The local retail shopping landscape was vastly different in 1997 when Ru Scott, then a 25-year-old undergraduate of the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, opened her first clothing boutique across the street from the Rite Aid in Sebastopol.
The infamous “dot-com bubble” was still in its relative infancy and major retailers hadn’t yet completely switched to easily-accessible online marketplaces for the masses, so physical brick-and-mortar departments like Macy’s, JCPenny and Emporium department store — for those Bay Area natives old enough to remember — dominated the fashion scene.
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