All the brands I carried in that store, I really loved. We had a combination of shoes, jewelry, lingerie, and clothes, because I wanted to make it a one-stop shop. Every time I would go downtown, which would be at least three, four times a year, I would pop my head into the showrooms. After a while, they got used to me being down there.
I learned that this business is really quite cutthroat and, in Los Angeles, clique-y too. All the people who work in retail had been friends for years, and I was an outsider. I also couldn’t buy a whole lot in the beginning, and at the end of the day, it’s all about money, isn’t it?
So we opened on May 5, 2003. We had a Cinco de Mayo party, and everyone was excited because we were in Sherman Oaks and there were absolutely no stores in Sherman Oaks. The store had a really cute vibe: you could come in and sit on the couch and hang out — it really became a bit of a neighborhood meeting point. It was all going very well. And then all of a sudden, I got a call from Oprah’s team. They wanted to feature the store in one of Oprah’s Favorite Things episodes.
This was before social media, and websites were just starting up. They told us that if we did this, we needed to have a website, because people were going to want to shop as soon as they saw the show. So Harry went and got a Websites for Dummies book, and figured out how to come up with a website and get a server and get a fulfillment house — the whole thing.
We also had to come up with something to sell, but we couldn’t order enough clothes in such a short amount of time. So we got this candle and some sweatpants and T-shirts and tank tops, and wrote “Belle Gray” on them. We appeared on Oprah, with Cindy Crawford, who is a friend of mine, taking people around Belle Gray as her favorite store. And then, Oprah handed out the candles during the show — “You get a candle! And you get a candle!” — I think we made $125,000 the day after the show aired, which was huge.
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