Elyse Walker on 25 Years of Retail Fashion Success

For a quarter century, Elyse Walker has been an American retail force, going from one to six stores that are among the highest-performing multibrand fashion boutiques in the U.S., now with omnichannel reach.

She has been at the forefront of industry trends — bringing luxury local to a monied community; carrying both luxury and contemporary brands side-by-side; seeing opportunity in personal styling, private label, traveling pop-ups and now rental.

For fashion, she’s logged hundreds of thousands of miles traveling from Los Angeles to New York and Europe on buying trips, discovering and getting behind hit styles including the Gucci slide, the Bottega Veneta woven clutch, and the Melissa Kaye needle earring, “which is like a white T-shirt in our stores,” she said of the new classic inspired by a sewing needle, early on.

And even after 25 years, there is still nowhere she’d rather be than in a store.

“I love people and product. I literally skip in and start snapping my fingers,” said Walker, a social person by nature who is always planning a dinner party, birthday party, puppy party or event, and wants her stores to feel like she’s having customers over into her living room.

“There is a type of client that may be intimidated to go to one of the big luxury places, but they won’t be intimidated to go to Elyse Walker. I have such respect, because this is really how good business is run, which is not this huge marketing machine, but a real merchant, real communication with your client and a real relationship. It’s very human,” said Gabriela Hearst, who counts Walker among her 75 wholesale accounts.

“You work so hard behind the scenes looking at sell-throughs, trends and looking ahead, but when you are in store and you touch and feel product — which is why brick-and-mortar will never die — you remember why you love it,” Walker said. “There isn’t a day I leave the store without learning 10 new things from my clients. I know where they are traveling, what they don’t have enough of in their closets.…You don’t learn that from a sales report.”

Walker helped build the businesses of many brands over the years.

“We empower our team to have a voice, it’s one of the things we constantly profess, so it’s not just me,” she said. “But Alanui, I think we were the first to bring into the country, and we found it by accident on whim in a showroom in Milan. Khaite, we were at her first little showing, walking up a bunch of stairs into a Paris apartment with no AC. Spinelli Kilcolin, everyone knows they can come in and make their own ring with us. After Barneys, we were one of his strongest partners,” she said.

“Mother Denim…we’ve sold over 25,000 units in the last 10 years. And in emerging brands, we were first out with TWP and have had an amazing partnership selling over $1 million at retail the first year, and we’re hoping for $2 million the second.”

A whiz with numbers, Walker grew up in retail, working from age 14 in her parents’ Capretto shoe stores in Scarsdale, N.Y., and Manhattan. After graduating from Columbia University, she opened her own Capretto boutique on Madison Avenue in 1987. Then in 1995, her husband’s job brought the couple to the West Coast. They settled in Pacific Palisades, Calif., where Walker recognized opportunity in the wealthy community for high-end retail and opened her first store in 1999.

Catering to locals such as Cindy Crawford, Jennifer Garner, Kate Hudson and Maria Bell, the store expanded multiple times, and she opened others in similar communities in Newport Beach, Calabasas and the Napa Valley, as well as debuting the Towne store concept featuring a more casual assortment.

The focus has always been on styling customers head-to-toe.

“I’m a shoe girl by family, so I never thought of selling a trouser or blazer without a shoe or bag or belt,” she said. “Many independent retailers are a shoe store or a clothing store or jewelry. We since 1999 have always been all of the above.”

Walker’s buying point of view could be described as New York sophisticated through a casual California lens. “I don’t think we’ve ever put the perfect blazer, blouse, cashmere V-neck or cardigan on sale; if they are soft and have a good fit, we can never have enough of them,” she said.

“Elyse understands her clients’ lifestyles, what works for them and how to seamlessly push their style boundaries while remaining true to their unique identities,” said jewelry designer Kaye. “She also has an impressive ability to successfully apply her concept to each community she expands to, adapting the assortment so that it resonates with the local consumer.” 

Of Walker’s 230 brands, a mix of established and emerging, the top 25 make up 50 percent of revenue. Top brands now include TWP, Toteme, Celine, Gianvito Rossi, Loewe and Elyse Walker label. “We might pick 10 styles, but we try to make it that those 10 pieces, or 20 pieces, or 30, whatever the assortment is, that they tell a cohesive story, because people come to us for a point of view,” she said.

New names she’s excited about are Kallmeyer, Heirloom and Nelly Partow for apparel, and Metier and Little Liffner for bags “that are not a huge investment.”

“Daniella Kallmeyer reminds me of myself, she’s a super hard worker, has a clear vision, wants to connect with her team and the customer.…I love New York designers. She is practical but polished, laid-back but chic, and very fresh. It’s like an elegant masculinity and that’s my personal style. And I love supporting women designing for women,” Walker said.

One of the secrets to Walker’s success has been her in-house Memo styling program; her 25 stylists account for about 30 percent of total sales, often selling clients merchandise before it even hits the floor or the web.

“I start every day saying let’s make a party. Shopping is a luxury, so it should feel really good and leave you feeling prettier, smarter and not worrying about what you are going to wear,” she said. “Our job is to make you feel like you are best friends with your stylist. I always say to the stylists, when you tell a customer you don’t love something on her you don’t lose a sale. Because we’re not in it for the quick sale, we’re in it for the long partnership.”

It’s that trust that has kept customers coming back and spending, even on fine jewelry, which is one of Walker’s top categories. “You don’t just buy jewelry from anyone, especially at the level we have it,” said the retailer, whose team is happy to source or arrange the design of special pieces. “We just did a beautiful custom Brent Neale bracelet for a friend with all her grandchildren’s initials and it took months.”

Another best practice when it comes to offering personal attention has been to get active in her stores’ communities through philanthropy. “It’s not just supporting a charity but getting to know you, and that has helped us get to know customers’ wants, wishes and needs,” Walker said.

Overall, her company has raised more than $16 million for charity, including cancer organizations, which are near and dear to Walker, who lost her mom, Barbara Feder, to breast cancer.

Although Walker may be most comfortable in a physical store, she saw opportunity for growth through digital, and in 2012 partnered with Revolve to launch Fwrd by Elyse Walker online. That helped propel her brand nationally and globally. In 2018, she left the partnership and launched her own site elysewalker.com a few years later.

Another key to building the business has been the Elyse Walker private label, created in 2017, to offer elevated basics the retailer thought were missing in the market.

“Last year, it was our third largest volume label, and our highest margin, and it was number one in units sold in the company,” she said, calling out the Summer blouse as a bestseller. “We created it because we didn’t have an easy blouse under $1,000 to put under cardigan or blazer or tuck into high waist trousers or a skirt. And it’s still in the line seven years later.”

As she grew her brand, and started to think about opening more stores both in California and on the East Coast, she tested the market with pop-ups at private homes.

“They were a way to get to know our clients in neighborhoods that could house a store,” Walker said. “We’ve never done a ground-level pop-up, but we’d reach out to 20, 30, 40 people over two to three days and spend an hour with each person. We’ve always been in the relationships business.”

Walker has been deliberate about building her team, including president Summer Holl, who came from Intermix, encouraging them to have a good work-life balance, and giving them positive feedback.

“At the end of every day, I text people who had an extraordinary day. Still. It could be the visual team, after I was just in the Towne store and the windows never looked better. It could be someone was in the store and told me how friendly everyone was…but very often it’s a great sale. And I never, ever talk about the dollars, because I don’t want my team to think about dollars, I want them to think about units.”

Last year, she came full circle, returning to New York where she started in retail 40 years ago. She opened the doors to her own Madison Avenue flagship, which followed on the heels of her store on North Moore Street in TriBeCa. All six of her stores are profitable, she said.

Following the expansion, she’s calling 2024 a “year of stability,” and focusing on increasing top-line sales to increase profitability, while leaning into brands and styles that work well to weather the volatility in the industry.

“Many brands have swung too far to direct-to-consumer. They are paying and doing all kinds of things to get that client, and in some cases diluting their brand’s specialness,” she said. “Our shoes are solid, jewelry is up, advanced contemporary is up and designer is slower. For sure, we think it’s due to saturated markets.”

Still, she’s delivered positive results.

“Overall, we opened three new locations between 2022 and 2023, and in 2024 we have increased gross profit by 12 percent over last year. So that’s major. And gross margin has increased 8 percent over last year,” Walker said.

“We’ve definitely slowed growth down to hit this increased profit. But we are ready for that growth again. We’re actually more ready now because we put so much money into the company,” she said. “We’re ripe for the taking.”

Currently, web sales plus online sales pulling from the stores represent 10 percent of the business, and Walker thinks there is a lot of room for growth in that area in particular.

Her new partnership with P180 founders Brendan Hoffman and Christine Hunsicker on the Elyse Walker Borrow rental business marks the beginning of that next chapter.

“This partnership has given us access to industry leaders in digital, which we are not. We’re industry leaders in the dressing room,” she said. “They had to slow walk me through this, but when they talked about monetizing inventory, which is music to anyone’s ears in this business, about increasing shelf life of fashion pieces and sustainability, and about new customers being able to date you but maybe they’re not ready to marry you, it was like, check, check, check.”

The first three months have gone well, she said. “We’ve already seen growth in both site traffic and site conversion…and we’re attracting new clients. What’s been interesting and surprising is, while we thought the most borrowing would be in dresses…we’re also seeing people borrowing denim, sweaters and T-shirts…and we’re seeing half of the borrows convert to a sale.”

Only some of the brands Walker stocks in stores are available to rent. “Eventually, down the road, we might buy brands for Borrow. We’re not there yet. And we could certainly test new brands knowing that if it doesn’t work, we have this other vehicle to monetize inventory. So the ramifications of this are, honestly, it’s one of the most exciting things I’ve done in my career,” she said.

Although she was initially worried what people would think, rental is becoming more accepted, even among wealthier customers, she said. “We’ve had clients who we never thought would test rental do it, because they like to change their clothes every month.”

The future possibilities for the relationship with P180 are wide open, she said. “After 20 years, what’s exciting is I’m still learning, and there’s so much more to do.”