I’m baaack! Three months ago I took a sabbatical from all things Jenette Bras. I had gotten to a point where my responsible oversight of the business was being misinterpreted by those around me as gamified obsessive doomscrolling through our tech stack.  My hawk-eyed attention to detail was, the thinking went, not actually doing me or anyone else much good. Truthfully, with my laptop and phone ever at my side, I did feel like I was sitting at a slot machine with a Big ...continued

[While Jenette is on sabbatical, her column will be guest-written by other key members of the organization.]

I’ve spent the last six weeks living in Spring/Summer 2025. As Buyer, I always have one foot in the present season and one in the next. Looking to the future, there’s always a sense of déjà vu. Especially in an election year. I can consult the planets, the cards, the newsfeed, but the fact remains: I cannot predict the future. All I know is change is constant. And ...continued

[While Jenette is on sabbatical, her column will be guest-written by other key members of the organization.]

I’ve been fortunate to be a part of Jenette Bras’ growth over the last nine years both as the opening manager of our West LA location and now as our Head of People. While so much has changed since my early days with the company, a continuous focus of ours has been to keep our defining culture intact. As you can imagine, this came naturally when we had only two stores ...continued

[While Jenette is on sabbatical, her column will be guest-written by other key members of the organization.]

In many respects, Jenette Bras is a mom-and-pop shop. Jenette and Aaron are Mom and Pop. They stop by the stores, chat up the customers, help make decisions about what is sold, fix the broken hook in the fitting room, and literally do the heavy lifting into the loft at the Burbank store

But Jenette Bras, like all children, grew up over time. The stores multiplied, the inventory ...continued

“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 ...continued

Fifteen years ago I was in a hotel room in Las Vegas giving myself a pep talk between sobs. No, I had not just gambled away my children’s college fund, though it certainly was feeling that way. Surrounded by lingerie catalogues and linesheets, I was at the Lingerie Market trying to place my very first order for Jenette Bras which–fingers crossed–would be opening in a couple of months.

Now, five stores strong, I have a crack buyer dealing with ...continued

In 1984 I was living in East London married to a veterinarian. We lived in a small flat over the PeeDee clinic on the ground floor. PeeDee stands for the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals, charity-run clinics where London’s poor and unemployed receive free care for their animal companions. Our clients were elderly widows with their even more elderly dogs, gypsies with sick horses, bikers with ailing snakes, and the infamous Mr. Crowder who shared his small ...continued

“…But that’s not fair!” I whined in response to some outrageous, now long-forgotten injustice. “Life ain’t fair,” growled my dad, as usual. Not much an eight-year old can say to that, is there? Maybe his Bronx-born attitude made me what I like to think of as a pretty straightforward person, or maybe it’s just genetic.

Possibly I may at times come off as a bit brusque or impatient with employees, kids, husbands…what ...continued