Today we’d like to introduce you to Margrit.
Margrit, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
We started in about 1989 as “Cotton Alley” in a little ‘mall’ on the Venice Boardwalk, but quickly changed concepts and reopened as a ‘rockin boots’ type of store on Main Street in Santa Monica. After a couple of years we decided to make a move into the world of European comfort footwear, more or less exclusively for women. That change coincided with our relocation to the store we’ve been in since about 1995 – 2525 Main Street, in the classic Art Deco Di Maio building on the corner of Main and Ocean Park Blvd. Over the years we have introduced quite a few shoe brands which have become industry leaders, such as Dansko, MBT, Arcopedico and a large number of other very high-quality, lesser known stars of comfort.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
We have a wonderful base of local customers, some of whom travel across the city or over the hill to visit us that said, fifty percent of our walk-ins these days are trying to figure out which shoe they will be ordering online after they use us to figure out what to buy. Others only come in to see if we’ll exchange their mis-sized online purchases for shoes in our inventory. The bottom line is that it looks as if Zappos/Amazon and the shoe manufacturers’ will to direct sell their shoes to customers with discounts, free shipping and insane policies on returns of used shoes up to a year after the original sale will probably cause us to close our doors sometime in the near future.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Berry Lee Shoes story. Tell us more about the business.
Margrit has striven to provide a special blend of good-natured skill in determining what a client wants and balancing that with what we conclude she needs to be able to walk out of the store in the best possible shoes for her. We stock a large variety of shoes guaranteed to make you feel better. We are a destination for ladies who have asked their doctors and therapists where they need to go to get shoes that will relieve their foot issues and at the same time be as sexy, or beautiful as they would hope their footwear to be. For a price they can live with. The kind of old-school, European attention to these details certainly sets us apart from the herd.
Contact Info:
- Address: 2525 Main Street, Santa Monica, CA 90405
- Website: http://berryleeshoes.com
- Phone: 310 392-8853
- Email: [email protected]
Image Credit:
Berry Lee Shoes
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