| Cheryl Hall: Fashion forward Ylang-Ylang owners keep jewelry sales rising at shop under Galleria escalator 04/15/2001 By CHERYL HALL / The Dallas Morning News IDEAS AT WORK California jewelry designer Cathy Waterman was caught off guard the first time she actually saw Ylang-Ylang, the only Dallas retailer allowed to sell her exclusive line of necklaces, earrings and bracelets.
Ms. Waterman hadn't quite understood that her fashionable extravagances – donned by Hollywood superstars and featured on fashion magazine covers – were being sold in a tiny, glass-enclosed pavilion in the middle of a walkway at the Dallas Galleria.
Her qualms, however, quickly subsided.
Ylang-Ylang, after all, is one of her most prodigious boutiques.
"They sell so much of my work, it's incredible," Ms. Waterman says from her secluded studio outside Los Angeles.
For 15 years, Charles and Joanne Teichman, owners of Ylang-Ylang, have tended to Dallas' jewelry fashionistas from a 600-square-foot store that's partially tucked under a mall escalator.
Roughly the size of a small ice cream shop, Ylang-Ylang expects to sell more than $2 million in fashion-forward jewelry this year. That's nearly five times the per-square-foot sales of a typical Zales Jewelers or Bailey Banks & Biddle unit and makes it one of the Galleria's best performers, even in this land where Tiffany & Co., Cartier and Bachendorf's loom large.
Its quirky moniker is that of a tree in the Philippines that sprouts fragrant flowers used in perfume.
"The thought was to have a name that's pronounced the same all over the world: e-long, e-long," Charles says in his lilting French accent that abruptly shifts into a tangy twang. "Except in Texas, where it's pronounced yang-yang or ling-ling or e-lang-e-lang – even by some of our best friends."
The Teichmans take absolutely no offense and consider it part of the eclectic charm of the store, which has $22,000 Waterman grape earrings and $50 sterling Me&Ro earrings in adjacent cases.
"It's a mini-Taj Mahal that looks like a jewel box, and the Teichmans are its jewels," says Galleria general manager Peggy Weaver. "They seek out new designs and offer looks that aren't seen in other stores. They're local and so very smart."
Devon Page McCleary, Me&Ro Designers, Gabrielle Sanchez and Beth Orduña are hardly household names but are established trendsetters in the fashion jewelry world. Ylang-Ylang is among a handful of stores in the nation that carry all of them.
The Teichmans play the marketing game, holding designer trunk shows, setting up designer appearances and maneuvering Ylang-Ylang's name into national magazines such as Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and Elle.
In October, InStyle magazine featured a cute $110 French enameled bracelet exclusive to Ylang-Ylang. More than 650 mail, phone and e-mail orders rolled in from as far away as Abu Dhabi and Japan.
And Ylang-Ylang may well be the smallest retailer ever to have a billboard on the Dallas North Tollway.
But just like the escalator that Ylang-Ylang is nestled under, getting the business to this lofty stage has had its ups and downs.
Texas bound
Originally, Ylang-Ylang was whimsical and flashy costume jewelry imported to this country by a French couple who opened a store in Manhattan in 1981. Charles Teichman, who started his career as an attorney in France before coming to the United States as a retail consultant, helped that couple open a second U.S. location in Beverly Hills.
In 1984, he and Joanne, who was an account vice president with a Madison Avenue advertising agency, hopped at the chance to bring Ylang-Ylang to Texas, because they wanted to start a family – but not in New York City.
Convinced that location was everything, the Teichmans scoped out NorthPark and the Galleria for a small, highly visible spot on the first floor. But this was Boomtown, and there wasn't anything available.
So Mr. Teichman suggested placing a store in the middle of the main Galleria walkway – well before the idea of kiosks became popular in malls. After initially turning down the idea, the Galleria said OK if it chose the architect.
In June 1985, Ylang-Ylang debuted to a throng of customers and opening day sales of $5,000.
"Dallas was truly the golden El Dorado," Mr. Teichman says.
The next year, the Teichmans opened a second store in the Crescent, followed a few months later by one in Houston.
"We got on the map instantly because it was just so different from everything else," says Mr. Teichman, who says it took a certain sense of humor, flair and disposable income to wear these oversized French-made baubles. Texas women certainly fit that bill. "It was a bizarre time with consumption pushed to the max. The only bad point in that was we believed it would go on forever."
That fairytale beginning, however, quickly turned into a horror story. By early 1987, the state's economy collapsed, and Ylang-Ylang lost half of its business in just two months.
"But people were talking about it like the weather: 'If it storms today, don't worry, the sun will shine tomorrow,'" Ms. Teichman recalls.
Unfortunately, the Teichmans were a long way from the bottom.
"We'd read our customers' names in the newspaper and not in the section where we were hoping to read them," Mr. Teichman shrugs. "These were FDIC cleanup days."
They closed their Crescent store in February 1988 and sold the one in Houston to their French partners so they could focus all their energy on the Galleria. They added lower-end (read: cheap) stuff to keep cash coming in.
"I distinctly remember the day when the only sale we made was a $5 hair clip," Ms. Teichman says. "And that was to one of our staff members just so we could say we didn't have a zero day."
She also remembers crying in her back yard before the baby-naming celebration of their firstborn – worrying that they might have to close the business and sell their home.
"Looking back," adds Mr. Teichman, "all we were trying to do was survive."
A unifying bond
They credit their upbringing for getting them through this tough period.
The Teichmans, married for 20 years, are in some ways Mr. Paris meets Miss Rural Arkansas. His family was in clothing retailing in a Parisian suburb; hers operated a big refrigerated seed operation in tiny Ashdown, 20 miles outside Texarkana.
Their polar-opposite backgrounds have one unifying bond: Both have Jewish immigrant parents who left their homelands to escape escalating anti-Semitism in the 1930s. His left Poland for France, while hers landed in the United States from Germany.
Their families instilled in them an innate sense of optimism.
"As long as there's a trace of light, we expect the candle to grow brighter," Mr. Teichman says.
The turning point came in 1991, when Joanne persuaded Charles to move into upscale designer pieces not being offered by more traditional jewelers.
"I decided to gamble and follow her instincts because we had nothing really to lose," Mr. Teichman says.
Designing woman
Getting designers to take a chance with them sometimes was a discouraging process. But within a few years, they'd garnered a cluster of noteworthy names that attracted a whole new clientele who wanted the edgiest in fashion jewelry. Turns out, their existing clients liked the switch, too.
Dee Dillon, a customer for more than a decade, always stops at Ylang-Ylang when she makes periodic jaunts to Dallas and buys a dozen "significant" pieces a year. "I shop there because they have fun things you can wear every day and because of Joanne," she says from her home in Cincinnati. "It's that simple."
The Teichmans' biggest coup came in late 1997, when Joanne decided to court Cathy Waterman, whose platinum-and-diamond necklaces were already gracing the necks of Gwyneth Paltrow and Jamie Lee Curtis.
Barney's New York, which had handled the exclusive line here, closed its NorthPark store. So, Ms. Teichman figured, what the heck?
She finagled the Waterman studio's highly private number from an underling at a fashion magazine. To Ms. Teichman's astonishment, the reclusive designer answered the phone, leaving her to quickly sidestep how she got the phone number.
An hour and a half later, Joanne was making plans to fly to California to place her first order.
"I agreed to sell her my collection if she got to my studio in 48 hours," says Ms. Waterman, even though she thought Ms. Teichman probably couldn't get her act together that fast.
That's when the designer learned not to underestimate this hard-charger from Texas.
"She came, and she knew exactly what she wanted," Ms. Waterman says. "It's that determination and confidence that sets Joanne apart."
The first 25 pieces showed up at the Dallas store on Dec. 15, after most of Ylang-Ylang's regulars already had made their 1997 holiday purchases. The Teichmans figured they'd still have most of the expensive inventory on hand for Valentine's Day.
Instead, they sold most of it within a few weeks.
"The merchandise was on fire," Joanne says. "I had to scramble to reorder for Valentine's Day."
Lesson learned
The Teichmans' success has attracted any number of proposals for other Ylang-Ylang locations.
So far, their only expansion has been a lease-department "outpost" in the chic boutique Forty Five Ten at 4510 McKinney Ave., where the Teichmans control the merchandise without the hassles of staffing and rent.
"Opening our store in Houston was a huge mistake for any number of reasons, the Texas oil crisis aside," Mr. Teichman says. "It was too far away, and we couldn't communicate to our staff the type of service we wanted to provide."
He and Ms. Teichman think about that every time another lease is waved under their noses.
Cheryl Hall is business columnist for The Dallas Morning News. Ideas at Work is intended as a forum for ideas and opinions of interest.
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