Custom Designs by Armando Dress Up Shopping Plaza
Inside the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza is Armando Clothing Collections, a European-inspired fashion boutique.
The shop features mostly men’s clothes at prices--$85 ties and $365 suits--that seem at odds with those at surrounding stores, like Sears. The store owner and in-house designer, Juan Armando Minniefield, says he is perfectly happy, as he puts it, to outclass the competition.
“I am devoted to this community, so I’m bringing the ambience of Beverly Hills and Bond Street here for the young black professional,” says the 30-year-old entrepreneur.
The decor of the 1,300-square-foot store is stark and clean. African sculptures rest next to brightly colored, neatly folded sweaters in a wall unit of white cubes. Suits by Cacharel, shirts by Lanvin and ties by Valentino and Giorgio Danieli, among other European designers, line the racks above the white marble sales floor. Also featured are Minniefield’s custom designs for men and women. They range from $850 to $4,000 and make up about 25% of his sales.
“Armando is one of the key drawing cards in the mall,” says Leopold Ray-Lynch, general manager of Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza. Armando is among the better sales performers at the mall, he said.
This is Minniefield’s second store. He opened his first six years ago in Inglewood and modeled it on Bijan’s setup--shopping by appointment only--he says.
A Los Angeles native, Minniefield worked as a showroom model in the California Mart before landing a job at Zeidler & Zeidler, a men’s fashion chain store. During his 2 1/2 years there, he recalls, many customers showed interest in his own custom-made clothes. Soon, he says, he was moonlighting, selling custom-made garments out of his car trunk.
When he was 21, Minniefield traveled to France, quit his Los Angeles job by mail and used savings and credit cards to buy garments for his yet-to-be-opened Inglewood store.
Today, the designer-retailer travels to France twice a year to shop ready-to-wear lines and buy fabrics.
