Murry Moss Partner Blogs On How To Open A Store In L.A.

I am very sorry that I only just discovered the guest blog of Franklin Getchell, the "media-shy" partner of Murray Moss, on T's For The Moment blog.This man can write. And, if you're wondering what this has to do fashion, read it is a lesson on how to open a luxury store in LA, any luxury store. His happens to be a design object store.

Today we haveThe Party. He interviews party planners tell him the party will be huge! With as many as 300 people and will cost $46,000.

I nearly choked on my soy macchiato. What? Were we going to do plastic surgery on each of them? Three hundred people, no food, and the wine was coming from us? How could this possibly cost $46,000? "Parking," they explained patiently. We were going to need at least 30 valet parkers, plus a shuttle to where they have to take the cars, plus four "leaners" (which I learned are the people who lean through the car window to see if the person inside is on the list or not), 10 security guards, including one at each end of the celebrity smoking area, and four celebrity escorts, whose primary job is to walk the celebrity from the door of the limousine to the door of the store, six feet away! God forbid they might get lost on that treacherous stretch of sidewalk.

I had a wonderful conversation with Mike the Fire Marshal, who at one point said to me, clicker in hand, "You know, you're 14 people from capacity." I asked what the capacity was, trying to make conversation in order to distract him as more people pushed in. "Beats me," he said.

Day One was Hiring The Staff:

You may have heard that West Hollywood is gay. Well, West Hollywood is gay in the same way that water is wet: completely, overwhelmingly, dog-neuteringly gay. Everybody in West Hollywood is gay. Our contractor was gay. The plumber was gay. Architect? Gay. Landlord? City Hall? Mayor? Gay, gay, gay. But how does this impact the renovation a building, you may ask. Well, think about it. You have all these buff guys in charge of tools and heavy machinery who would rather be having a grapefruit Cosmopolitan or getting a massage. How much work do you really think gets done? If the months we spent in L.A. revealed anything, it's that most people there would rather be playing paddleball than working.... I suppose you might be wondering why we hired the Village People in the first place. Well, we're gay. We speak the language. We thought working with so many of our brethren would be a refreshing change of pace, maybe make for a gentler kinder construction experience

Some people didn't find this funny.

Day Two was Managing The Staff:

Our contractor, a sweet man for the most part--super attentive to detail, great subs, cute, even--was so expertly passive-aggressive that weeks would go by and he wouldn't speak to me, or take my calls, or even email, because I had yelled at him. Once, toward the end, we were having what I would characterize as a mild discussion, and he backed away and ran out to his pickup, and I literally had to stand in front of his truck to stop him from driving away. I don't mean to sounds glib, but it was like a West Hollywood version of Tiananmen Square.