I'm willing to pay, why won't she let me shop?

Henny: My daughter needs to look good and I’m willing to pay. Why can’t we buy?

Atara: I’m not trying to play favorites, but I need to run my business.

Atara

The most common complaint I get about my store: Why is your stuff soooo expensive?

I get it — $275 on a dress sounds like a lot. Ditto $85 for a tween’s everyday top. But that’s only until you know what goes into running a successful clothing store. There’s the cost of the premises. The monthly bills. Employees’ salaries. The inventory itself, the shipping, the displays, the unsold stock at the end of the season…

And then there’s the advertising, the branding, and the marketing. I used to run ads in all the circulars, and that added up pretty quickly. But when I figured maybe it was time to pay an influencer to promote my line on Instagram, it cost even more. It took a few years before I was even making a profit.

Baruch Hashem, my clothing line — Tiara Boutique — has a great name now, but that comes at a cost, too — hours upon hours upon hours of research, constantly trying to stay ahead of the trends and get the best inventory for the upcoming season. It’s constant communications and negotiations with suppliers, while running the store’s full-time operations, while insisting on impeccable customer service, while handling the millions of technical aspects of running a business.

Still, once you have a certain standing in the community, that’s pretty much all you need. Baruch Hashem, we pulled through the difficult early years, and now, Tiara Boutique is one of the trendiest clothing stores in the neighborhood. We are a higher-end store, and I don’t claim otherwise, but I do occasionally offer discounts and run great sales, so even those customers on a lower budget can purchase a Tiara outfit.

Customers like Henny Minkoff, a mother of ten whose husband is still in kollel, come often. They browse, they finger fabrics, they ask questions, they mutter over price tags, they ask about when the next sale will be. Sometimes they buy, carefully folding the receipt and asking twice about returns for a full refund. Fifty percent of the time, they’re back within a day to make the return.

Henny comes to all my sales, and she’ll often debate over a discounted top almost as if it’s full price. I get it; it’s hard to shop without money. But what she doesn’t realize is what it means to the store owner, all this haggling and thinking and please hold it behind the counter and can I have a day to decide.

I try to be patient, firstly because it’s the menschlich thing to do, but also because I want my customers to be happy, even if the customer spends under $100 a year. Luckily, there are other customers who make it all worthwhile.

Like the Halbs.