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Bella Brie’s
Keri Suhy
By
Barbara L. Roose |
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"I’ve
always been a career girl,” admits Keri. “I
wanted to do something where I could be in business,
but not lose sight of my family.”
"I’ve
been on my own since I was 17, and when I was 18,
I got custody of my youngest sister.”
On her own since the age of 17, Bella Brie owner Keri
Suhy never expected life to be easy. Just barely out
of her teen years, Keri had to learn how to be an
adult–quickly. “I’ve been on my
own since I was 17, and when I was 18, I got custody
of my youngest sister.”
As the oldest child of five, Keri grew up in West
Toledo in a blue-collar family. Although athletics
were an important part of her life, Keri chose to
focus on academics and worked hard to be a good student.
Most college students grapple with balancing difficult
course work and the trials associated with early adulthood.
Keri, however, grappled with being a college student
and employee, as well as a guardian to her younger
sister. How did she do it? “Hard work,”
she answers. “I’ve always had my nose
to the grind.”
Keri put herself through college at the University
of Toledo by working as an intern with Dana Corporation.
Not only did that position enable her to support herself
and her sister, but she was also able to parlay her
internship into a full-time position after she graduated.
“Originally, I began college as a marketing
major, but while working at Dana, I realized that
there were a lot more opportunities for me if I went
into finance. So I got my business degree in finance.”
In 1999, Keri graduated from the University of Toledo
and went to work for Dana Corporation.
After four years with Dana Corporation, Keri moved
to New York City with her future husband and worked
on Wall Street as an investment manager for an investment
bank. As it turns out, though, the Big Apple was just
too big from Keri’s perspective: “New
York is a tough place to live if you didn’t
grow up there, so after a year, I told him that I
wanted to go back to Toledo.” Keri remembers
how cold the city was because she had to walk everywhere,
and Keri got frustrated when she could see her office
from her apartment, but it would take an hour and
half actually to get there. “At least in Toledo,
you can get wherever you want to go in 20 minutes.”
In time, Keri and her husband, Andy, settled back
in the area. Andy opened a business with some partners,
and Keri went to work as a pharmaceutical sales representative
for Eli Lilly and turned a struggling territory into
the top producing territory in the nation.
When the Suhys decided to start a family, Keri got
pregnant and delivered twin daughters, Isabella and
Gabrielle, for whom her business, Bella Brie, is named.
After two years of full-time motherhood, Keri began
to feel a desire to work again. “I’ve
always been a career girl,” admits Keri. “I
wanted to do something where I could be in business,
but not lose sight of my family.”
With a solid background in business and finance, Keri
crafted a strategic approach to creating a new business.
She began with the two principles of entrepreneurship:
“First, you should be passionate about it, and,
second, there should be a demand for it.” A
lifelong admirer of fashion and style, Keri wanted
to go into the fashion industry when she was younger,
but her mother always told her there was no money
in fashion, so Keri abandoned the idea. But, no longer.
After spending time reading and interviewing other
boutique owners, Keri went to New York to begin wooing
vendors. However, she found herself in the middle
of an undesirable “catch twenty-two.”
She discovered that before a vendor would sign with
her, he or she would want to know who else she was
carrying. “No one wants to pick up a new boutique
until they see who is already on the list. The toughest
part is to get the first few great customers to sign
you on and then the others just fall into place.”
Keri explained that vendors carefully manage their
brand, and they only agree to provide their fashions
to stores that are consistent with the vendor’s
image.
Once the arduous task of securing vendors was complete,
Keri set out to find great employees. She decided
to go the academic route and contacted Bowling Green
State University’s fashion merchandising department.
She hired fashion students from the university as
interns because she knew they would have the knowledge
and passion to effectively sell Bella Brie’s
fashion lines.
Rather than opening an ordinary mall store, Keri opted
for the boutique experience and has located her store
in a newer retail strip at the busy intersection of
Sylvania and Talmadge. Unlike crowded mall stores,
Bella Brie purposefully carries few pieces rather
than mass inventory. Keri explains that the reduced
inventory is really for her customers’ sake.
“In a boutique, we carry a few pieces rather
than a lot of something so that someone picking out
a dress for an event can be confident that 50 other
people won’t be wearing the same dress.”
Keri buys her pieces from New York, so Keri has to
use a critical eye to forecast what will and won’t
sell in Toledo’s fairly conservative environment.
Not all of New York’s hot trends always translate
to desirable fashion in the Midwest. Keri’s
customers, however, appreciate a local connection
to the uber-chiqueness of the New York fashion scene.
Customers have access to brands such as: Susana Monaco,
Juicy Couture, Velvet, Ella Moss, Three Dot, Seven,
Rock n Republic, Hudson and William Rast.
In April, Keri and Bella Brie celebrated their first
anniversary. Although Keri hasn’t really made
plans to expand her business at this time, she has
some incentive to at least consider the idea. “I
do have another daughter (Vivian), and I am sure that
later in life she might be upset if I don’t
name a store after her,” laughs Keri.
BELLA BRIE
Keri Suhy, Owner
4204 Sylvania Avenue
Toledo, Ohio 43623
Phone: 419-475-2450
Website: keri@bellabrie.com
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