Yvonne La Fleur/New Orleans: A step back in time, but a step forward in fashionA love of fabric, sewing, design and everything feminine, has been the catalyst for Yvonne La Fleur to turn her lifelong passion into a thriving fashion business that has withstood not only the wrath and fury of a devastating hurricane, but the test of time.
La Fleur first got the idea for a fashion boutique store after visiting California between 1966 and 1967, and seeing some of the fashion trends that were evolving at the time. When she got back to New Orleans she began putting her plans in place and in October 1969 opened the You Boutique – the first boutique concept store in New Orleans.
At the time she didn’t have a lot of money so she initially rented about 1,000 square feet in a building in the Riverbend district, just a stone’s throw from the Mississippi River, and her inventory consisted of t-shirts, bikini panties, hot socks and $8 blue jeans – which is rather ironic, considering La Fleur herself has never owned a pair of blue jeans in her life.
Even the way she showcased the items was classic, with La Fleur making the most of what little she had in the way of money back then. Down the center of the store, she placed three antique bathtubs whose front legs were removed. She painted the tubs psychedelic purple to fit the 60s “style,” if you will. One tub displayed $5 t-shirts, one showcased $1 bikini panties and the third one sported the hot socks. As luck would have it, La Fleur was in the right place at the right time.
“I just happened to open the store the first year the public and private schools allowed girls for the first time to wear pants and not dresses,” La Fleur says. “So a t-shirt and a pair of pants, altered free of charge, would cost someone $13.78. And when the mamas would pick up one altered set, they’d get another one. It was just an incredible flow like that.”
Soon thereafter she began adding casual blouses and mini-dresses, and as she added to her line she also added to her customer base. By 1972 she was financially in a position to buy the entire 10,000 square foot building that housed her 1,000 square feet. Because it originally had housed four other businesses, La Fleur used the extra space to expand the store and her inventory, yet again. She gave a lot of thought to how she wanted the store to look, deciding on always having only one location that would offer antiques and be stocked with other merchandise that was coded by color, rather than size.
During 1977 and ’78 La Fleur had a factory in New York where she produced all the clothes for the store. As a result of that she had a lot of people who did special collections just for the store with her own patterns and such.
“And my husband who is an attorney who has licensed people’s names before told me it’s very important to develop your brand and proprietary products. So everything in the store has Yvonne La Fleur labeling,” she says.
In May 1984, La Fleur changed the store name from You Boutique to her own name and dropped the word “boutique” from the moniker. “It was more than a boutique at that point; I figured it had become more of a fashion emporium,” she says, adding that La Fleur was her mother’s maiden name and every one of her aunts taught her everything she knows about sewing, clothing, hat making. “So when I turned 30 I took their name legally because of the 14 siblings, there were six boys and none of them had children. And because they taught me everything I wanted this sort of to be their legacy. Three of them worked actively in retail while I was growing up and I used to visit them in their department stores and just loved it. And one of them was a hat maker who had a hat shop.”
Today the Yvonne La Fleur Private Designer Collection of apparel caters to that part of a woman that wants to feel pampered and feminine and features almost any women’s fashions and accessories you can imagine: Exclusive wedding dresses in a variety of styles, as well as mother-of-the-bride dresses, business suits and career clothing, sportswear, casual blouses, ball gowns, cocktail dresses, silk dresses, suedes, one-of-a-kind evening gowns, lingerie, jewelry, tiaras, handbags and accessories, custom made hats, and a trio of French milled soaps. You can also find turn-of-the-century flowers from France, silk ribbons from Switzerland, antique feathers from Germany and other elegant touches from the around the world.
And of course, Yvonne La Fleur sells her own signature perfume - Eau de Parfum – something she’s specialized in since the early 80s. Her husband had told her that scent was a natural thing, and that gave her the idea for her fragrance line.
“At first, I decided I wanted a single note, which is how all the perfumes were originally made. Chanel was actually the first person who had a blended perfume. Anyway, I got it all bottled. Heliotrope was going to be the flower. But as I tried it on different people I realized that not everybody liked that particular flower; not everybody could wear it morning, noon and night, winter and summer; and not every skin type liked it. So after that, I had several consultants, even one from Este Lauder, who advised me in different directions and eventually I went with a British company called Union Camp. They did several submissions of blends to me of things that I thought I would like.”
She whittled the selections down to three, and eventually one – Eau de Parfume. She says it’s been a wonderful part of her business, accounting for between 15 and 20 percent (about $500,000) of her overall annual sales volume.
“It’s been a wonderful part of my business,” she says. “Once people wear it, they make it their single scent. I never could understand why people would wear just one scent, but once it’s in your clothes and in your drawer and handbag, and you don’t necessarily smell it but other people do, it becomes a very pleasant part of your personality that people expect to smell when they see you. And you forget that it’s even on you.”
The custom-made hats is another part of her business in which La Fleur takes great pride, mainly because her hat-making aunt actually taught her the business at an early age. These days La Fleur sells about 2,000 hats annually and even gets commissioned to do several hats for the Kentucky Derby, for the Royal Ascot, for movies, etc. She has a tremendous selection of fine silk flowers – antique as well as new – and feathers that she uses in her hats. The felts are from France and a lot of the braids that she makes the straw hats out of are from Switzerland. Many of the ribbons are silk and the netting is antique. The millinery department as a whole is gorgeous and, though everything throughout the store is displayed in beautiful antique cases, it is the display case in the millinery department that is particular striking.
“The main case in the millinery department is this beautiful case that I acquired from Victoria and Albert Museum when they went from aisle units to wall units,” she says, adding that her bridal gowns are also uniquely and beautifully displayed.
“The building was built in 1969, but it has 12-foot ceilings. So it gives the feeling of an old New Orleans house with large, wandering rooms. And it gives me an expansive space to merchandise the goods,” she says. “For example, my bridal salon is 3,000 square feet and the dresses hang from the ceiling so that the trains are extended. It’s a very special ambience. People come in and really like it because it’s sort of like a step back in time, but a step forward in fashion. It’s visually a very interesting experience. I think it would be something that even men would enjoy seeing.”
La Fleur has the hard patterns and designs a lot of the fashions she sells. She even selects the fabric for them.
“Because of my factory days I had great experience in doing that. I used to sell about 400 different stores my designs, and I had input into what would sell and I had a really good knowledge of fabric, which most people don’t have. That’s what makes my clothes really a cut above,” she says. “For instance I do not have a wedding dress over $2,000 and most of them are either 100 percent silk or French lace and hand-beaded, because I know fabric. And as I tell my brides, you’re wearing the dress, not the label. If you have to spend $10,000 on a label and have a 100 percent polyester dress, something’s wrong.”
Over the years La Fleur has deleted two categories of merchandise – make-up and shoes.
“I would go to Europe four times a year and design the shoes, but because I was starting a family I couldn’t predictably go four times a year and I wouldn’t buy cases of pre-made shoes like most stores do. I actually went to Bolognia and designed the shoes from the interior to the exterior. That’s the only way I would have it,” she explains. “And with the cosmetics, it’s very interesting because you get involved with a brand, you promote it and then they merge with someone else or they decide to delete a collection or whatever and it’s just very hard with the stock-keeping units to go forward unless you have the product under your own control. So in the early 80s I dropped the cosmetics and just switched to having my own fragrance, which has seven stock-keeping units in it and no color.”
When La Fleur first started people thought she was very faddish.
“Actually, I think I got things right on the cutting edge. People come in and say ‘Gosh, I wore that dress for 10 years or until I gained too much weight.’ So it really was something like that. And right now, for just no reason, I’m seeing a real spike in business and I think it’s because mothers are coming back, having had children years and it’s been awhile since they shopped as college girls and now they’re bringing their daughters in,” she says. “So it’s a whole different generation that mothers are bringing to me and now they can afford to buy for themselves because they’ve been without buying power due to tuition, toys and everything else that goes with kids.”
She spends very little money on advertising, saying her customers are the best advertising and it’s something you can’t ever buy.
“When it was You Boutique I spent a lot of money on advertising. I was up to about $400,000 a year in advertising back then, and my volume was really good. But since changing the name to Yvonne La Fleur, most of my business has come from word-of-mouth advertising and volume is still good.
She is off the beaten path so doesn’t have a lot of drive-by or tourist customers. “But the tourists who do come in really like what they see because it’s not something they can get in their market place. And I like to think that this is so indicative of New Orleans, like Ralph Lauren is to New York. Because it’s a pure New Orleans concept it probably wouldn’t succeed in another market place, But New Orleans ladies are very interesting because they dress for the time of the day, which means they may dress four times in a day. For example, you have your work out suit. Then you might take the kids to school, so you have a little house dress you put on; then you have your work clothes; and then you have your dinner dresses. And that’s a reason to buy more clothes.”
One of her daughters is now working in the business with her and La Fleur has made her the accessory and handbag buyer to get her even more intimately involved in the business.
“Plus, I figured those would be two areas that she could see grow very quickly and it would encourage her to seek growth in other areas,” she says.
From time to time La Fleur likes to revamp part of her store. Right now, in fact, she’s looking at doing something different with her bridal department.
“I’m looking at doing some really, far out dresses and a lot of dresses for destination weddings because people seem to be doing that more and more. And a destination wedding dress doesn’t have to be just a little flimsy thing,” she says. “People still want a “wow” dress. But I’m talking about things for Napa, things for the islands, things that would go in these different environments.”
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 brought major changes to the business. The store was closed for several weeks and she lost most of her employees, including her alteration staff. Nonetheless, she had many people she had to get merchandise out to. “A great deal of my business is from out of state, so their weddings were still going on. So I had to alter and ship everything myself. But I piecemealed everything and gradually my daughters and a few other people came along to help me. It was definitely a challenge, but also really exciting because it was the first time I didn’t have a manager in a long time. Fortunately she had the finances to be able to keep the store afloat despite not having cash flow in the store for so long.
The building didn’t suffer any damage but there was a lot of humidity in the building because the air-conditioning was off for so long. As a result, some of the knit merchandise was lost because the fabric stretched. There were also some cancellations on wedding dresses because phones were down and people couldn’t get in touch with them. “Those were the real losses, but we just dealt with them and went forward from there.”
She doesn’t have an explanation for how she’s managed to remain successful in an ever-changing retail market, a sagging economy and a hurricane whose effects are still felt in many places throughout New Orleans even five years after the fact. But it is more than likely the pride she puts into the products she carries and the attention to detail in her customer service.
“It’s a challenge every day and every day is different in a small business, which makes it very exciting. It’s cast of characters that come into the store every day and everybody has different issues and a different story. But it all kind of comes together and laughing a lot helps, and hopefully you don’t cry too much, she says.
For up and coming business owners, especially retail merchants, La Fleur recommends truly knowing what you’re investing in. “You have to have some experience and really understand it. You also have to understand it’s really going to be a lot of hard work and be ready to just roll up your sleeves and get down to work.”
Side bar
Yvonne La Fleur | New Orleans
Riverbend District
8131 Hampson St.
New Orleans, LA 70118
Hours of Operation:
Mon – Sat: 10 am - 6 pm
(Thurs. open till 8 pm)
Closed Sunday
1-800-749-9666 or 1-504-866-9666
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