Eric's Fashion Boutique

I can honestly say that I never imagined I'd be saying, "My husband just opened up a fashion boutique." But, that's what happened. The official opening (albeit, a soft opening) of The Pattern Store was last night.

Okay... so it wasn't all Eric's doing. But he's pretty proud of this - his first true venture as the director of his own non-profit, Riley Area Development Corporation. Not too long into his new job last year, he came up with the idea of starting an 'incubator' of sorts to help a small retail business get off the ground. Ideally, an entrepreneur or someone that didn't have experience opening a store - something that is not easy to do. Riley Area would help with the financial backing (through grants) and the business end, kind of teaching along the way, and the incubatee (is that a word?) would have a chance to learn how to run a business and, hopefully, be able to run it without assistance in a few years. Pretty cool concept, really.

Well, in his inquiries and talking to other community leaders, he found Pattern Magazine, a local fashion magazine that is created and published locally. They were looking for a way to promote the local designers they worked with and thought a storefront and an outlet to sell their clothing would be a great way to do that. But as a non-profit, themselves, and no experience with opening a store (they didn't even have a permanent office space), they weren't sure how to go about it. So a partnership was formed. And, quite quickly, a store/studio space for the magazine concept came to be, and just four months later, a store is now open.

Now there was quite a frenzy of a process to get to this point in just four months. I felt like Eric was back at Kite Realty, for awhile, with the late night he had to put in. He had no say in the fashion inventory going into the store (thankfully, they hired a professional for that), but he was very hands on with the design of the store, done by LUUR Design, if for no other reason than the budget they had to maintain. They jumped right in with design concepts for the store, trying to keep the budget in mind. Then they had to get those concepts to reality... still staying in budget. That's the hard part. But this was where his Kite Realty experience really came into play - he gets how to build out a retail space. Even if it means a bunch of trips to Ikea. And, much to my personal dismay, he also knows how to jump in and do some of the build out himself, if he needs to. Which he always seems to 'need' to help in this way. I think he enjoys playing with electricity more than he lets on.

But the final product is quite cool. He was lucky to have a great team the whole way through and, for the most part, everyone knew their part in making this work. Considering last night was just the soft opening, mostly spread through word of mouth, they had a good turnout and I think it bodes well for their future success. And now Eric can just fall into the silent partner/'big brother' role... maybe. Hopefully. But it's good to see Eric in this mode - and I'm proud of him for this venture. It was definitely out of his comfort zone working with people in the fashion industry - they don't do things like him, and he had to accept that and make it work. And he did. And now I can have people look at me oddly when I say, "My husband opened a fashion store."