Catherine Bloom calls her new workplace “a raw fashion studio”. The renovation of the 3,700 sq ft former Nordstrom Local store on Melrose Place in Los Angeles isn’t quite finished, but the 63-year-old is already welcoming clients — discreetly, via the back door, where they can easily valet.
Those shoppers are mostly her longtime customers from Neiman Marcus, where Bloom spent decades as the reigning champion of personal shopping, with a fiefdom dubbed Bloom’s Room. She had been with Neiman Marcus since she joined as a part-time sales associate aged 18. It was major news, then, when rival department store Nordstrom announced in February that it had poached Bloom and her entire eight-person team.
At Nordstrom, Bloom has been given her own co-branded retail space, Catherine Bloom for Nordstrom. “I said I would be interested in a store that was separate from a Nordstrom, where I could turn the fashion world upside down, the ultimate in luxury curation,” she says. It’s a prototype for a small-format personal-shopping-focused store that the company hopes to roll out elsewhere.
Nordstrom’s move is part of a wider investment that luxury brands and retailers are making to cement relationships with VICs (Very Important Customers) as sales from entry-level consumers stall. Chanel has recently expanded the concept for its Salon Privés beyond dedicated areas in its own boutiques via standalone examples in Guangzhou and Shenzhen in China, while Brunello Cucinelli operates a by-invitation shopping and entertaining space, dubbed Casa Cucinelli, a few blocks from its Madison Avenue boutique in New York.
Only Nordstrom, though, has added a name-brand asset like Catherine Bloom. She landed her first personal shopping gig at age 12, when a wealthy grandmother who spotted her keen eye for fashion offered to pay her for her help. “I charged her $25 an hour,” Bloom recalls, “I can’t believe I did that.” Later, she worked part-time as a sales associate to help pay her way through university in Los Angeles. “I marched into Neiman’s in a white Perry Ellis suit and Maud Frizon shoes — Bottega green — and I got a job.” Sally Aminoff, who ran the store’s couture salon, spotted her potential straight away and chose to mentor her.
Within a decade, Bloom was a major force at the store, running a thriving personal styling business, known as a book, and travelling to fashion weeks in Europe to help buyers better cater to the highest-spending clients. Work called her to Elizabeth Taylor’s mansion in Bel Air — “She took out all her jewellery and told me about the pieces as we sat on her bed” — and to Montreal to meet a client after a ballroom dancing contest, where she acted more as personal schlepper than personal shopper. “I went there to meet her with her fur coat and all sorts of suitcases, set up her hotel room and brought back all the beaded Bob Mackies.”
Bloom attributes her success to a combination of work ethic and what might best be described as listening between the lines. “You must hear what they tell you the first time, digest it and take her or him on this journey.” Her go-to labels are Tom Ford, “for basics”, and Bottega Veneta, which she describes as having carved out a “cool, quiet, artisanal space”. She also regularly recommends items from Alaïa, Dior (“easy and exciting, beautiful and feminine”) and crochet pieces from Celine.
But what has driven Bloom into the spotlight is a reinvigorated focus on “clienteling” — put simply, taking good care of your best clients. Two years ago, Neiman Marcus’s then CEO Geoffroy van Raemdonck made clear why that matters: 2 per cent of its customer base accounts for 40 per cent of its business. Bob Mitchell, co-CEO of Mitchell Stores, an American boutique chain that carries brands including Bottega Veneta and Saint Laurent, sees a similar skew now. “Our [top] 20 per cent [of customers] produce 85 per cent of our revenue, and 90 per cent of our top-line growth is coming from those top clients,” he says.
Luis Navarro is a Saks alum who helped devise and launch its Saks Limitless programme, aimed expressly at those VICs. “Acquisition and retention of new clients? That cost is skyrocketing year after year, and marketing budgets are being cut,” he says, adding that it’s better to focus those tightened resources on driving greater revenue from your most loyal existing shoppers. “A little bit of clienteling is the simple, smart way to make the numbers.” As economic headwinds grow gustier, deep-pocketed, traditional customers are more pivotal than ever.
And they don’t want to shop where everyone else does. Winston Chesterfield of Barton Consulting notes that typical designer boutiques are now more like “gift shop experiences” where gawpers can come, snap a few pictures and buy a key ring as a memento. “For the person chartering a yacht in the summer, or flying on a private jet, do they want to be around other people like that, or go into a place where they’re being really well considered?”
Such retail glad-handing isn’t groundbreaking but rather a return to how luxury stores once operated, with tenured staffers manning the cash registers familiar with their regulars’ likes and dislikes. During the 21st-century luxury boom, that role was diluted, separating those paid to simply ring up a sale from a smaller group of more prestigious, better-paid style consultants — Bloom, for example.
It’s not incidental, either, that these efforts are concentrated on conventional brick-and-mortar stores. Online VICs spend less, according to Saks vet Luis Navarro: $15,000 will qualify you as one in the digital arena, while it takes $50,000 to be an IRL VIC at Saks.
Yet these salon-style stores are not guaranteed slam dunks. Gucci rolled its standalone VIC salon on Melrose Place into its Rodeo Drive store earlier this year, while Saks shuttered its VIC atelier in San Francisco in May, barely nine months after it opened.
But Bloom is bullish. When the building works are complete, she plans to bring in a “highly curated” assortment of vintage and “an obscene amount of fantastic shoes” — a nod to Nordstrom’s own beginnings selling footwear. “We want it to be like you’re kind of coming to my home, somewhere everyone meets each other.” Well, at least if you’re a VIC.
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