We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Etty Berkowitz & Chaya Kibel a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Etty Berkowitz &, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

We came up with The Shoppe Miami after each starting our own small businesses and then deciding to merge into one larger store.

Chaya had started a women’s boutique in 2014 and Etty began with a small children’s boutique. We were introduced by a mutual friend and decided to run our separate boutiques from a joint office space.

We became close friends and noticed we shared similar customers; moms looking to shop for themselves or their kids. As our stores individually grew side by side, we realized we would make great partners and could benefit by merging ad expanding into a one stop shop for women and children. And so The Shoppe Miami was born.

Etty Berkowitz &, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

We’re both high energy creatives and The Shoppe was created both as an outlet for us and as a necessary addition to our local community. We noticed there was nothing in our area that offered a curated selection of the best kids fashions and we wanted to bring styles from around the world to our local Miami neighborhood.

We are proud to have created two retail locations, in Miami Beach and Surfside. We put careful thought into designing our retail stores to be inviting for parents and kids, including offering fun accessories and toys. We also maintain a busy e-commerce site and ship to all over the world.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

We’ve recently been dealing with rising costs and tariffs so we’ve added a small side hustle to our boutique. We added a separate site called theswagshoppe.com where we offer promotional items and branded customized items. We also offer smaller quantity customized t-shirts.

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

We dipped our toes into manufacturing for a short while. We found that manufacturing and designing from scratch was a completely different process than our usual wholesale and retail trade.

We had some trial and error with getting the sizing and materials right and finding a factory match. After a while we were finally ready and placed our order with the factory for our own products.

We had to arrange a pallet delivery and we were so excited when it finally arrived only to be completely shocked when we began opening the boxes to find deck chairs inside instead of our clothing! The delivery driver had mixed up our delivery and we had to wait another week for our product to finally arrive.

It was a proud moment when we eventually got our order however we’ve decided to stick to wholesale for the most part since then.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://theshoppemiami.com/
• Instagram: @theshoppemiami
• Facebook: @theshoppemiamikids