My Biz: Store owner wants to offer customers quick satisfaction

Owner: Joy Purdy, Owner

Company: Joy Women's Clothing and Accessories

Address: 710 11th St., Marion

Phone: (319) 377-0866

Website: www.JOYinMarion.com

Elevator Pitch: “We want you to have it now.”

MARION - Joy Purdy described herself as a nerd in high school.

“I was good in math and sciences, and my engineer father encouraged me to go into engineering instead of fashion because the field was wide open to women at that time,” she recalled. “Women were being encouraged into the field with flexible hours, job sharing and the like.”

So she earned a chemical engineering degree from the University of Illinois and started with the Environmental Protection Agency working with environmental remediation.

“I loved that job because I felt like I was doing something good for the world,” she said.

But, she said, “I'd always loved fashion, and from the time I was 6 years old I'd enjoyed styling my Barbie dolls and asking my grandmother to sew clothes for them so they would have more options.”

Purdy would cut out pictures of purses and hairstyles that caught her attention, taping them to her walls.

But after some 20 years in the engineering field, Purdy decided to hang up her hard hat and safety goggles. In 2004 she opened Joy Women's Clothing and Accessories, which today sells an array of designer labels more commonly found in larger cities - BCBG, Michael Stars, Milly, Nicole Miller and Laundry.

The clothes span urban chic to sophisticated, and carries jewelry from Paris and Italy in addition to upmarket handbags and shoes.

“When I started the boutique I wanted what I was seeing in Vogue Magazine to be here - now - for my customers,” she said.

She modeled her store after some of the small boutiques she studied around the Chicago area.

Joy Boutique also strives to find labels that are made in the USA.

“Some of the companies will use high quality fabrics from Italy and so forth,” she explained, “but the clothes are made here in the States. The Vintage Highway label is made in Los Angeles, as are Three Dots and Velvet.”

The shop also sells clothing in contemporary sizing, Purdy explained - true sizing, unlike the vanity sizing trend in the industry today in which sizes are getting bigger, but the number stays the same.

“We offer up to an XL, which is a size 12, a true size 12,” Purdy said. “We have a lot of customers that are in the 0-4 size range and are so glad we are here because they cannot find their size in area stores because those stores start at a size 4 or 6 these days.”

The boutique was partially named after her, but Purdy said there is more to it than that.

“ ... It was also the feeling that people get when they are shopping and having a good time, whether it's with their mother, daughter or best friend,” she said. “It's about finding the joy - here.”