We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jenette Goldstein a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Jenette, thanks for joining us today. Talk to us about building your team? What was it like? What were some of the key challenges and what was your process like?
First it was just me, then one part-time bra fitter, then a full-time and a part-time, and so on as we grew the company organically. Among the many things we (my husband/partner and I) didn’t know about business was how to hire. We stumbled along with casual interviewing and hit-or-miss hires until we reached a crisis point: a cabal of bad apples formed and began to undermine the business. I was slow to understand what was happening and unequipped to deal with it. At the same time, our real business model was coming into focus: high touch, high quality, high service–so it became clear that hiring and training was our critical area of improvement, and we turned our attention accordingly. Nowadays we are one of the hardest retail jobs to get, with a battery of interviews, background check, and probationary period with a well organized and benchmarked training curriculum. The quality of our team is our essential ingredient and maybe my proudest accomplishment.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I was a film actress married to an artist, and there came a time we needed to make some more money somehow. Our aha! moment came during a trip to England when I was properly fit in a good European bra for the first time in my long and busty life. I couldn’t stop talking about the game-changing feeling of the experience. On the plane home I wondered aloud why nobody had opened such a shop in Los Angeles, and my husband said, “Why don’t we do it?” Jenette Bras was founded in Los Angeles in 2009, the first shop in the US to focus on the full-cup client. That’s not just a number and a letter—that’s a client who requires an elevated level of service and quality. We scoured the world for the finest bras (and found most of them in Europe): brands like Aubade, Empreinte, Luisa Braq and Primadonna. Back in the US we developed a wholistic approach to fitting the whole woman, and organically expanded our chain from one store to five… and counting. Most of what we earn goes back into the company as expansion and pay and benefits to our extraordinary staff. We are family owned, like most of our vendors, and we have a passion for quality and craft. I believe that bra-fitting is an intimate form of feminism, and we spend an inordinate amount of money on transforming each storefront into a magical safe space for our clients. At Jenette Bras, you don’t have to look though racks of bras not in your size—we do that for you, so you can focus on the sensations of quality fabric and perfect fit. We are a brick and mortar business from top to bottom, for the simple reason that you can’t get properly fitted online, anymore than you can get your hair styled. Once you’ve been in and we know your size, if you need another one you can just call and a real woman in the store, who knows your preferences and needs, will check availability and ship it to you. We are pushing back on the contemporary fear of picking up the phone!
Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?
COVID nearly ended our company. The timing could not have been worse: we had just opened not one but two new locations, bringing the company from three stores to five. The first had been supposed to open six months earlier but was delayed in city planning. The two stores opened two weeks apart and the epidemic shut us down a week after that, meaning we had recouped virtually none of our buildout, overhead, and inventory costs. We were loaded with debt and had no cash reserves at all.
We laid off all but three employees and stopped paying our bills. Final paychecks to our team went on our personal credit cards (in time we were able to hire nearly everyone back).
With no other choice we developed a virtual bra fitting program and desperately tried to sell bras to home-bound clients, eking out a tiny fraction of our old revenue. We could not have survived without PPP loans and other government assistance, and even today, with both of the new stores running at a profit, but following another tough year with the writers and actors strikes, we are still paying down debt.
If there’s any upside to this story, I would say we learned a lot about cash flow, streamlined operations, and took hold of inventory with an iron hand. We are running one squeaky clean ship at this point!
Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?
Output Thinking by John Seiffer. It’s just been published, and, full disclosure, John has been our business coach for many years and we’ve had the benefit of working through his management philosophy in person–there’s a thinly disguised account of our company in the book–as he was writing it. It’s a very no-nonsense, practical way to re-orient how you think about your company away from people and toward the outputs your people produce. I used to be endlessly worked up over personalities as the key to why things weren’t working as I wanted them to. Once I started to focus on outputs instead, the business started to run better, the people in the business grew happier, and my relationships with them improved.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.jenettebras.com
- Instagram: jenettebras_la; jenettebras_atl
- Facebook: Jenette Bras
Image Credits
jenette portrait: Amanda Johnson