A boutique, from the French word for “shop,” is a small shopping outlet, especially one that specializes in elite and fashionable items such as clothing and jewellery.
The term entered into everyday English use in the late 1960s when, for a brief period, London, UK was the centre of the fashion trade. Carnaby Street and the Kings Road were the focus of much media attention as home to the most fashionable boutiques of the era.
It can also refer to a specialised firm such as a boutique investment bank or boutique law firm. The word is often used to describe a property in the independent section of the hotel market (such as The Rockwell in London) in order to distinguish themselves from larger chains (such as Hilton Hotels). In such cases the idea is that the operation is elite and highly specialised.
In the strictest sense of the word, boutiques would be one-of-a-kind but more generally speaking, some chains can be referred to as boutiques if they specialize in particularly stylish offerings (such as New York City boutique shoe store Alife Rivington Club).
Recently, the term “boutique” has started being applied to normally-mass-market items that are either niche or produced in intentionally small numbers at very high prices. This may be referred to as boutique manufacturing. For example, before the release of the Wii, a Time Magazine article suggested that Nintendo could become a “boutique video-game company”, producing games for niche audiences, rather than trying to compete directly with Microsoft and Sony.[1]
In the traditional luxury watch industry Scalfaro International is considered as the precursor in manufacturing and sale of bespoke watches. The Swiss company uses a highly flexible boutique manufacturing site, which allows producing small series or even unique timepieces.
Although some boutiques specialise in hand-made items and other truly one-of-a-kind items, others simply produce t-shirts, stickers, and other fashion accessories in artificially small runs and sell them at unusually high prices. In the early 1990’s Selena started manufacturing her own line of womens clothing. Opening two boutiques labeled as “Selena Etc. Boutique & Salon” One located in Corpus Christi and one located in San Antonio, Texas. One was due to open in Monterrey, Mexico in 1995 but due to her death it was not opened. Today, only the Corpus Christi Boutique is still open.
In late 1990s some European retail traders developed the idea of tailoring a shop towards a lifestyle theme, in the form of “concept stores”,[2][3] which specialised in cross-selling without using separate departments. One of the first concept stores was 10 Corso Como[4] in Milan, Italy followed by Colette[5] in Paris and Quartier 206[6][7] in Berlin. Several well known American chains such as Urban Outfitters[8][9], D-A-S-H, Billabong and The Gap[10] and, though less common, Lord & Taylor adapted to the concept store trend after 2000.
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