The shop that started with one very bad afternoon
In 2006, Melissa Henderson needed a dress for her niece’s wedding.
She was fifty-four. She spent a Saturday walking up and down Hay Street, in and out of eleven shops, and came home with nothing. Everything was either cut for a twenty-two year old or it was a shapeless beige tent with a mandarin collar. There was no in-between. As if women simply stopped having occasions to dress for once they hit a certain birthday.
She sat down at the kitchen table and told her husband Geoff about it, and he listened to the whole thing, and then he said: “Well. Somebody should fix that.”
She said somebody should.
He said, “You’re somebody.”
So we opened a shop
We signed the lease three months later. Melissa did the buying, Geoff did the books, the deliveries, the light bulbs, and the tea. He put an armchair outside the fitting rooms and sat in it most afternoons, and he was the honest one — if something wasn’t right, he’d say so, kindly, and the woman in the mirror would usually agree with him.
The rules were simple from the first day and they never changed.
- Sleeves. Real ones. Women asked for sleeves and nobody was making them.
- Fabric you can put in the machine on a Sunday night.
- Sizes 10 through 24 on the same rack, in the same colours, at the same price. Not a “plus” corner near the back.
- Waistbands that sit where a waist actually sits, not down near your hips.
- A cup of tea and somewhere to sit, because trying on clothes is tiring and nobody should have to do it standing up in a corridor.
Melissa kept a notebook behind the counter with customers’ sizes and what they’d bought, so when a new delivery came in she’d know that the navy linen shirt would suit Barbara, and she’d ring her. Some of those women have been shopping with us for eighteen years. A few of them came to Geoff’s funeral.
Geoff
Geoff died in 2022. It was quick, and it was not fair, and there’s no tidy way to write that sentence.
Melissa kept the shop open. Partly because she didn’t know what else to do with herself, and partly because the women who came in were the ones who got her through it. They’d been through it themselves, most of them. They brought soup. They didn’t fuss.
His handwriting is still on the back of the stock cards in the drawer.
And now the racks have to be cleared
Melissa is seventy-four. Standing on a shop floor six days a week is a young woman’s game and she has finally admitted it, which took some doing.
So Perth Boutique is moving online. The same buying, the same sizes, the same eye — just from a desk instead of a shop floor, and delivered to your door instead of wrapped in tissue at the counter.
Which leaves us with twenty years’ worth of stock and nowhere to put it.
Everything in the shop has to go, and it’s going at clearance prices until it runs out. There’s no restocking these. When a size is gone, it’s gone — most of these pieces are one or two of each, and once the racks are empty that’s the end of it.
Shipping is free on every order. You have 30 days to send anything back if it isn’t right, because Melissa has never in twenty years wanted a woman to keep something she doesn’t feel good in.
Thank you for twenty years. Genuinely.
— Melissa
Questions about sizing, or want to know if we’ve still got something in your size? Send us an email. Melissa reads them herself.