Sean Nero

Tomace is the new ap­par­el store that caters to a high-end fe­male clien­tele and it has T&T's women of so­phis­ti­ca­tion buzzing. And to think, the es­tab­lish­ment (lo­cat­ed at the Falls at West Mall, West­moor­ings), has been opened a mere three weeks.Sit­u­at­ed at the sec­ond lev­el at the west­ern end of the pre­mier mall, Tomace is un­doubt­ed­ly a piece of per­fec­tion, with all its lux­u­ry trim­mings, soft in­te­ri­or d&ea­cute;cor, and not for­get­ting its al­ways at­ten­tive staff.

Gabriel Tom­my and En­rique Aceve­do are the brains be­hind Tomace. From glitz to bling or some­thing that is clean and clas­sic like that Jack­ie Kennedy-in­spired close-fit­ting strapped black dress, Tomace pro­vides for every woman's taste and proves that men tru­ly know what women want.

"We re­alised there was a mar­ket for high end women's ap­par­el," said Tom­my, a fash­ion ob­serv­er for decades."It just fi­nal­ly came to me that I want­ed to do this. I de­cid­ed to do this with my busi­ness as­so­ciate En­rique Aceve­do."Every­thing hap­pens in life step by step. My sis­ter said this was some­thing that should have hap­pened years ago. She knows the fash­ion his­to­ry that I have. But some­times in life, you have to wait for it to hap­pen. That's how life is. It's a con­stant­ly evolv­ing thing. I am so ex­cit­ed about this. I love fash­ion."

The store un­of­fi­cial­ly opened its doors on No­vem­ber 14. The of­fi­cial side of things, though, came in­to place on No­vem­ber 25, when the stocks were in store and laid out for the cock­tail wel­come, with the serv­ing of pre­mi­um wines and chilled cham­pagne.Tom­my con­tin­ued: "Al­though we are a small is­land, we are big thinkers.

Peo­ple here are very artis­tic, great busi­ness­men and women, yet there is no great shop­ping to rep­re­sent­ing these great peo­ple. We go in­to shops and see the same thing over and over."You are not ed­u­cat­ing the peo­ple. You are not feed­ing their spir­it, minds, with beau­ti­ful things and I felt there was a need for that in women cou­ture."

Don't go look­ing for last year's col­lec­tion at Tomace. The store had a pol­i­cy to car­ry on­ly the lat­est styles, straight off the run­way, and at the same prices trav­el-trendy shop­pers could get it for abroad.Sig­na­ture lines in store were di­rect from BCBG, Laun­dry by Shel­li Se­gal, Nicole Miller, Anne Klein, among oth­ers of sim­i­lar ilk.

A Se­lect Mar­ket

It's not at all dif­fi­cult to "sight" one or more women of el­e­gance and so­phis­ti­ca­tion on any giv­en day in T&T, but Tom­my and Aceve­do al­ready knew that.They were al­ways net­work­ing with in­de­pen­dent women, whether they were sin­gle or mar­ried, had their own ca­reers and gen­er­at­ed wealth, know­ing what they like and know­ing what they want."Those are the women that we are rep­re­sent­ing in the store; women who want qual­i­ty ser­vice and a fash­ion ex­pe­ri­ence. The first thing you would no­tice on a vis­it to Tomace is the warm wel­come, then be­ing pam­pered.

"We are not cater­ing to the broad­er pub­lic. So, we are go­ing to be able to have more time for that in­di­vid­ual client. For ex­am­ple, sizes were an is­sue for us. I knew go­ing in­to it that we were not go­ing to get every­thing right at the be­gin­ning. A lot of our clients–eight out of ten–are full-fig­ured women. I knew we didn't have enough stock for them," said Tom­my.

How­ev­er, he had great news.

"I'm await­ing a ship­ment of beau­ti­ful suits from Kasper and they are all plus-sizes. That is one way of deal­ing with serv­ing women more in­di­vid­u­al­ly. Every woman has the po­ten­tial to want to look beau­ti­ful and to ap­pre­ci­ate beau­ti­ful things. I nev­er re­al­ly tar­get­ed any age group. I def­i­nite­ly know we are not tar­get­ing girls who just want to come in to get a lit­tle thing to go to a fete. We have enough of that in T&T. We were tar­get­ing women who areac­cus­tomed to the very best.

They trav­el, they see beau­ti­ful things and they don't want to go away and buy it. They want to buy it right here and we want to be able to bring it to them."

Ac­ces­sories:

Okay. The dress­es are im­port­ed and, even though they had no ini­tial plans to car­ry shoes, ris­ing de­mand for shoes to com­ple­ment the gor­geous styles has com­pelled Tomace's own­ers to re­con­sid­er adding the footwear el­e­ment. To the de­light of its el­e­gant clien­tele, the store now car­ries lines of Eu­ro­pean styles.

How­ev­er, when it came to ac­ces­sories, to suit the out­fit for the oc­ca­sion, Tomace's in-house tal­ent had ad­dressed that as­pect of the busi­ness splen­did­ly.Out­side of his cor­po­rate pro­file, Aceve­do was a skilled jew­eller, though not in pre­cious met­als.His neck­laces were carved from coral, turquoise and am­ber, which, as fate would have it, sat­is­fied the wear­er.

Christ­mas Ready

"We are more than ready for the Christ­mas sea­son," said Tom­my. We have things stocked: all the beau­ti­ful dress­es for cock­tails or for that cham­pagne event and clas­sic, long dress­es. Luck­i­ly, now in T&T, we have ex­press ser­vices, so we don't have to wait months to get some­thing. We can get it overnight and that is a plus. What hap­pens when a woman comes in and wants a dress and we don't have it in her size? We have to get it right away! It's just a mat­ter of call­ing a cou­ture house, tell them the style, size and colour. It's that sim­ple."