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STIL BRINGS SCANDINAVIAN STYLE TO AMERICA

By Rodger Brown

Betty Riaz took a small, 800-square-foot space on Boston’s bustling Newbury Street, stocked it with apparel by Scandinavian designers unknown in the U.S. and gave it a name that looked to English speakers like a typo: Stil. Danes, Norwegians and Swedes, of course, will recognize the name as their word for “style.”

This was nearly four years ago, but within that first year, Stil was on nearly every best-of, hot-places and A-list in Beantown. The Boston Globe Sunday magazine supplement declared Stil “Best of the New.” In 2005 Boston magazine called the store a standout. And Lucky magazine — “the magazine about shopping” — hailed Stil as a don’t-miss destination. “It’s been amazing,” Riaz told SCT. “I’m having so much fun.”

But now Stil must rise above the hype, having scored a choice, 1,100-square-foot space in the 220,000-square-foot, high-end wing of Natick Collection (formerly Natick Mall), one of New England’s largest malls. Here the store will join Neiman Marcus, Massachusetts’ first Nordstrom and nearly 80 other luxury retailers when it opens in September.

This will be only Stil’s third store, but its spot inside that mall signals the boutique’s arrival at an enviable new status as a highly desired tenant in a coveted location. “Stil is a very unique retailer,” said Robert A. Michaels, president and COO of General Growth Properties, which owns and operates Natick. “It’s all about new and emerging designers. It’s not your same-old, same-old. It’s very different and will have merchandise nobody else has.”

Just as Riaz is excited about the chance to open a store at Natick, General Growth considers adding Stil a bit of a coup. “We have an office in Boston, and the leasing people knew of them from their Newbury Street location,” Michaels said. “They made contact with them, and we were able to get them for Natick.”

As for Riaz, the move into Natick is just the next step in a process that she makes sound easy. “We started building a following, got a little press, and it grew,” she said. “And now here we are.”

More than any other retail sector, the world of fashion and women’s apparel seems to breed success stories such as hers. By definition, fashion is fleeting and fast moving, and the ones who succeed are the ones who manage to tap into the zeitgeist and translate taste into product. It’s more alchemy than science, and a product of passion as much as it is of planning. Riaz says this kind of business plan works for her. “It’s been very organic,” she said. “I wanted to do something I loved, and when you do something that you love, it can really blossom.”

Riaz has a strong fashion background, having worked with designers and stylists in Los Angeles and San Francisco, but the motivation for starting Stil and building her merchandise strategy on unknown Scandinavian designers were rooted in something more organic. “I married a Norwegian man,” she said. “We lived in Scandinavia for five years, and from Scandinavia we kind of toured Europe. I have a daughter that was born in Oslo and a son born in Basel, Switzerland, and that kind of set me on this international fashion exploration. When I moved to the U.S., I knew I wanted to do something in the fashion industry, because I loved it.”

Back in the U.S. Riaz quickly spotted her niche. Fashion-forward customers were continually looking for that elusive combination of edgy design that was moderately priced and suitable for everyday wear. Riaz found her solution in contemporary Scandinavian designers such as Baum und Pferdgarten, Bruns Bazaar and Munthe plus Simonsen, all of which design clothes in a style that could generally be described as structured bohemian, she says.

“The difference between my store and some of the other really fashion-forward boutiques is that the clothes are wearable,” Riaz said. “They’re not like the funky, weird things you see coming out of Belgium that you don’t even know where the right sleeve is and the left sleeve is. It’s not straps hanging left and right and you have to know how to wrap it.”

Riaz says her “cautious but curious” approach was perfect for the New England market. “Boston is a very conservative market, so it’s been a challenge for us,” she said. “But we realized people don’t want boring suits. They want special pieces, but they want them to fit right. They want to know how to wear them.”

Jason Weissman, the principal and founder of Advisors Retail, who has helped Riaz negotiate all three of her store leases, agrees. “Stil is an incredible concept that’s perfectly aligned for today’s market,” he said. “And Betty is just a very talented businesswoman and operator. She’s propelling the growth.”

That growth has prompted Riaz to tweak her overall merchandising strategy. The store on Newbury Street, a 13-block-long shopping district of refurbished brownstones in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood, was very eccentric, chic and “girly,” Riaz says. The buzz grew to a din, and Riaz opened a second store, in the Mall at Chestnut Hill. There some changes had to be made. “When I got the chance to go into Chestnut Hill, that’s when it became [a] kind of high-end corporate deal, because we started to attract a higher-end demographic,” she said. “We had to offer higher-end merchandise, and it stopped being the little, cute, girly store and started being more of a real fashion store.”

At Natick Riaz is tweaking the formula yet again. “What makes us unique is that each store is really different, but really special in its own way,” she said. “But with Natick, there will be more of a format.” Riaz is working with designer John Stefanon to develop a space that will contain a lounge, a cappuccino bar, a CD listening station and some video screens looping footage from recent fashion shows in Denmark.

Riaz says she will follow up with Stil Hus, a store focused on home furnishings. The lease, she says, is almost finalized, but she is keeping the location a secret. From there she wants to go national. “I would like to see stores in San Francisco and either L.A. or Miami,” she said. “I would like to be in New York, because a lot of our customers are in New York, but we’ll see. I’m a big risk taker, but I also like to use my intuition in finding out what’s the right market for us. But again, when the opportunity arises, I like to take it all organically.”