In this edition of Going Places From No Vacancy, we had the opportunity to interview Chris Warren, the owner of Marjory Warren.
Chris has been running Marjory Warren for just over a decade and was able to tell the fascinating story about how she was able to quickly and successfully pivot her company from a brick-and-mortar business to an e-commerce first brand when Covid hit.
Why don’t you tell me a bit about Marjory Warren?
Marjory Warren was a brick-and-mortar store in the city for many years and I took it over about 11 years ago. I was lucky since I had a website already up when Covid hit and since then I’ve been working very hard to make a business out of our online platform.
Our target market and demographic is clothing and accessories for women over 50.
What’s behind the name Marjory Warren?
Marjory Warren was the previous owner. I kept it because we had a location in NYC for 35 years that had a big following and I didn’t want to lose that. It also made sense since a lot of people knew the Marjory Warren store, it was on Madison Ave. and 88th St. for a long time.
Where were all your stores when you had a physical retail presence?
We moved around a bit. As I said, we were on Madison and 88th for about 30 years. When I took over the brand, we had just lost our lease. I brought us down to the East Village for six years. Hurricane Sandy made it tough to operate downtown for a little, so I brought the store back uptown to Lexington and 96th for four years.
We also operated a store in California for some time while our Madison Ave. location was open.
How long have you had an online presence?
I’ve been online for about six years. Since we are such a small business, it was challenging to run a store and e-commerce platform simultaneously. The only reason we were able to make it through Covid was because we already had an e-commerce platform up-and-running.
A lot of niche boutique clothing stores had difficulty making it through Covid because they were unable to put their inventory onto a website quick enough. Also, even if these stores were able to get their online presence up-and-running, the process of learning how to manage an online store was overwhelming for a lot of smaller boutique brands.
Because I was already online, I felt comfortable that I had enough knowledge to give being online a shot. That’s why we are still around today.
Do you source your inventory any differently now that you are totally online or is it a similar process to when you were a brick-and-mortar first company?
I’ve had relationships with my vendors for many years. What I am able to bring in is a specialty. We cater our inventory to a certain group of women, a certain age group, at a specific price point.
Since I’ve been sourcing this specific product for so many years, I’ve built up solid relationships with our vendors when all hell broke loose during Covid.
When Covid hit, many factories closed down, and a lot of my smaller vendors were crippled by everything that has been going on in the world over the past few years. Things are slowly coming back, but there are a lot of vendors that are gone. I remember during the darkest days of the pandemic many vendors didn’t even answer their phones. Another major hurdle we have faced is supply-chain issues.
It got to a point where myself, and probably every other smaller merchant out there, just got used to this new normal. We had to come around to the fact that we would just get our inventory whenever it would arrive.
Because my vendors are small businesses, I’ve really tried to be sensitive to their needs. To me succeeding in this business is about building relationships and helping each other out, which could mean being patient on delivery times if need be and not having super high demands.
I would say for the last two years I’ve tried to make it as easy as possible for my vendors to operate successfully.
Before Covid, I was working on a small line, adaptable clothing for senior women. That really helped me out over the past few years because the knowledge that I built doing that, learning how to manufacture and get small batches, allowed to me make items on my own when we couldn’t get items from manufacturers.
Because Marjory Warren was able to successfully pivot so quickly during Covid, do you think that you are in a better position now than you would have been had none of this chaos occurred?
Although I miss my customers face to face, I have accepted the major change in my business. It’s to early to say if I am in a better position, but I am enjoying working just online.
I truly believe that in order to survive you have to be ten steps ahead. I am a one woman show here, I never went to school for business, but I just keep pushing forward and learning.
The benefits of a physical store was that I was visible, people knew where I was. People came and stopped by whenever they would visit the city. I had a customer base from around the world. A physical store in some ways did provide certainty at times.
Where do you want to take Marjory Warren over the next 2–3 years? Do you want to expand your target demographic over time?
I have confidence knowing what our demographic wants. If I expanded our target market, we would end up having to compete with numerous other e-commerce sites that would make it difficult for us to gain market penetration. There is not much of a point in doing that.
Our current demographic, women over 50, is one of the wealthiest demographics in America. Along with the population aging, there is already a sizeable addressable market in the current age group that we target. Our only issue with this demographic is that as women get older, they don’t purchase as much clothing.
I think there is a lot of further potential in our current market. Looking five years down the road, it would be great to keep growing the brand and trying to reach more people. I am growing a reliable customer base online, especially compared to where we were last year, so I see my business is going in the right direction.
I would like to further expand on the clothing line that I spoke about previously and was working on before the pandemic. That is a real passion of mine and something I would like to get up-and-running again.
How have you seen shopping habits change over the past few years?
I was very nervous because before the pandemic, I felt many women over 50 much preferred shopping in-person and were not thrilled about the idea of shopping online. Some weren’t particularly savvy when it came to buying things on the internet. We spent the first year of the pandemic teaching our customers how to use our website! Once we were able to get past that though, the transformation has been phenomenal.
I truly believe my customers now feel a lot more comfortable online shopping. They used to have reservations about giving out their personal information on the internet and things of that nature, but no longer have any of those fears. They are realizing how fun and fluid online shopping is.
Older generations used to have a choice whether-or-not they wanted to shop online, they don’t have that any longer. Once they were forced to use technology to do their shopping, they finally embraced it. That has really helped my business.
You can learn more about Marjory Warren by visiting their website, marjorywarrenboutique.com
