California Apparel News

The Fashion Bookstore at the California Market Center in Los Angeles is under new ownership, following the sale of the shop by owners Bill and Linda Golant to longtime employees Yolanda Bragg and Rina Castro.

“It’s time,” Bill Golant said. “What do they say in politics? I need to spend more time with my family.”

The Golants said when they decided to sell the business, they immediately thought of Bragg and Castro.

“Right away, we thought, ‘What about our employees?’” Linda Golant said.

Castro and Bragg know the business, the customers know them, and they’ve seen the business grow, Bill Golant added.

Bragg has been with the store since it first opened in 1992 on the CMC’s second floor. Castro joined a few years later while she was still a student at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College.

When the bookstore started, the Golants were primarily publishing their National Registry of apparel manufacturers and were exclusive distributors of the salesman guides.

In 2000, the bookstore moved to its current location in the CMC lobby, where it stocks thousands of fashion titles and magazines. The move to the lobby increased the store’s reach and its inventory, Bill Golant said.

“We have evolved with the apparel industry’s growth,” he said. “We have benefited from the world’s interest in fashion.”

As customers began asking for a wider range of fashion books and international fashion magazines, The Fashion Bookstore began expanding its inventory to meet those needs.

“In navigating the ebbs and flows of this business, we’ve had to be alert to changes,” Linda Golant said. Providing added customer service was part of the store’s success.

“If it’s not here, we make every effort to find it,” Bragg said.

Another part of the service is anticipating and understanding what the customers are looking for—sometimes before they even do.

“We usually have what they want—they just don’t know it,” Castro said. “We’ll show them a book and they’ll say, ‘Yes! This is it!’”

The store receives calls and online inquiries from all over the country and the world asking for specific titles, Castro said.

“When they come here, they say this is their first stop,” she said.

There’s a section at the back of the store for rare and out-of-print books. And the store’s website (www.thefashionbookstore.com) has current titles as well as a free section where visitors can download the annual reports of publicly traded fashion companies.

“When Bill and I traveled to Europe, we always brought back a rarity,” Linda Golant said.

In 2009, The Fashion Bookstore opened The Project Café, which is stocked with patternmaking and marking and grading software and equipment from Los Angeles technology solutions company Tukatech. The way Bill Golant tells it, he first became friends with Tukatech founder Ram Sareen. “He’s a fan of Italian wine. I’m a fan of Italian wine,” he said. The idea for The Project Café grew from there.

“What other bookstore have you ever been in that offers patternmaking and marking and grading?” Bill Golant said, adding the café combined with the customer service and the depth of fashion-specific material in the store, “There’s no place like this.”