From the Desk of Cassandra Grey:
November 15, 2024
It is with great pleasure that I inform you that, after a five-year courtship, VIOLET GREY is officially going steady with Hirshleifers, the legendary fifth-generation department store in Manhasset, New York. This East Coast footprint is our first outside our original location on Melrose Place, and we’re in very good company at Hirshleifers—nestled in between The Row and the excellent shoe department whose only near rival was the late Barneys (RIP).
It has been a very busy two months since VIOLET GREY was “returned to sender”—our in-house term for bringing the business back under home rule. One of the first calls I made before the public announcement was to Gwyneth Paltrow, whose early advice I credit for the reason VIOLET has its heartbeat. In 2009, when VIOLET was little more than a mood board with a seven-page business plan, I relentlessly begged Gwyneth’s agent, Tracey Jacobs, to get her client on the phone with me—“Just for 20 minutes,” I said. Goop was just an email newsletter at the time but brilliant, and I knew it would go on to be a catalyst for what is now the trillion-dollar wellness industry. I remember the call like it was yesterday. I was in my first studio in West Hollywood, palms sweating, barely able to muster the courage to answer the UK area code shining through on my mobile phone. I did pick up, only to hear a man with a posh British accent say, “Ms. Huysentruyt”—pronounced correctly, which meant he must have prepared—“I have Gwyneth for you.” She got on the phone, not for 20 minutes but a whole 47. What I remember most is her conviction that my primary focus must, and always must, be curation. Delivering a best-in-class edit for the customer would become our purpose, our reason to exist, our “why” at VIOLET GREY.
At this point, you may be wondering what does this story have to do with VIOLET GREY’s very exciting partnership with Hirshleifers? Well, in a full-circle moment, so many years after that career-making chat, Gwyneth stepped in with another act of generosity. When Marci Hirshleifer Penn asked GP who should curate beauty for their customers, GP said the only person to call is Cassandra. She so kindly introduced us, and that’s how VIOLET GREY landed in the most rigorously curated place on earth.
To know Hirshleifers is to love Hirshleifers—both the store and the family that founded it. When I drive from Manhattan to Manhasset and walk through those doors, I feel like a modern-day Holly Golightly inside Tiffany’s, with its boundless sense of possibility. That they chose VIOLET GREY to edit the best in beauty for their community feels like I need to call my mom and tell her I have made it in the world! I am just so thrilled, I can’t even tell you.
Cassandra Grey
