They chased one brand for eighteen months. It's now their bestseller. Here's what finally made it say yes — and what makes a buyer quietly drop you.
Alyssa Iaquinto and Lily Quenneville barely knew each other when they decided to open a shop together. Three years on, ROVE London sits at 333 Portobello Road, stocking Dôen, Simkhai, Posse, St. Agni, Tressé and a rotating cast of brands you genuinely cannot buy anywhere else in the UK.
But this isn't really an episode about opening a shop.
Alyssa and Lily are buyers. They are the person on the other end of the wholesale email you've been sending. And in this conversation they say out loud the things brands almost never get to hear: why they say yes, why they say no, what makes them drop a brand, and exactly what a late delivery does to a boutique's margin.
What we get into:
• The chicken-and-egg problem of stocking a brand-new boutique — and the one brand that said yes first and unlocked all the others • Why Dôen took eighteen months of follow-ups, and why that's actually a compliment • The real reason brands said no: no trading history, no website, not a single social post • The thing they'd genuinely go back and change, which is the same regret I hear from founders constantly • What actually happens on a buying trip — the 6am Eurostar, three days of back-to-back appointments, and why two buyers in the same showroom walk out with completely different edits • How the data/intuition split shifted from 100/0 to 50/50, and why their numbers never tell the whole story • What to do when you get a buy badly wrong and nobody wants the thing you bought fifteen of • The screenshot bit: what makes a brand a joy to work with, and what makes one a nightmare. Spoiler — it isn't the design or the price • A dress due in January that landed in July, and what that does to a selling window • Why they turned down a street full of big names to sit among independents and vintage shops instead
Alyssa and Lily are also both inside Magnetic, so I get to watch them do this properly week to week.
The bit I keep coming back to: they answer customer WhatsApps at midnight. One of them took a customer's call on the Tube. You can never get that on Amazon — so do what Amazon can't.
FIND ROVE LONDON Shop: 333 Portobello Road, London W10 5SA Online: https://rove-london.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rove_london/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@rove_london
BRANDS MENTIONED Dôen · Simkhai · Tressé · Posse · St. Agni · Staud · Faithfull the Brand · Agolde · Soft Goat · Le Scarf. Also name-checked as customer requests: SIR. and DISSH.
WORK WITH ELIZABETH Magnetic — my six-month marketing accelerator for fashion businesses. We build an organic marketing strategy from scratch and then put it into action together. A small handful of spaces left for September 2026 — email hi@elizabethstiles.co.uk and we'll have a chat. https://www.elizabethstiles.co.uk/magnetic-open
The Scaling Project — six months of 1:1 mentoring for established, VAT-registered brands https://www.elizabethstiles.co.uk/level-up
Free resources: https://www.elizabethstiles.co.uk/freebies
The Fashion Feed — my free weekly newsletter and Facebook group
Fashion Marketing Live 2027 — Monday 15 March 2027. The first one sold out in 24 hours, so get on the waitlist via the menu at https://www.elizabethstiles.co.uk
The Shopping Forecast — my other podcast, with Catherine Erdly:
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-shopping-forecast/id6787894258
