A Park Cities mom’s clothing and accessories boutique now has a brick-and-mortar location.
Emily Wickard, 43, said the website for Avara was started in 2018 and they developed an app in 2019.
“Our goal is to provide affordable fashions that are chic, that are different than you see in a lot of other boutiques. We cater to the moms out there,” Wickard said. “We’d been doing pop ups out of my home, but it was sort of, kind of, a down low thing because you can’t really run a business out of your house in the Park Cities, so it was…kind of word of mouth.”
She said they do pop ups from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays at the new location at 4239 W. Lovers Lane.
Wickard said the boutique has grown to include five women who work there.
“This was an opportunity for women to pick up some new pieces and feel good about themselves and have something positive, so it’s really turned out better than I’ve even expected,” she said of their grand opening week last week.
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She said she’d always been interested in fashion, but didn’t have experience in e-commerce or retail prior to starting Avara.
“So, long story short, I ended up leaving my (former) job…I literally sat at my kitchen table and Googled ‘how to start an online boutique,’ and so I started sourcing products…but I just leveraged these sources and basically started buying products, and I would sell them in our local Park Cities Facebook group,” Wickard, said. “I ended up just getting people’s attention and they liked what I had, so I (did) pop ups out of my house.”