New Neighborhood, New Store for Lisa Kline
The quest for new retail neighborhoods never ends. But Lisa Kline believes that she found one neighborhood that is ready to blossom. It’s South Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills, and the veteran retailer signaled her confidence in the street by building her largest store—at 2,500 square feet—at 315 S. Beverly Dr.
It’s only two miles away from her original namesake store, a 1,800-square-foot space with which she pioneered fashion retailing on Robertson Boulevard more than 10 years ago. Yet Kline said that Beverly Drive might as well be a different world from the flashy Robertson, where tourists from around the world often gather to catch a glimpse of the latest crop of Hollywood celebrities.
“It’s mellow. There are no paparazzi,” Klein said of her new Beverly Drive store, where she has one of the few women’s fashion boutiques lining the busy street.
“Mellow” may not have been the word to describe the March 21 opening party for the store, when more than 300 people crowded the boutique. Los Angeles designer Rachel Pally and E! Network correspondent Samantha Harris co-hosted the event.
Fashion designers attending the soiree included Pepper Foster of the Los Angeles–based Chip & Pepper label and Mark Tourgeman, designer of the REO Starr denim label.
While the crowd might have been noisy for the relatively quiet Beverly Drive, Kline believes that the street is under-retailed, despite being the location of a lot of foot and car traffic from the surrounding office buildings. Her vendors gave her real estate gamble a vote of confidence.
The Beverly Boulevard store will carry more than 20 fashion labels that are not offered at her Robertson boutique. The labels include Cynthia Vincent, Bailey 44, Hudson and Ya Ya.
Kline thought that she would find a similar customer to the ones who made the Robertson store successful. Yet she designed it differently from the shabby-chic look that marked her original store. Kline, her husband, Robert Bryson, and designer Bobby Milstein crafted the look of the new boutique.
It bears pink walls and a gray slate floor to provide a simple backdrop for the clothes, Milstein said. But some pieces had a unique pizzazz. The Lisa Kline logo, a women’s silhouette, appears more than 100 times on the cash register’s counter. —Andrew Asch
