About 15 years ago, I met a young woman selling sterling silver and beaded jewelry out of a small booth at a trade show in New York City. She and I were both in the beginning year’s of our businesses. I learned that she designed her own sterling silver beads and searched for rare trading beads and stones through contacts she had around the world. I purchased her line to sell at my store. For many years we would chat at each show and catch up on each other’s lives. And so began my friendship with Jes Maharry.
Jes is a true artist whose roots in nature have inspired her spiritual jewelry designs for her line called Sun Horse Jewelry. Though from upstate New York, Jes now lives on her Sun Horse ranch near Santa Barbara where, with her husband and daughter, she tends to a growing number of rescued animals including horses, lambs, donkeys, sheep, dogs, and cats.
Jes’s work is now well known throughout the world. Many people recognize and collect her signature style of jewelry. We are proud to once again carry Jes’s beautiful line of individually designed pieces of sterling silver and semi-precious stones.
Be sure to check out Jes MaHarry’s recent designs in our Designer Jewelry Gallery.
Filed under: New Lines
In September, I had the chance to be in LA for a couple days, and as usual, spent most of the time shopping my favorite areas of this city to see what was new. Robertson Ave. is a great place to research “what’s happening” in the fashion world and I spent one afternoon checkin’ out the stores there.
I came back with some great sweater and tee shirt lines to research for spring. I also came back with a great candle line called “A Scent of Scandal”. We ordered many of their signature scents including “Hot Mama” (scent of sugar and spice), “Bee-otch” (scent of honey), “One Night Stand” (scent of Margaritas), and “Wild Thing” (scent of musk). Their candle names make me laugh every time I read them!!
After a bit of brainstorming, we decided to design our own “exclusive” scents and worked closely with the owner of A Scent of Scandal to find the perfect scents for our designs. We are now now proud to offer our first two scents: “Manch Vegas”(scent is called “clean-ish”) and “Smells Wicked Good” (scent called “wicked fruity” with hints of pomegranate and currant) in homage to our New Hampshire roots.
Be sure to check out the other names of this long-burning all-natural candle line in the store…their guaranteed to make you smile!
I have a special binder of photos and magazine clippings hidden away at home from my mother’s years in the fashion magazine world during the early 1950’s. My favorite photo is one of my mom pinning a model’s dress on a magazine photo shoot for Woman’s Day Magazine in New York City.
So, here I am, 50 years later, on my own photo shoot for my website. No models, just mannequins, but I did feel my mom smiling down on me. She would have loved this.
Early one morning last week, one of my managers, Christine Bennett, and I loaded up my SUV with piles of clothes and accessories. Our three mannequins were in giant plastic bags lying on top of the clothes. It was a pretty funny scene and we laughed about our carload of “bodies” all morning.
Our photo shoot was a lot of fun. Our “models” were so cooperative and didn’t complain once about the 12 outfit changes! The morning flew by and we had a great time with our photographer, Jeff Dachowski of Dachowski Photography, who captured all of our clothing in the perfect light.
We are looking forward to our next photo shoot for Spring 2008!
When I created the Alapage website, I wanted my customers to feel as if they were at Alapage when they went to my site. My web designers, Kelly and Zach of Keza Media, really understood what I wanted and after months of collaboration, we launched our first site in November of 2006. I loved our results and customers and vendors gave us rave reviews for this first launch!
After a year of refining and working on the site, I realized it was time to update our look and to offer our customers more. Again, I worked with my web designers on some new concepts. I wanted my site to showcase more of our in-season clothing and I wanted this to be easily accessible. To do this, we had to re-vamp our front page.
So, here is our new front page designed to show some of our favorite Holiday/Winter looks! If you see items you are interested in, please contact the store for furhter information.
Filed under: General
And so begins my venture into the world of blogs…
Not being technical by nature, I have not really known much about blogs and have therefore been a bit tentative of the entire blog world. After a bit of brainstorming with friends, colleagues, my website developers, and my husband (the techie in our family) I realized that blogging was going to be the perfect way to share so much more about Alapage and this wonderful world of fashion in which I live.
Our home is full of magazines and fashion newspapers. I am addicted to print media and obsessed with dissecting the latest and greatest trends. I travel to New York often and to LA whenever possible, not just to buy for Alapage at fashion trade shows, but to observe and absorb what is happening in other stores and on the streets. This lifetime obsession has become my valuable homework. Each season, I rely on this osmosis of material and combine it with a bit of “gut” intuition to buy for Alapage.
How fun this is going to be to blog about all this information that I gather on fashion trends, new finds, designers, store happenings, and buying trips. I’ll also be sure to include some funny “behind the scenes” stories.
Thank you for joining me on my journey. What a wonderful trip this will be…
