Budd Mishkin has the story of an iconic New York store, Kleinfeld, and the colorful couple running it, Mara Urshel and Ronnie Rothstein:
Mara Urshel and Ronnie Rothstein thought they'd heard just about everything in the bridal business.
Until....
""I had a call last night about 11:30 from a mother who was quite hysterical," Urshel says. "The bride has a protruding belly button. So [we] have to put in stretch fabric and lining from one end to the other. We are hoping that when she comes in on Thursday the protruding belly button will not be protruding."
Welcome to the world of Kleinfeld, a New York City institution on W. 20th Street, where wedding dresses, and memories, are made.
Kleinfeld boasts the largest selection of designer wedding gowns in the world.
Co-owners Urshel and Rothstein are partners in business and life.
One of their mantras: "It's not about the dress."
"If it was about the dress, they could buy the dress on the Internet. It's a whole experience is about the girl coming in to buy the dress with her family," Rothstein says.
Adds Urshel: "The dress is a souvenir. It's a souvenir of the experience."
That experience starts with the bride looking through thousands of samples that start at $2,000 each.
When she chooses one, that first viewing is crucial. So the grey in the carpet has to be just so. Same for the sapphire mirrors. And the lighting.
"The lights are halogen and three different combinations so all pointed to show the dress, when she turns around and her parents are sitting there, it's like voila," Urshel says.
Months later, the dress arrives for alterations, stored in a system that looks like your local dry cleaners.
"When they get new dresses they have to find a new spot. It’s on the computer, every dress is catalogued," Urshel says.
But the process is far from over.
One floor below the glamour of the showroom, there's the work the bride will never see. The artistry, the attention to detail that will elicit oohs and aahs on the big day.
"We have 110 people working here between the sewers the fitters the beaders and the pressers," Urshel says.
Urshel and Rothstein live together, and they absolutely take the business home, so much so that they give their home phone number to customers, who are encouraged to call at any hour, no matter what the issue.
"One of our top designers did a dress with gorgeous embroidery," Rothstein recalls. "When they took pictures at the fitting, the light hit the embroidery in such a way that it looked like a smiley face across this part of the dress. no, it's a serious issue."
Generations of brides from New York and around the Northeast made the pilgrammage to Kleinfeld for more than sixty years at its location in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and since 2005 in Manhattan.
Since 2007, Kleinfeld's reach has expanded, thanks largely to the TLC show based at Kleinfeld, "Say Yes to the Dress."
"Used to be bride came with mother and best friend, and sister," Rothstein says. "The average group that came was four including the bride - sometimes the grandmother slipped in also. Nowawdays our average group is seven may be eight, and this store wasn't built. and some people come with 10 12 people."
Urshel had 20 years experience as an executive with Saks Fifth Avenue when the Kleinfeld owners hired her in 1998 as a consultant.
She recalls seeing dirty carpets and ripped up dresses.
But Urshel found that the store prevailed even during hard times because of its generational pull.
"The mother remembers her experience and she has to have her daughter come to Kleinfeld," Urshel says.
Adds Rothstein, "I would not be in this business if Mara had not gone to consult for them for Kleinfeld in Brooklyn, and came home and said we should buy the business."
They bought the business in 1999, hoping to move it to Manhattan, which they finally did In 2005.
The main concern was that many of the 165 employees at the time lived in Brooklyn and Staten Island.
"When we announced we are going to New York, you could hear people in shock. And so what Mara and I did we bused staff for almost three years from Brooklyn so that they didn't have the stress of the move but we were very concerned because you couldn't move a business like this unless the whole staff went with you."
The lobby at Kleinfeld has the feel of a welcoming hotel lobby, and it's no coincidence.
Ronnie Rothstein grew up in Flatbush, and went to Poly Prep High School.
But he also grew up in Miami Beach at his father's hote, the famed Eden Roc in Miami Beach, where Rothstein spent many weekends and summers, lived there while in law school, hanging out with the hotel's performers.
"Being with Jack Benny and George Burns and having lunch with them around the pool and listening to them tell jokes," he says.
"And I had a bar mitzvah at Eden Roc and Frank Sinatra sang at my bar mitzvah."
Mara Urshel's upbringing could not have been more different.
She was born in Latvia.
She says her family left in 1943 to escape the Soviets during World War II, and was relocated to Germany, where the family stayed in a refugee camp for seven years, dreaming of America.
"It was kind of like paradise you know, she painted it like it was going to be something you swim through whipping cream, and you wound up in this wonderful place and that’s where you going to be," she remembers.
In 1950, a Lutheran Church group sponsored the family to move to a German community in the small town of Pigeon, Michigan.
"My mother was obsessed about coming to the United States, we could of left the camp much earlier if she would of agreed to go to Canada, Australia or any other country," she says.
Years before he became known for helping thousands of brides, a 23-year-old Rothstein left one at the altar, skipping out on a wedding that was the talk of Miami Beach.
"This wedding got out of hand. the bride's parents wanted to wedding that was ridiculous and obnoxious and it wasn't my personaltiy and life became the wedding and not the relationship between the two people. so i escaped with my life," he says.
They are respectful of Kleinfeld's rich history dating back to 1941.
But as times have changed, so has the store.
"We do transgender weddings and we been doing, Kleinfeld's been doing gay weddings since the 50’s," Rothstein says.
What hasn't changed through the years is the importance of the moment for thousands of brides.
"What you have to do is find the dress the girl loves. You can't sell it. There's no closing technique, there's nothing that works. You have to be smart enough to know what she has in her mind and you have to pull that dress for her. And sometimes, it's the needle in the haystack but we are pretty good at it."