The first three months after Karmen Berensten opened by Union Station, back in 2019, was the best debut ever for her small boutique chain.
But last week, she shuttered A Line Boutique’s store at 1750 Wewatta St., telling BusinessDen the location lost $400,000 last year.
“It never came back,” she said of the pre-pandemic environment downtown.
Berensten bought A Line in 2012 when it had a single location in Greenwood Village. Along with the store at the base of the Coloradan condominium complex, she added locations in Denver’s Cherry Creek, plus Salt Lake City and Carlsbad, California. She moved the original store in 2018 to the Denver Tech Center’s Belleview Station.
Those four stores are profitable, she said, selling designer brands like L’agence, Zimmermann and Max Mara. But with the 3,200-square-foot Union Station store deep in the red, she said, 2024 was the only year in her tenure that A Line’s overall sales numbers shrunk.
“Every other store grew, but Union Station dragged it down,” she said.
Berensten blames vagrancy and theft issues, and a lease she now sees as overpriced.
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People have walked in and stolen thousands of dollars worth of purses, she said. Another woman stayed in the dressing room for hours past closing before finally running out the door with clothes. Berensten said building security has been unresponsive in the last few years and hiring her own private security guard would cost too much.
“Guys come in and grab a $2,000 purse and walk out. And then the police are like ‘Did anyone get hurt? No? Then file insurance if you want,’” she said. “We have homeless people sitting right against our door and no one will do anything. You would think they would. We have to keep the door locked and have a Ring doorbell.”
Since the pandemic, A Line’s Union Station spot has lost seven employees — compared to one across all her other stores — nearly all because they felt unsafe, Berensten said. One stylist even brought in bear spray for protection before she quit.
Berensten said she’s paying rent of $55 a square foot per year for the space along with utilities, property taxes and insurance as part of the 10-year lease she signed in 2019. She thinks the market value today is closer to $30 a foot, mainly because of the area’s decline in recent years.
“The current market rate is half of what our lease is. We’ve tried and tried and tried to get it negotiated, and (our landlord Ascentrist) wouldn’t even come to the table,” she said.
With A Line leaving, six of the 10 retail units at the Coloradan are available, according to a JLL listing. The restaurant Eggs Inc also closed there earlier this month after opening in January.
Berensten said the focus is now on her four other stores and continued out-of-state expansion, hopefully getting to a total of 10 stores. She thinks two spots is a good number for Colorado. A Line also closed a Castle Rock spot when its lease was up in March.
While her remaining stores are doing well, Berensten said it’s a challenging time in general for brick-and-mortar.
“Retail just doesn’t have margin, especially with tariffs now and online (shopping). It has never been worse in 13 years,” she said. “It wasn’t this hard during Covid. Everyone now expects not to pay full price.”
The 51-year-old former tech entrepreneur, who sold her consulting firm GB Synergy for millions at 33, also wants to expand A Line Experiences, whose trips include African horseback safaris and Paris Fashion Week excursions.
“I am a woman who has range,” she said. For a long time I felt like I needed to be in a box, be a working woman but be in a man’s world… You have to be able to go to the dark night of the soul.”
