CEO Kim Le Pham has perfected the art of making her Tustin retail concept Morning Lavender LLC photogenic, and it’s served the entrepreneur well with each change in the fickle fashion market.
Pham’s Tustin store—with a big business in specialty dresses—includes a café component. She’s also got a Morning Lavender store, her first, in San Francisco.
Creating a voice and stylish point of view has been her forte from day one, allowing the organic stretch into food, on-site bridal showers and other events, and more recently a roving truck to bring Morning Lavender directly to private parties.
The pandemic may have tamped down on foot traffic, but it did little to stop Pham from innovating, and it hasn’t curtailed her ambition for the upstart company.
She and her husband, Jason Huang, moved quickly taking the inventory sitting in store from the start of the shelter-in-place order—up until about mid-July, when the store reopened—to create curated gift boxes.
They also launched a to-go version of the company’s high-tea service on Mother’s Day; built out an online ordering system that went live in May; reopened the Tustin location’s 500-square-foot patio for dining in; and about a month ago linked with DoorDash.
With all the operating environment’s twists and turns—40% dining capacity and a five-person maximum in the clothing shop—Morning Lavender has managed to bring back about 80% of its workforce.
Its afternoon tea boxes to go, sold nearly every weekend since rollout for $25, have sometimes seen more than 400 boxes purchased on some weekends.
And the company’s private events truck has been booked almost every week serving its coffee, teas and pastries for parties and events.
“We’ve been lucky where we’ve had different [selling] channels,” Pham said. “It is important to not have all your eggs in one basket.”
It also helps Pham has an eye for what will draw people in; as evidenced by the nearly 90,000 Instagram followers for Morning Lavender.
Good Taste
A constant scourer of ideas, she said she’s frequently on Instagram and Pinterest gaining inspiration but also staying relevant with what’s trending.
Her good taste isn’t newly acquired.
About 10 years ago, while still working as an accountant, she bought a camera mainly to take pictures as a hobby and for her travels. Her sister happened to be getting married around the same time and Pham, while she didn’t shoot the wedding, learned a lot about the process.
“I did it for 10 years and from that I think I learned a lot about aesthetics, an eye for design and I also learned what women like as far as all the attention to detail that would come together for a wedding,” she said.
She later started a fashion blog based on all her learnings and tips from brides and from there saw the need for a specialty occasion store, so she created a collection and launched an online shop six years ago.
She tested the concept at brick-and-mortar with pop-ups before opening a store in San Francisco. Once she moved back to Tustin, where she’s originally from, Pham opened the 3,000-square-foot café-boutique.
“The fashion blog as well as my wedding photography background helped a lot because I developed a readership through it and I think people appreciated my styling,” Pham said. “I tried to apply a lot of tips and suggestions, and I think organically through that, they trusted what I curated for Morning Lavender.”
Retail’s Future
E-commerce sales are still down from last year, although Pham said they’re off only slightly, hit in part due to the lack of in-person events that would have demanded one of Morning Lavender’s special occasion dresses. Spending on loungewear is seeing an increase.
Eventually, the plan is to open more locations. The pandemic’s slowed that, but not erased the strategy entirely, she said.
The situation’s a bit frustrating, Pham said pointing out it seemed as though boutique-like, born-online businesses, such as Warby Parker and Reformation, were starting to branch out in more recent years with brick-and-mortar growth for consumers who wanted specialty retail experiences that were a relief from generic malls.
It’s tougher now with the pandemic, and Pham sees the shift back to online where robust technology is ever more critical.
That means, for example, more videos online to show how to style different pieces from Morning Lavender, she explained.
And with fewer discretionary dollars from consumers to go around, she’s making the appeal to support small.
“People are being a lot more choosey about how they spend their money,” she said. “So, we’re really trying to show that, ‘Hey, we’re a small business; we’re not a huge corporation. I’m still the one curating your everyday items.’”
