Lisa Kline's New Direction
Pioneering Los Angeles boutique retailer Lisa Kline brought months of speculation to an end Aug. 29 when she announced in an exclusive to California Apparel News that her bricks-and-mortar business will take a new direction. She will be debuting a new online marketplace called Vaniti.
Vaniti (pronounced quot;vanityquot;) will debut on Black Friday, the last Friday in November and the traditional start of the Holiday shopping season. The e-tail site will stock some of the same emerging brands and designers popular at the Lisa Kline boutique at 123 S. Robertson Blvd. in Los Angeles.
Kline will serve as the online marketplace’s co-founder and chief fashion officer. She will curate men’s, women’s and children’s fashions on the site. Vaniti also will offer homewares, accessories and lifestyle products. Kline declined to name her partners or state who is funding Vaniti. She will continue to run the Lisa Kline boutique on Robertson Boulevard.
Rumors have swirling around the direction of Kline’s business since March, when she announced plans to stop selling women’s apparel and accessories to focus exclusively on selling men’s fashions. Retailing women’s fashions was especially challenging for a boutique retailer who has to compete against department stores and specialty chains that can offer frequent promotions and deep discounts, Kline said. Earlier this year, Kline also closed her storefront at 143 S. Robertson Blvd., leaving just one location on the thoroughfare, which she helped pioneer into one of Los Angeles most prominent retail streets.
At the time, it seemed like the end of a boutique empire that stretched from Malibu to Beverly Hills to Robertson Boulevard. Between 2009 to 2011, she closed four of her storefronts and an e-commerce store, leaving many to speculate that she leave the fashion business altogether. But now, it’s apparently not the end of an era for Kline but the beginning of a new chapter—one in which the traditional bricks-and-mortar model is not the primary focus.
“There’s no rhyme or reason to the way people shop in the bricks-and-mortar world,” she said. “It is sporadic and unpredictable. You could predict in the old days.”
While consumers continue to spend on fashion, they are not consistently patronizing physical stores, she said, which made her focus on looking for alternatives such as e-commerce.
Kline has also been parlaying her fashion experience into a new role as a fashion pundit and trend expert for broadcast news programs and reality shows. She appeared as a judge on Bravo’s fashion reality show “Launch My Line.” She recentlly she spoke about women’s fashion trends on NBC’s “Today in L.A.”
“I’m always going to be in this business but in different ways,” she said. —Andrew Asch
