California Apparel News

According to Intimate Apparel Concepts’ Ellen Lewis, when it comes to the business of lingerie, it’s all about fit.

The way retail consultant Ellen Lewis sees it, a successful store or a manufacturing business runs with the synchronicity of an engine’s moving parts. When one of those cogs breaks down, that’s when Lewis steps in as a “retail mechanic.”

“Based on all my years of experience, I can diagnose what’s wrong with [a business] like you would an engine in a car and make recommendations on what needs to be done,” Lewis said. She can also build the engine from scratch as an “architect: the person who can create the plan and gather together all the resources to get the plan executed.”

Lewis began sharing her knowledge of the intimate-apparel market through the launch of her consulting company, Intimate Apparel Concepts, in 2007. She has worked in both the manufacturing and retail sides of the lingerie industry for more than 30 years, starting in 1972 as a store manager and then buyer at R.H. Macy & A&S Department Stores. She moved into the manufacturing side in 1984 and has worked in product development and private-label lingerie for R.H. Macy, Nap Inc. and Jacalyn Bennett lingerie. Lewis has worked with Victoria’s Secret stores on behalf of several wholesale clients. She has also consulted for lingerie brand Hanky Panky and the La Petite Coquette shop in New York. Most recently, she partnered with leading lingerie trend-forcasting service Concepts Paris as a liaison for the company in North America.

Lewis’ approach to running a business balances retail, math and instinct. “I have a good instinct for what works and what doesn’t work, like the old-time gut merchants. You can also lose that with all the computers and numbers. In the old time, I just know this is going to sell because I just know it.”

California Apparel News Associate Editor Rhea Cortado recently spoke with Lewis about the common problems retailers and manufacturers in the lingerie sector face and how to succeed during a recession. For more information on Lewis’ consulting company, visit www.ipc-ny.com.

What is on your checklist of tasks when you come in to repair a business?

What I’m really expert at is digging down into their numbers and figuring out how to merchandise their business to their customer profile. [For a retailer,] I really analyze their vendors, their stock flow and turn. All of the small retailers do everything by the seat of their pants, and they know a lot because they’re on the floor a lot. I’ll go so far as to look at, “When did you sell that size and color in the month?” If you sold it in the first part, how many sales did you lose because you didn’t have it in stock for three of the four weeks? I really get down into the nitty-gritty. I do the same thing with a manufacturer. I’m looking at sales, their shipments by customer, by classification, by size, by color, by price point. Whether it’s retail or wholesale, you have to know the numbers. My motto is: Know the math. How is it different to repair a business during an economic hardship?

I have 10 major steps you can take of how to run a business, and it’s how I would run a business in the best of times. What happens when business is good is you can take more chances. In February, you led a presentation at the CurveNV trade show in Las Vegas titled “Navigating the Storm,” which highlighted your 10 steps of how to run a business. Many of the stores and brands that participated have been employing your strategies. What stores have been successful?

The stores that followed the concept of inventory control weathered through that storm. Their business may have been down, but so were their inventories. So they did not lose profit. My personal thinking is that the worst is over, but I don’t think it’s over over. I think its going to take a whole year to recover. What have vendors been doing?

[Vendors] are doing the same thing that the retailers are doing, and they are focusing hard on the specialty stores. For example, [one company] that was always so department store–driven has set up an infrastructure to monitor and maintain the specialty-store business. [Another company] is making efforts to satisfy each individual retail boutique’s needs. If a store needs something special, they’ll do it. They’re doing a lot of in-store promotions. They’re making individual efforts in individual locations to make business happen. What are some of the issues in product development that are specific to lingerie?

In the foundations business, the challenge is how to stay new and relevant and still maintain the integrity of the product that your consumer is almost married to because it’s a basic product. The advantage of that business is you can have and keep a dedicated consumer because of the engineering of that product.

In lingerie [and sleepwear]—more than any other business—the materials you use are probably 75 percent of the success of the product. You may be able to do things with trims and the detail—the way you use the trim is really critical—but you don’t have the luxury that ready-to-wear has for a lot of external adornment. You can’t use zippers, you can’t use buttons because you can’t sleep in it. The fabric itself becomes the essence of the creative aspect of the product.

Think of a shoe: You think the fit would be everything, but if it looks great, you’ll wear it. Undergarments aren’t like that; they have to be comfortable. It becomes such a major force in the success of the product. That’s true in bras, too, but the fit is more important than the fabric in a bra. How have the channels of distribution changed throughout your 30-year tenure in the business?

When [the sluggish economy] gets through these times, I think, small stores with unique profiles—there’ll be more of them. I think Main Street will come back. There used to be lots of specialty department stores, each with their own profile. When I started out, there was a difference between Abraham & Straus and Gimbels and Sterns and Macy’s and Nordstrom. The Internet is the new retail venue. It’s different because it’s global. It still needs a very defined niche, but it can do that. That’s how a business will survive, by really defining themselves and marketing themselves that way.