The Emporia Gazette

May 27, 2012

• Headlines
• Sports
• Forums
• Weather
• Classifieds

• Help
• Log in
• Home

• E-mail story
• Post a comment
• iPod friendly version

Laura Haught Oxandale felt like she had nothing to lose.

Working in the financial industry in downtown Kansas City in 2006, the Emporia High School graduate wasn’t really happy with her life. Looking to change course, she decided to dust off a business plan she had devised as part of an entrepreneurial course at the University of Kansas, apply it to the Kansas City-area market and see if she could make it a reality.

Her business idea was a boutique — one that offered more chic, sophisticated attire than the usual cookie-cutter clothes offered at the shops she saw in KC.

“Because when I was working downtown, I was like, there’s not a lot of stores that really do different things here,” she said. “All the boutiques kind of do the same old pretty trendy lines that everybody knows, over and over.”

After a little over a year of adjusting the business plan, applying it to the area, and lining up space and financial aid, Oxandale finally realized her vision last October when Haught Style opened in Prairie Village. Thus far, she’s thrilled with the success of the store and the reaction of her customers who come to the Prairie Village Shopping Center.

“I met with a retail adviser — she owned a store up in Kansas City for awhile — and just was chatting with her about how things were going and shared some of my numbers with her,” Oxandale said. “She was really surprised, for just getting started, that I was having that much success.”

Oxandale graduated from EHS in 2000. After she graduated from KU in December 2003, she figured that the boutique business plan from college wasn’t going to come to fruition anytime soon.

“Finally I was like, ‘You know, it would really make me happy, and I’m just gonna go for it,’” she said. “So I first started just checking out whether I could get a space, whether I could get some money to get it started, and all that good stuff. And things just kind of started working out, falling into place.”

Most of the designers featured in Haught Style are New York-based, but Oxandale has a mix of local and national clothes-makers. She has bios of her designers, most of whom are young and just getting started, posted around the store so her shoppers can read them. She said she knows most of the designers personally, and some of them will call her to see how things are going at the store.

Oxandale also likes the uniqueness and serenity of the boutique’s interior, which features a fireplace and walls painted robin’s-egg blue. She said the homey feeling of the 1,700-square-foot space sets it apart from stores such as Banana Republic and the Gap.

“It’s a great location,” she said. “People around here are so wonderful, and the store is really different and unique — and that’s what I’d planned on, but it’s nice that when people come in here, they actually say that.”

Laurie Robinson is one regular customer who feels that way. She’s been coming to Haught Style nearly since the beginning. Her daughter takes ballet lessons a few doors down, and one day she thought the boutique looked interesting and stopped by.

“I think it’s really a fabulous boutique,” she said. “I think it’s really a unique place in comparison to other options in Kansas City. I think that Laura has such a great sense of style, and she has so many things that you couldn’t find other places, like a Banana — places that I also love to shop. But if you buy something from her shop, you’re not going to see other people walking down the street in it.”

For now, Oxandale is just enjoying following her dream. But she said she definitely wants to expand sometime in the future.

“In a few years, I will definitely get back to that and look again,” she said. “But I think that this kind of a store is needed lots of places.”