Lindi Laws, owner of Lindi’s Boutique, prefers to see the future of her Plaza Palomino business a different way.
“I’m old enough to retire,” Laws said. “I can quit, it’s OK,”
 Lindi’s Boutique is having a 27th anniversary (Retirement) sale at their location on Plaza Palomino, 2970 N. Swan Road through the end of the year. Nicholas Smith photo |
“I really wanted to retire next year, that was my goal,” she said, adding that the state of the economy forced her to push that date up.
With a steady stream of bad economic news, Laws wanted to shy away from being just another store closure.
“I didn’t want to put ‘going out of business,’ on the window because of the other store owners,” she said.
Instead, a positive spin has been put on the clothing store’s departure.
On all the flyers and poster advertising the current sale, the words “27th Anniversary Sale” appear in large colorful letters, while the word “retirement” is printed below in smaller, colorless type.
Laws said she intends to stay at the mid-town location until the end of the year.
Laws originally opened her boutique at the corner of Ina and Oracle roads. Several years later, she opened a second location, becoming one of the original tenants of Plaza Palomino.
“That was the beginning,” she said, pointing to a framed newspaper article from her business’s earlier days. “Twenty-seven years and I’m retiring.” While the first store is long gone, her current location developed a solid base of regulars as well as a reliable stream of walk-in customers.
But like many other shopping centers across the city, Plaza Palomino has been no stranger to empty stores and darkened windows.
Earlier this year, Culinary Concepts and the short-lived Bistro Philippe went out of business, taking some of the center’s walk-in customers with them.
With the recent opening of the Luna Bella restaurant, some of those customers have returned, but market conditions were the deciding factor of Laws’ early retirement.
Laws speaks of her regular clientele as if they were standing in the next room.
“She’s 40 to 60 (years old). She doesn’t want to look like her mother, she doesn’t want to look like her daughter,” she said, adding that while many people noticeably dress younger than they should, most skew towards the other end of the perspective.
She compares her interaction with customers to the TLC TV shows like “What not to wear” and “Ten years younger,” by helping them select styles and colors that complement their natural looks.
While she acknowledged that people will still get their clothes from big-box stores like Costco, Laws felt that the future of specialty stores like hers is still bright. Department stores though, may be the ones that feel the pinch in the coming months.
But it’s the personal touch of boutiques that insures their place in the clothing market.
“I think that people still want that service,” she said.
Contact reporter Nicholas Smith at (520) 295-4238 or at nsmith@azbiz.com.
Comments
HEMHER wrote on Nov 13, 2008 12:36 PM: