The Tamesis
I absolutely love all the brands sold in that store. We have a mix of shoes, jewelry, lingerie and clothes because I want it to be a one-stop shop. Every time I go downtown (at least three or four times a year), I stick my head in the showroom. After a while, they got used to me being there.
I learned that this industry is really cutthroat and that in Los Angeles there are cliques. Everyone in retail has been friends for many years and I was an outsider. I couldn’t buy much in the beginning, but in the end, 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 no stores in Sherman Oaks. The store has a really cute atmosphere: you can come in and sit on the couches and hang out – it’s really become a neighborhood hangout. Everything went smoothly. Then all of a sudden, I got a call from Oprah’s team. They want to showcase the store in one of Oprah’s favorite thing Episodes.
This was before social media and websites were just getting started. They told us that if we did this we needed to have a website because as soon as people saw the show they were going to want to shop. So Harry went and got one fool website book, and figured out how to build a website, get a server, and get a fulfillment center—the whole thing.
We also had to come up with something to sell, but we couldn’t order enough clothes in such a short time. So we bought this candle and some sweatpants, T-shirts and tank tops and wrote “Belle Gray” on them. We were on Oprah with my friend Cindy Crawford, who referred to people around Bear Gray as her favorite store. And then Oprah passed out candles on the show — “You get a candle! You get a candle!” — and I think we made $125,000 the day after the show aired, which was a huge amount of money.
