Unlike most fashion people, Geraldine Chung doesn’t rhapsodise about the business she’s in. Sure, she loves clothes. But the business of fashion? Chung, founder and owner of LCD, a multibrand e-tailer with two bricks-and-mortar Los Angeles stores, lost her rose-coloured glasses a long time ago.
“Now when people ask me about going into fashion, I’m like, ‘Don’t do it. I just want you to keep money in your bank account’. It’s so hard. If I’d known that before I might not have done it.”
Chung, of Taiwanese heritage, founded LCD – short for Lust, Covet, Desire – in 2011, offering hand-picked pieces from hard-to-find designers; many of them, she is sad to note, have since gone out of business.
In 2016, she opened a store on Venice’s Lincoln Boulevard, which she subsequently moved to the far trendier Abbot Kinney Boulevard in the same neighbourhood. Last September, she opened her second store in downtown Los Angeles.
Walking into her Venice boutique, it is evident that Chung is a born curator. There are the spare, shopping bag-inspired leather bags from Italian brand Medea; a sequence of matte nail colours from J. Hannah; and rectangular towers of soap arrayed on a marble slab.
On the racks, there is a shimmering lilac pleated skirt from Priscavera; a celadon green blouse by Korean-born, London-based designer Rejina Pyo; a burst of florals on a button-front shirt by Danish brand Stine Goya. Music plays, shots of mescal are offered, the staff give good advice, and there is no hard selling.Chung was born in the Fountain Valley area of Orange County; her mother lived in the United States while her father split his time between Taipei and Hong Kong, where he ran a company making doors and windows.
When Chung was six, her mother decided she’d had enough of raising three kids on her own, so the family relocated to Taipei. Chung went to American schools, but couldn’t wait until summer, when she would holiday with her family in the US – six weeks of near endless shopping where she stocked up on clothing from Body Glove, Maui & Sons and Banana Republic.
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“What had the most impact for me was growing up near the beach in Orange County; a lot of that Southern California beach culture soaked into me. It’s why I have fluorescent clothing in my stores, and vintage skate and surf tees that sell out so quickly. They have that Californian beach retro vibe, which I like to marry with avant-garde young designers.”
She returned to the US for college, first Stanford, then to New York University for graduate school. She got a job at Atlantic Records, where she built websites for top artists like Bruno Mars and Janelle Monáe. It was a high-stress job that burned her out.
“So I decided that if I was going to slave away like this, I’ll start my own business and slave away for myself. It was pretty naive.”
Her expertise in tech came in handy; she knew she could build her store’s website and run the email marketing and social media, but she needed stuff to sell.
“I thought it would be fun to try out my knowledge in a new way,” she said. “All my friends loved fashion so I thought ‘I’m going to start a store’. I had no business or financial advisers and I didn’t do a lot of research. I was so dumb.”
But she knew what she liked, and she started reaching out to little-known designers to ask if she could carry some of their pieces on her website. She borrowed US$50,000 from her family, and her brother paid her mortgage while she built the business. She stored all her stock in her house, from where she did online sales, packed boxes and mailed shipments.
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“I was lucky to have parents who were extremely supportive of anything I wanted to do. They were also very hands-off. They trusted me. They knew I wasn’t messing around and throwing money away on Lamborghinis. They said, ‘You want to start a business? Okay’.”
Opening her stores, she says, was a game-changer.
“We were selling online but then we plateaued,” she says. “I realised that we were selling really nicely made and quite expensive indie designers that people were too nervous to pull the trigger on. They couldn’t try anything on. I couldn’t afford to offer free shipping.
“We opened a store so I could stop running everything out of my house. People can come in and look at something and understand why it’s US$500.”
After opening her first boutique, she realised “this is so fun”.
“I was talking to shoppers, meeting people face to face. I have a great team and we are about providing a very chill and fun experience. It’s different from when you go to [department store] Barneys and everyone is so polished and beautiful and wearing their five-inch heels and you just want to go home.
“Our environment is way more relaxed. Someone on my team put it that way the other day; that retail is about optimism. It’s about helping someone have a great day when they find something that looks good on them and makes them happy. What’s the point otherwise?”
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: How an indie boutique owner did it the hard way
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