Bobbi is the Owner of Traveling Chic Boutique, a women’s clothing and accessories store based out of a 1963 Airstream. Bobbi walks us through the start-up and growth of a clothing boutique, from purchasing inventory at NYC wholesalers to renovating the store and putting on trunk show parties and attending trade shows. Although the start-up can be grueling, the self-employment pays dividends and Bobbi tells interested students to get out there and network as early as possible.
Transcript
My name is Bobbi Jo Biers, and I do a wide range of things. I own my own business called Traveling Chic Boutique. It is a mobile women's clothing business. So I have a 1963 Airstream that's been converted. And I travel around and I do trunk shows. The Airstream, it was completely gutted on the inside and redesigned to be a woman's boutique. So you walk in, there's a couch, some display racks, adorable chandelier, and it's painted really nice. There's a fitting room in the back of it. And then I have cubby holes to put jewelry and scarves and handbags. A typical day for me can be dropping my kids off at school and coming home, entering new inventory, tagging it, steaming it, pricing it, displaying it, taking pictures, running it through social media, logging it into website, logging it into your inventory, doing research to find out who, what shows I can go and hit and set up at and reaching out to customers to book trunk shows and book private showings at the house. So it can, yeah. And to start buying online a lot of them require that you have previous purchases through a wholesaler. So for me the way that I, the best way for me to get started, was I go down to New York at the Javits Center, and there's fashion shows. I call them fashion shows. And there's hundreds, thousands of distributors and wholesalers, and I literally walk the floor up and down the aisle looking for new designers and new brands. Feel it, touch it, look through. Most women say oh that's so fun, that's a dream, and I say yes, it is a lot of fun, but I can promise you you will be exhausted at the end of the day. So besides doing the boutique, which is what I do, I also teach a young entrepreneurs academy here at West Conn. It's not a West Conn program, it's run through the Ridgefield Chamber of Commerce, and I'm their program manager. West Conn is a partner of ours and hosts it, and that's a 30-week long class that I take middle schoolers and high schoolers through the process of owning and operating and launching a business.
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