Off the Shelf

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As owner of Curve, a retailer that helped establish L.A.’s Robertson Boulevard as a destination for shoppers looking for cutting-edge fashion, Nevena Borissova has had a hand in the rise of many now-prominent designers.

Now, after more than 15 years in which she’s outlasted both the recession and much of her competition, she’s doing for herself what she’s done for so many others: launching a fashion line.

Called A.O.T.C (Ahead of the Curve), the line is due to come out before the end of the year and arrives amid a hectic time for Borissova. In addition to the launch, she is in the process of relocating two of her five boutiques and setting up an e-commerce site that will, finally, allow her to reach a much wider audience. On top of all that, she’s expecting to give birth to her second child – a son – in August.

But Borissova hasn’t always moved at such great speed. She operated her Robertson store for more than a decade, gaining a celebrity following before venturing out to open a second shop in New York in 2008. In fact, her tortoiselike pace might have saved her boutique from the fate of so many others on Robertson that shuttered during the recession.

Lisa Kline, a formidable retail presence on Robertson for nearly two decades, closed all six of her stores during the recession. She had spread herself thin during the boom years before the markets plummeted.

Kline said she suspected Borissova had an easier time weathering the downturn because she didn’t have multiple stores to juggle.

“If I had just one store, I wouldn’t have been in the same position,” Kline said. “But I had six stores with three divisions and 80 employees. I had a ton of overhead.”

Now, as the economy is turning, Borissova’s smaller footprint is providing enough of a base for expansion.

In addition to stores in Los Angeles and New York, she has outposts in Miami and San Francisco, along with a summer-only shop in tony Sag Harbor, N.Y.

Her corporate and retail operations are lean. She has a staff of only 20, including 16 salespeople because small shops with expensive items such as hers need only a few employees. As a result, she has the freedom to fly to Europe four times a year to buy merchandise.

Borissova emigrated with her parents from Bulgaria when she was 15. After working in retail for a couple of years, she raised $150,000 from family and friends to open her Robertson store in 1997, when she was just 22.

“Failure wasn’t an option,” she said. “We needed to be profitable from day one or lose everything. I think that’s why we have a working, profitable business on our hands now.”

Sleepy street

At the time, Robertson was quiet and unremarkable, aside from the presence of the Ivy, a restaurant popular with celebrities. Only a couple of fashion retailers had opened on the street by the time Curve set up shop, including Lisa Kline, which opened in 1995.

After she established her base, Borissova expanded. Five years ago, she was pregnant with her first child when she opened her New York store. And she was working on the latest styles for a fashion line she had started three years earlier when she learned, to her horror, that the man she’d been working with had been shot to death while working in his factory in Montebello east of downtown Los Angeles.

As a result, she quit designing clothes and focused on running her stores.

Her stores were some of the first in the country to sell clothing from the collections of such designers as Isabel Marant, Helmut Lang and Alexander Wang. But as many of the designers she championed gained mainstream popularity, they began to open their own stores. In fact, in the last few years, both Marant and Wang opened stores a block away from her Mercer Street location in New York. Marant also opened an L.A. store on Melrose Place earlier this year.

The creeping competition provided the motivation she needed to pick up fashion design again.

“I want to have something that’s super exclusive, something that’s only ours,” she said. “Plus, there’s so much that I want to see when I’m buying for my store that I don’t. If I don’t see it, I can’t buy it, so I’ll just go make it.”

Her goal is for the fashion line to account for 20 percent of volume in her stores in the next 16 months.

“I’m very confident I can make clothes and that I can have a stellar collection out there,” she said.

Paul Zaffaroni, a director at Newport Beach investment bank Roth Capital Partners LLC who also sits on the board of the California Fashion Association, said that if any retailer could jump so confidently into design, Borissova would be at the top of the list.

“She’s a retailer first, but she’s also coming at it from a stylist’s perspective,” he said. “I think this could be a good complement to what she’s doing in her stores. She knows her customer really well and has a good sense of style; she’s a taste maker.”

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