Chick is It

Once upon a time, there was a little girl who loved fashion.  When she grew up, she bought a discarded candy store in downtown Pittsburgh and magically transformed it into a sleek women’s boutique named Chick.  A few months later she launched the store’s website, chickdowntown.com. Celebrities (and those who want to look like celebrities) flocked from all over the land to buy the hip and beautiful clothes. Within a year, it was one of the largest fashion websites in the world. This past week it was named one of the top 10 boutique websites by Elle.com.

As fairy tales go, this one rocks. Except this story is for real.

Amy Reed, who made it all come true, discovered the power of fashion in kindergarten when her pink tulle dress suddenly made her the focus of students and teachers alike—a “princess” for the day.  She launched her fashion empire when she opened Chick Clothing Boutique on Liberty Avenue last May.  

Her husband, Ira Gorman, had purchased the Clark building, and a storefront, the former site of Candyrama, opened up. Reed had always wanted to own a shop and saw an opportunity in Pittsburgh.  She started with 30 lines.  Now she has over 200, from Alice + Olivia to Giuseppe Zanotti.

“A boutique with all these different lines is not original in New York, but it is in Pittsburgh,” says Reed who splits her time between the two cities.  

Chief Financial Officer, Michael Tarquinio, recalls how focused Amy was when designing the store:  “Amy had vision.  She wanted a sleek, New York store.”

Chick is just that:  cool tones of white, gray and pale lavender are punctuated with oversized mirrors and racks of luxury clothing.  A Lucite chair sits adjacent to a table filled with this season’s brightly-colored shoes.  Sunlight pours through the large front windows and on this particular Friday lunch hour, Pittsburgh’s chic professionals parade in and out.  Oversized sunglasses and chunky necklaces abound.  Stilettos are de rigueur. Music pulses in the background, giving the whole scene a fashion-show quality.

But the store is just the tip of this company’s iceberg.  “When you walk in off the street, you’re seeing five percent,” says Tarquinio.

Going Global
That’s because four months after opening the store, Reed launched chickdowntown.com.  Eight months later, 90 percent of the company’s business is done online--landing chickdowntown.com in the top five contemporary fashion websites in the world in a comparison ranking through compete.com

While that seems mercurial to outsiders, Reed takes a more pragmatic view.  “It wasn’t like it happened overnight,” she says.  “We have 30 employees who work on the website full time….You have to come up with the visuals; someone has to write all the descriptions. You have to put all the inventory on the site….It’s a lot harder than it seems.”

To create awareness and buzz, the company invests heavily in advertising—fashion glossies (Vogue, Bazaar, Elle, In-style…), weekly magazines (People, Us…), television (Keeping Up with the Kardashians, E! News…) and all those billboards we see around town.

Reed personally chooses all the ad placements.  “I’m really into pop Culture,” she says. Less than a year after its launch, the infrastructure supporting Chickdowntown.com fills two floors of the Clark building.  

It is “completely run out of Pittsburgh,” says Reed.

Shipments arrive daily.  Every piece is photographed onsite for consistency. Reed pioneered the site’s video modeling, so clients can “see the clothes moving.”

“No one else has that,” she says.

The models are all from Docherty in Pittsburgh, she says. “Our whole staff is here”--shipping, receiving, IT, photography, store management.  

That staff caters to a cosmopolitan client base.  Most of chickdowntown.com’s clients click from New York and Los Angeles with Florida and Chicago close behind.  Big cities, says Reed.  

Initially, that surprised her--she had predicted her web customers would come from places that didn’t have access to top fashion.  “But people in New York and L.A are very conscious about what they wear, and they are very busy,” says Reed.

“People know what they’re looking for—a specific dress, a pair of jeans they saw in a magazine.  They have an idea of what fits.  We have quite a few celebrity shoppers.”

The Celeb Style tab features stars wearing clothes available for purchase on the website—sort of like having access to their red-carpet stylists.

Reed says she always tries to buy the “most fashion-forward pieces, the most interesting….That’s what our customer comes to us for.”

So what five fashion items does this style-icon recommend for summer?

White jeans, a bright summer scarf, a pair of ballet flats embellished with beautiful stones, a great swimsuit with a brightly colored caftan and bangles, lots of bangles.

And for fall? Slouchy boots, a great pair of pumps, distressed jeans, a blazer like the heather grey one we link to here  and cashmere scarf.

And if our fairy tale entrepreneur could be granted one more wish, what would it be?

“I would like people in Pittsburgh to know what we have—the sheer quantity and amount of lines…. All of our inventory is right there….It’s like having a Bergdorf Goodman or a Barneys.”

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All photographs copyright Brian Cohen except the picture of Amy Reed, courtesy of Chick Downtown.