I Called The Boutique To Ask If The Sale Was Real. Eleanor Picked Up.

A note from a reader who almost passed on a small Florida boutique quietly turning twenty two this month, and the sale that came with it.

I am 61 years old, and I do not usually call small businesses on the phone to ask if their sale is real.

But here we are.

I had been looking at the website of a small coastal label called Sanibel Boutique for three days. A friend of mine in my walking group, Linda, who is seventy one and has never been wrong about clothes in the entire time I have known her, had shown up at the trail head a few weeks ago in a sage green linen top that turned heads. She told me where it came from. I went home, looked it up, and almost closed the tab.

Not because the website was bad. The website was lovely. It was the price that stopped me. Sanibel had a top in the sort of real, breathable, hangs just right linen that I had not seen at any sensible price in a decade. Eileen Fisher charges $228 for a top in the same fabric. J.Jill charges $89. Sanibel was selling theirs for $59.95.

I am sixty one. I have been on the internet long enough to know that when something looks too good to be true, it usually is. So I sat on it for three days. And on the fourth, I picked up my phone and called them.

A woman answered on the second ring.

"Sanibel Boutique, this is Eleanor."

I told her what I was calling about. I asked if the sale was real, and I asked if the price was a mistake, and I asked if the top was actually linen or one of those polyester blends that the photograph hides. She laughed, which is not the reaction you expect from a scam.

Then she told me about the boutique.

The boutique that almost closed

Sanibel is twenty two years old this month.

Eleanor opened it in May of 2004 with her husband Jim, in a corner shop in a small beach town on the west coast of Florida. They picked the name from the island where they had spent their honeymoon. For seventeen years they ran it together. Jim handled the back end, the suppliers, the small mountain of paperwork that any small retailer collects in the corners. Eleanor ran the front, the buying, the women who came in week after week looking for one nice thing for a daughter's wedding or a sister's birthday or a sixtieth they were not quite ready to admit to.

In 2021, Jim passed away. Eight months later, Eleanor told me, the boutique almost went with him.

She said the words very quietly. I could hear her stirring something on a stove in the background. She told me she had not opened the door of the back storage room for almost a year after Jim died, because there were three quilts in there that he had been making for the grandchildren, and she could not bear to be in the room with them.

"I almost sold the whole thing," she said. "I had a buyer lined up. I almost did it."

She did not, in the end. She kept the boutique. She moved most of the operation online. She kept three of her best longtime staff and let the rest go with severance she could not really afford. And every May, on the month of the anniversary, she runs the only real sale of the year.

"This sale is the only time we go this low. I would rather these tops go to women who will actually wear them than sit in the back, where I do not want to walk. The next time you will see this price is May next year. If we are lucky."

The Polaroid Eleanor mailed me later, of the boutique in 2004.

What I called for, and what I got instead

I want to be honest. I did not call expecting a story. I called expecting a polite explanation of a small mistake on a webpage. I got an hour on the phone with a woman who had, by the end of it, asked me about my husband Tom, my walking trail, my terrier Buster, and which color I was leaning toward in the Zamma top.

She did not try to sell me anything. She did not push, she did not throw codes at me, she did not mention the sale a second time. We just talked. She told me she used to teach high school English before she met Jim. She told me her best customer is an eighty four year old woman in Naples who orders one top every single year on her birthday, and that she once mailed the woman a handwritten note with a Polaroid of her dog, and the woman called her at home to thank her.

I hung up the phone, looked at my husband, and said, I think I just bought three linen tops from a woman who, ten minutes ago, was a stranger.

→ Read about the Zamma

What I ordered

I ordered three Zammas. I had not planned to. I had planned to order one, in the beige, to test it. By the time I got off the phone with Eleanor I had also added the navy and the sage green Linda had been wearing on the walking trail.

The 22nd anniversary sale brings the top down to $59.95 from $129.95, and stacks an additional discount on top of that the more colors you buy. Two for fifteen percent off. Three for twenty. Five or more for thirty.

The first one arrived about a week later, in a small kraft paper parcel, tied with a length of natural twine, with a handwritten note tucked inside.

Thank you for trying us. Hope this one earns its place in your closet. — Eleanor.

I wore the beige to lunch with my sister, who is sixty seven. She does not lie about clothes. She said, "you look summer." And then she asked me where I had bought it, and I told her, and she said she had been looking for a real linen top for years and would never have stumbled on a small label called Sanibel on her own.

"I have been buying clothes for sixty years," my sister said, "and I have never had a woman from the boutique itself call me back."

What I'd tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sitting on my back porch with a glass of iced tea, and you had asked me whether you should order one, this is what I would say.

I would tell you that small, female run boutiques that have been quietly dressing women our age for two decades are not a thing we can take for granted anymore. They are closing. The good ones are closing the fastest. The reason this sale exists is because a woman called Eleanor in a small shop in Florida decided to keep going after losing her husband, and the reason it is the lowest price you will see all year is because she would rather those tops walk out the door than stay in the back room next to her late husband's quilts.

I would tell you that the Zamma is the best summer top I have owned in ten years, that the navy is the most flattering, that the beige is the one you reach for the most, and that the sage is the one strangers compliment.

I would tell you that the anniversary sale ends when the popular sizes do. The navy was almost gone in the larger sizes the day I called Eleanor, and the sage was thin in mediums and larges. I have no idea what is left as you read this. I would not wait.

If you have been quietly looking for a real summer top from a real small label run by a real woman, this is the year, and this is the sale.

While the colors are still in stock.

— Barbara