This story is part of My First Job in Fashion , interviews with fashion insiders on the roles who made them who they are today.
The story of Belle Gray boutique, named after my daughters Delilah Belle and Amelia Gray, really begins with my love of fashion. When I was a teenager and I was living in a really small town in Medford, Oregon, I got my first Seventeen magazine and then Mademoiselle and then Vogue. Once I got Vogue, that flipped my world. It gave me a window into art and fashion and really, the world as a whole.
I like to say that in my family we were professional shoppers. When we would travel, we would go shopping because we lived in Medford — there’s not much there. And I think my mother had the same feeling about fashion as I did.
Fast forward a few years: I’ve moved to LA and built an acting career. And then I turned 40. That’s critical. I turned 40 and at that point, the acting opportunities really started to slow down. I had already branched out to hosting TV shows, but that had slowed down too. My husband, Harry Hamlin, wasn’t working at the time, either. We were barely covering our expenses and were close to losing our house. Mind you, my daughters were really young — Amelia was barely two — which obviously adds pressure. I thought, “My God, what are we going to do?”
We were at the breakfast table one morning and Harry said, “You keep showing up in all these magazines’ best-dressed lists and people love to see what you’re wearing. Is there any way we could monetize that?”
So we began talking about starting a clothing line or a boutique, or something in that realm. I started to talk to people and kind of investigate what it might be like to create a clothing line at the time. One day, I was driving around and thinking about how I’m basically a professional shopper. I know all the boutiques in Los Angeles and New York, and the people that own them. I remember at the time, Scoop was just happening in New York, and I was bowled over by it. It was this great boutique that was incredibly edited, so I thought it would be cool to create something like that in LA.
I ended up meeting Stephanie Greenfield, who created and was the owner of Scoop at the time. She talked to me about fashion and owning a boutique. And then I met Elyse Walker out here in the Pacific Palisades. She is somebody who has been around for ages — she has just survived everything — from the downturn to last year’s fires.
I loved Elyse’s store — again, a beautiful way to edit. She gave me lots of advice. Then, I met a woman who had a boutique in Rancho Santa Fe — this tiny, 600-square-foot boutique full of great brands. Her name was Gracie, and she was so kind. She took me down to the Mart in Downtown LA, which is where all the showrooms are, and showed me around. I met some of the women who own the showrooms, and I remember asking them, “Where would be a good place to open a store?” They said I needed to open somewhere not too close to other stores because there was this rule that you can’t be outside a one to three-mile radius from other boutiques. Otherwise, the showrooms couldn’t sell me the same brands that they sold to them.
The women from the showrooms said Studio City or Sherman Oaks in the Valley would be good — there weren’t really many stores there. We live close to those areas, so Harry and I began driving up and down Ventura Boulevard, and we saw this weird little shop that was for rent. It was like a bridal and prom dress sewing space for the store next door. It had black carpet and hot pink walls. I think the ceiling was also pink. It was hideous, but I could see the potential. About 3,000 square feet, it wasn’t too big or too small, and it had some really cool metal details on the walls, probably from the ’40s, ’50s.
We decided to go for it. I’ll never forget the day we were going to sign the lease — I got really scared. We didn’t have any backers; it was all our money we were putting in the store. And we had no idea how to run a business, let alone a clothing business. We are actors! But we took the risk.
Next, Harry got some contractors to come and give him an estimate of how much it would cost to redo the place. It was around $250,000. There was no way we could afford that, so Harry decided to build it out himself with Ricardo, our handyman of 15 years. They figured out how to do it up between the two of them for just $40,000.
Meanwhile, I went to the Mart and bought all the lines I could. There were a couple of stores three miles away from Belle Gray, and one a mile away, but I knew the girls who owned the stores and I thought they would be generous and let me have some of the same styles. CNC T-shirts and Da Nang pants, specifically, were the cool brands at the time. But once they found out I had them, they threw a fit and tried to get them pulled from our store. I wouldn’t remove them because I felt there was plenty to go around. I ruined a friendship with one of the women — she was so mad about it.
I think if the showroom had declined to sell to me, I would have accepted it. But they did, because business is business. There were many brands I had to really work to get. I couldn’t get any James Perse for six and a half years, which is a brand I love.
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All the brands I carried in that store, I really loved. We had a combination of shoes, jewelry, lingerie, and clothes, because I wanted to make it a one-stop shop. Every time I would go downtown, which would be at least three, four times a year, I would pop my head into the showrooms. After a while, they got used to me being down there.
I learned that this business is really quite cutthroat and, in Los Angeles, clique-y too. All the people who work in retail had been friends for years, and I was an outsider. I also couldn’t buy a whole lot in the beginning, and at the end of the day, it’s all about money, isn’t it?
So we opened on May 5, 2003. We had a Cinco de Mayo party, and everyone was excited because we were in Sherman Oaks and there were absolutely no stores in Sherman Oaks. The store had a really cute vibe: you could come in and sit on the couch and hang out — it really became a bit of a neighborhood meeting point. It was all going very well. And then all of a sudden, I got a call from Oprah’s team. They wanted to feature the store in one of Oprah’s Favorite Things episodes.
This was before social media, and websites were just starting up. They told us that if we did this, we needed to have a website, because people were going to want to shop as soon as they saw the show. So Harry went and got a Websites for Dummies book, and figured out how to come up with a website and get a server and get a fulfillment house — the whole thing.
We also had to come up with something to sell, but we couldn’t order enough clothes in such a short amount of time. So we got this candle and some sweatpants and T-shirts and tank tops, and wrote “Belle Gray” on them. We appeared on Oprah, with Cindy Crawford, who is a friend of mine, taking people around Belle Gray as her favorite store. And then, Oprah handed out the candles during the show — “You get a candle! And you get a candle!” — I think we made $125,000 the day after the show aired, which was huge.
We were so very lucky. That segment made the business skyrocket. But then, of course, we didn’t know how exactly to use this success. I went out and bought like crazy at the showrooms, because I thought we would need that. And then, of course, we had way, way, way, way, way too much inventory, so we would have to hold these huge sales in the back of the store, in the parking lot. Retail comes with these big highs and lows. At some point, we were making $14,000 a day — crazy numbers. But then the 2008 downturn hit.
By that point, we’d opened another store in Calabasas. There was a Caruso-owned mall in Calabasas. This was just before Keeping Up With the Kardashians had really hit, and people didn’t know what Calabasas was. The Kardashians had a store out there, called Dash, in another mall across the street from where we were.
Caruso wanted an 11-year lease, which we never should have signed. I would now say never do that. Sign for three years at the most. You live and you learn. But at the time, we really didn’t know any better, and we thought, “Wow, how cool to be in a Rick Caruso property.”
These stores we had were just gorgeous. Everybody loved them. But the 2008 financial crisis happened, and suddenly, we could barely pay our rent, especially out in Calabasas, where we ended up making $300 a day. After a while, that’s just not sustainable. The whole mall was suffering; people were going out of business. And unfortunately, the property owners were not willing to help anybody by cutting down rent, which was extremely high, I think $10,000 a month. The store in Sherman Oaks was maybe $3,000 a month, so we could afford to keep it a little longer. Caruso ended up renting the store to Fresh Brothers Pizza, which is still there. They survived, we didn’t.
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At that point – it was 2011 – I had somebody from QVC come into the store and they wanted to do a line with me. So that became our next chapter. The stores were dying, but thankfully, I was able to transition the Belle Gray concept over to QVC, and that became a $50 million business. We made $30 million in the first year, and $50 million the second.
The advice I give my daughters, who are starting to think about building their own businesses, is to have a billionaire backer. I wouldn’t do it again with my own money. It is the hardest thing ever, and I don’t have any interest in doing that right now. I just want to have fun, do things that I love. I’d like to do collaborations and endorsements with different designers — to work with somebody who’s in the power seat and create something with them. I think my experience can come in handy now.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately — my fashion evolution. I’m really starting to understand that the seeds took in, way before I got to where I am now – going to couture week every season and being able to support all of these amazing young designers, like Maximilian Raynor at the Fashion Awards this past December. Being in fashion retail for 10 years and spending eight more years on QVC, I’ve been in the business for a long time.
It’s been so fun going back into acting and doing a reality show. But with eight years on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, I realized I just kind of put fashion on the back burner. I was never the fashionista on that show; it was much more Dorit and Erika that were talked about in terms of their style. But once that show was over, my fashion side came bursting through because there was space for it again. At first, I thought the last four years were just luck, and a lot of it was. But I also think fashion is in me, and maybe I even subconsciously manifested it once I left the show.
I’ve been through so many iterations. And people tend to think of endings as failures. I don’t — not at all. It’s like friendships or relationships; some people are there for a season, some people are there for a reason. Some people come and go in your life. All these different chapters of my life have served their own special purpose. I worked super hard and learned so much. And they always led me to the next chapter. I am super proud of it all.
You Better Believe I’m Gonna Talk About It by Lisa Rinna will be released in the US on February 24 by Dey Street.
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