, jewelry and Kleiner’s own line of swimwear. She quickly realized that she needed a niche, so the men’s items were the first to go. “Guys either shop in a men’s shop or a department store,” she says.
And as the economy started to tank, Kleiner made more changes. She moved the shop to a single-level storefront down the street. “[The old store] was a great space, but it wasn’t practical,” she says. As more young mothers and nannies populate Bucktown sidewalks, Kleiner says strollers kept many customers from venturing up to the second floor of her old space—a problem the new venue doesn’t have. Plus, a smaller store equals less inventory to keep track of, as well as fewer employees. “In the old space, the rent was more expensive, and I would never have been able to be there on a Saturday by myself,” she says.
The biggest change, however, is the name and its focus. It’s now called Claudia Kleiner Malabar Collection (1880 N Damen Ave, 773-321-6685, malabarboutique.com), with an emphasis on Kleiner’s own line. In addition to swimsuits, Kleiner also makes jewelry and clothing: “It was a good opportunity to show my own designs and start branding my name.” It’s not just all about the owner, though. In addition to Kleiner’s front-and-center designs, the store also features local designers such as Cindy Chan and Vika Brown, as well as lines from New York and Brazil. While the original store carried dresses costing around $600, Kleiner says the most expensive piece currently in stock is $400.
Kleiner also hosts more events and allows customers to plan private shopping parties. The changes are paying off. Kleiner says Malabar has been busier since it reopened in February. “We used to just sit down and wait for the clients to come in. Now, you have to go out and get them,” she says. “It’s getting better, but this whole year has been challenging.”
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