Maria Leone, Co-owner, Leone

Leone co-owner Maria Leone | BCBusiness
Maria Leone has spent the best part of the last 25 years on the 25,000-square-foot sales floor of her high-end store Leone.

Maria Leone celebrates 25 years of bringing high fashion to Vancouver.

It’s a typical pewter-skied spring morning in Vancouver and Leone, the independent high-fashion boutique, has just opened its doors. Inside, two (literally) well-heeled customers, the red soles of their Christian Louboutin shoes flashing against the floor’s ornate antique mosaic tile, are browsing the display cases that line the store’s 35-metre central arcade.

Maria Leone, the 65-year-old matriarch of the Leone clan, is already at work on the 25,000-square-foot sales floor, where she’s spent the better part of nearly every day for 25 years. “This is not a business where you can be here part-time,” she says of the store, which employs 50 people and last year posted over $10 million in sales. “You have to lead by example,” she adds, noting that no job is too menial.

Together with her ex-husband, Alberto, Maria is co-owner of the store; she is the public face of the company, taking care of daily operations, while Alberto takes care of the business end.

This principessa of Vancouver fashion retail looks every bit as elegant as the boutique that bears her family name, but her chic appearance belies a hardscrabble past. Born in postwar Italy, Leone immigrated to Canada at age eight with her widowed mother. “It was a hard immigrant’s life,” she says of her youth in Montreal’s Little Italy. At age 14, to make ends meet, she took a job in the cutting room of a garment factory in that city’s then-bustling shmatte (or rag trade) business. “It was a prestigious job at the time,” she remembers, but Leone wanted more than a life in a factory. “I used to daydream when the buyers would come in, but it’s not as if it was my dream to become a store owner,” she says. “I guess it was ingrained.”

At 18, she married hair stylist Alberto Leone because, she says, “that’s what Italian girls did back then.” Two children followed by the time she was 20. With Quebec separatism on the rise, the family moved to Vancouver in 1970, as much for the milder political climate as for the weather.

Leone cut her business teeth “in the background,” helping with bookkeeping and day-to-day operations at her husband’s bustling beauty salon. At the urging of Alberto’s clients, the couple opened a small women’s wear store, Alberto Boutique, in the front of the shop. When the business expanded to include six locations, stocking them proved too much for Alberto. “He couldn’t go to Italy and Paris on [buying] trips,” Leone recalls. “So he said to me one day, ‘You have to get on a plane.’ That’s when I became a buyer. I was terrified, but I was sucking everything up like a sponge.”

By 1974, Alberto Boutique had consolidated all its locations into one store in the newly constructed Pacific Centre Mall. “We were growing as the city grew,” Leone says of the time. “It was exciting, but I didn’t always like it. I was also trying to raise my children. But I made it through even though I was in Europe sometimes twice a month buying everything for the store, going to the fairs, putting the collections together and bringing in new designers.”

One of these new designers was a relative upstart by the name of Gianni Versace. The first retailer in Western Canada to open an in-store Versace boutique, Leone would later repeat this coup with labels such as Dolce & Gabbana and Iceberg, after Alberto Boutique, renamed Leone, moved to its current location in the Sinclair Centre at West Hastings and Howe, in 1987.

The couple’s decision to move into the federal government’s newly minted “Heritage District” certainly raised eyebrows. “The retail consultants were asking, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ and I may have asked Alberto the same thing once or twice,” Leone says, laughing. “You have to remember, there was nothing here,” she says of the area back then. “There were no stores on Hastings. No waterfront. Birks was still up on Georgia. Escada was not here. Cartier wasn’t here,” Leone recalls. “So maybe it was a little crazy.”

Whereas her husband had been lured by the area’s promise and its sweetheart rents (“$27 per square foot triple net,” he recalls), Leone was swayed by the “wonderful energy of the space,” she says of the converted 1910 post office building. “Our vision expanded thanks to that energy.”

Leone may have been the first to experience the energy, but she was far from the last. “Maria has always helped to create a unique shopping area along Hastings West,” says Heritage District director Gisa Straith, going so far as to call the store an anchor that, since its opening, has “attracted luxury retail to the neighbourhood while continuing to be a destination for both local and visiting fashion-conscious consumers.”

Leone also worked with the city’s film industry, beginning soon after opening with the Goldie Hawn and Mel Gibson 1990 caper Bird on a Wire. (Both the store and Leone herself appear in the film.) “Costumers and designers knew that I was here, that decisions could be made easily,” Leone says of her strong ties to the industry, which gave the boutique an extra shot of glamorous exposure. “They don’t have to wait for a head office to sign off on something.”

And therein lies Leone’s business philosophy. “It’s about being there for your clients,” she says. “Knowing what they like and what they want. I think that’s where we are different from other stores. Every customer is special and we will always make the extra effort. I was up at one o’clock this morning calling the Chanel store in Geneva for a customer, because she is a part of the Leone family, too.”