Underwire: March 2024 ‘A Tale of Two Cities’
“So where are you living now?” This is a question I get asked a lot. For those of y’all new to this newsletter, let me enumerate the bullet points of how I came to live in two cities at once.
- We decided to expand Jenette Bras to Atlanta partly because this is the city where my mother’s family is from and partly for the food and film production.
- We bought a small house with a large basement in Southwest Atlanta to use as a base for our Southern expansion. In the basement we staged all the elements of our Decatur build-out, including vintage factory windows, custom cabinetry and racks, mannequins, paper goods and boxes and boxes of inventory.
- The plan was to open the store in Decatur, throw a fabulous opening party, do a few events, interviews, and, with everything in motion, rent the house out and take a two week vacation before heading back to LA.
- The Atlanta store opened its doors for business on March 8, 2020. We had a good first week before COVID shut the whole country down.
Timing is everything, eh?
Needless to say, those other parts of the plan were slightly delayed. So here we were, locked down in this strange house, in a new city with only a suitcase of clothes and, thankfully, our car (we had driven across