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News
Trendy European Children’s Clothing Entrepreneurs Pack Up and Go Home
In February, after 12 years in a downtown La Jolla, Calif., storefront, Brett and Kimberly Buffington packed up their children’s clothing boutique, Eurochild LLC, and moved it into their home.
“Business just stopped on a dime” 18 months ago, Mr. Buffington says, and he and his wife were unable to renegotiate their $7,000-a-month rent.
Working at home allows the couple to save $12,000 a month in rent and other overhead costs and focus on revamping Eurochild’s Web site to attract new customers. “You don’t have overhead, you don’t have to manage employees, you don’t have to keep the store clean — all the stuff that comes along with running a retail business,” Mr. Buffington says.
But as more small businesses around the country ditch their storefronts and offices to cut expenses during the recession, they’re encountering new hurdles. Many of them have to deal with home-business zoning ordinances and take on new insurance and marketing costs. The Buffingtons, for example, faced $1,200 a year for home-based-business commercial insurance, as well as an expanded online marketing budget.
![[small business and work at home]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/MK-AW445_SBHOME_D_20090601192311.jpg)
Eurochild LLC
Kimberly and Brett Buffington closed their La Jolla, Calif., storefront in February to run Eurochild LLC out of their home to cut costs.
Business owners also confront the challenge of making it appear to loyal customers that nothing significant has changed. “Clearly, the biggest mistake is having a huge drop in customer base,” says Larry Cox, associate professor of entrepreneurship at the Graziadio School of Business at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif.
“You have to have a sense by talking to customers of how attached they are to the locations,” he says. “Will they continue to do business with you with a different model?”
Victoria Rogers of Kingston, N.J., closed her six-year-old ballet-apparel store across from the Princeton University campus last year. Her rent had risen over the years from $3,800 a month when she opened the store to $5,000 a month, and the slack economy was taking a toll. “You can’t sell enough ballet shoes to justify that kind of rent,” she says.
Ms. Rogers was set to reopen her business, Giselle Dancewear LLC, in her home last December, after winning approval from the local zoning board. She had spent a year with planners, engineers and lawyers preparing for the move and had bought a house for $500,000 using her retirement savings. But the Kingston Initiative, a community advocacy group, appealed the zoning ruling, leading town officials to reverse the board’s decision.
Zoning laws vary, but home-based businesses generally operate under the radar unless someone files a complaint. In this case, Karen Linder of the Kingston Initiative argues that Ms. Rogers’s home store violated the master zoning plan of a historic area. The Initiative, she says, was wary that the home-based business would set a dangerous precedent that would make it easier for other commercial businesses to move in.
“It was small-minded,” responds Ms. Rogers. But she recently got a permit to sell pointe shoes, by appointment only, at her home. In addition, the American Repertory Ballet’s Princeton Ballet School, one of her major customers, has allowed her to set up a little store in its lobby.
Billy Carmen, president of Wizard Industries Inc., a catalog-based specialty-tools company, looked for a town friendly to home-based businesses when he moved recently. The economic crunch led him to shed an office-and-warehouse space he had leased in a Los Angeles industrial complex since 2000 and trim his 12 employees to just him and his wife.
Mr. Carmen settled on Sebastopol, Calif. The town lets him put a business sign outside his new home. And he’s able to get packages picked up from his house, rather than having to drive to a nearby mailing facility to drop them off.
When small businesses move home, many of them are returning to their roots. Katheryn Haro co-founded Rutledge Haro Design Inc. in 2000 in the San Diego home of her business partner, Mary Rutledge. When business boomed, they moved the interior-decorating company to a commercial space downtown, eventually expanding to eight employees and $4 million in annual revenue.
But business has deteriorated over the past 18 months as clients have canceled 10 contracts. Three months ago, Haro Design laid off its staff, put the downtown office up for lease and moved back to Ms. Rutledge’s home. They hope that within a year a turnaround will allow them to return to the office space. “We’re just hunkering down,” Ms. Haro says. “But if nothing comes in, this year’s going to be a bad year.”
Despite the move back home, slumping sales have driven EuroChild’s Mr. Buffington to take a second job coaching high school tennis. To keep past customers loyal, he’s also offering free local delivery.
The Buffingtons have also had to rethink some of the basic dynamics of their business. “Before, we could put a sign with ’sale’ on it outside our door, and it would drive traffic directly into our front door,” Mr. Buffington says. “Now, we place ads on other Web sites, and send our email campaigns, and wish on a star that people will click through.”
Write to Raymund Flandez at raymund.flandez@wsj.com
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New trendy Summer clothing for boys includes OKKIES, Petit Bateau, Ben Sherman and Quiksilver Kids Clothing!
Okkies boys clothing makes debut
Looking for a trendy online childrens shop for boys clothing and hip kids clothes. Check out Okkies, the latest and newest in designer boys clothing.
OKKIES, trendy & hip toddler kids everyday clothing boys.
The About StoryThe thread that repeatedly weaves its way through my life and career is, well, literally thread. Actually, it’s the cut, color and fabrication of clothing that are among my most important memories and, later, my influences.Born in South Africa, I attended a conservative elementary school that required me to wear uniform dress – a blazer, button-down shirt, skirt, hat and tie. Freedom came at the end of the day and on weekends when I donned my favorite outfit: bright yellow cropped palazzo pants paired with a tank top. I can picture the pants clearly; I remember how they felt against my body.At 14, my family and I immigrated to Los Angeles, where in High School, freed from a dress code, clothing was a means of self-expression. I used my mom’s idle sewing machine to make my own clothes that broadcast my membership in the artsy crowd. I was really into upholstery fabric in high school, I made an upholstery fabric pajama outfit with gold buttons that I lived in.
After high school, I moved to New York City to attend design school. Soon my school internship turned into a full-time job: I worked as a freelance editorial stylist for Interview, Details and Face, the fashion-forward magazines of the day. My work was heavily influenced by the aesthetic of my favorite designers Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo, whose clothing lines continue to inspire. These Japanese designers effortlessly reduce fashion to simple sophistication; it is amazing how they delineate colors using a monochromatic color palette. And their designs artfully balance practicality with playfulness, seriousness with humor. Yet their clothes don’t overwhelm, instead they enable the wearer to express his or her own personality.
In 1987 I returned to LA to broaden my freelance stylist and costume designer career. I created costumes for music videos, concert tours and album covers, adding Janet Jackson, the Rolling Stones and Sting, to my client list. I also collaborated with television and print-ad directors styling and designing costumes for A-List commercial accounts such as Coke, Nike and Visa/MasterCard.
In 2001 I added motherhood to my resume with the birth of Hugo and, later, Oscar – nicknamed Okkie by his big brother. Watching my two young, constantly moving boys was easier than finding boy-appropriate clothing. At that time, girls had many fashion choices, boys much fewer. I struggled to find comfortable, easy-care, hip boys’ wear. Choices seemed locked into a few silhouettes merchandised in standard demins, fleeces and twills, in boy-accepted primary colors.
It was in the limited boys’ wear market that I saw opportunity. In 2005, as a natural next-step in my 20 years experience in the fashion industry, I designed and introduced OKKIES, a line of boys’ pants. With four pant silhouettes merchandised in a variety of fashion-forward colorations and menswear patterns, OKKIES debuted in five stores its first season. By fall 2006, I was designated best new designer by the online children’s clothing expert jamesgirone.com. In October 2008, Earnshaw’s national retail survey named OKKIES one of the top three best-designed collections in the boys’ wear industry.
Today, OKKIES boys’ wear line features 26 styles in a full line of silhouettes – from pants to shirts, sweaters and hoodies, to hats – for sizes 3 months to 12 years, and is available in 500 specialty stores throughout the country, including Barney’s New York, Fred Segal, Lisa Kline and Eurochild.com.
I have created OKKIES as a lifestyle approach to clothing. By adding shirts, outerwear and hats, the OKKIES line offers kids a lifestyle of ease of wear, clothing that allows them to move, stretch, run, climb and relax without restriction. For parents, that lifestyle is about comfort and more. It’s about clothes that are high-quality; that are wash-and-wear; that are appropriate for a full day of activity, going from a play date to dinner with grandma; that reflect an awareness and appreciation of fashion trends without being fussy or over done; that don’t express ‘generic kid’ but allows an individual’s personality to shine.
Lauren Landau Hines
President and Founder
OKKIES
