Burbank has finally opened and we are overjoyed! The response from our Valley clients and Burbank locals just popping in to say “welcome!” has made the struggle (nearly) a dim memory. Now on to Atlanta, where, if the pieces fall into place, we will be opening store five on March 8th.

Why Atlanta, you may ask? Well, it seemed like a good idea when we were eating delicious biscuits and chatting up the locals in Cabbagetown on our first scouting foray back in June of 2017. Since then we’ve been back twelve times, taking AirBnBs in different neighborhoods and pursuing retail leases on four separate spaces before we finally locked in our Decatur storefront. In Sept, 2018, on the verge of signing a retail lease that we did not, in fact, end up signing, we bought a little house with a big basement in the West End to stage fixtures and inventory for the buildout, optimistically moving our store manager, Miss Toon, in from California to lay, we figured, three or four months of groundwork.

Doing the math, since November this California girl has spent only 21 days in Los Angeles, non-consecutive. Indeed I am writing this on a plane back to Hartsfield-Jackson International airport. The rest of that time I’ve been working the crowd in Atlanta where my mother’s family landed as Jewish immigrants from Poland at the turn of the century – that’s the 20th century for all you Millennials.

Typical Southern Jews, my people set to work running corner markets, selling clothes, and forming tight-knit networks of families and businesses. I grew up getting shuttled back and forth, and instilled with the knowledge that y’all was the same as ustedes and Magnolia blooms were as overpowering a smell as Night Jasmine.

Jenette Bras Atlanta, our fifth store and first foray east of the San Gabriel Valley, continues my family’s tradition of running corner stores and clothing businesses in the South and I am about to be damn proud.

Now y’all know why.