Punch Clothing has been serving customers in downtown Santa Rosa for over 25 years

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.

After graduating from Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising’s San Francisco campus, which recently shuttered its doors alongside their San Diego campus in order to consolidate overhead costs amid financial struggles, Scott spent several years working within the advertising and modeling agencies before returning home to Sonoma County.

Sensing an opportunity to capitalize on her hometown’s lack of boutique-style shops, Scott found a little storefront to purchase on North Main Street’s section of Highway 116 in Sebastopol and put her fashion sense to good use, opening Punch Clothing’s first location in 1997.

“It wasn’t a lack of style so much as it was just a lack of boutique shopping,” Scott said. “I moved back here after living in New York and, after being around the shops there, realized how little there was here, boutique-wise, so I bought the building in Sebastopol and opened the store.”

After a couple of successful years in Sebastopol, a friend of Scott’s, who ran a hair salon on Fourth Street in downtown Santa Rosa, told her about an opening in the building near her salon and implored Scott to open another location. Despite being in her mid-twenties and still relatively green to the retail business, she leased out the old storefront at 711 Fourth Street across from Barnes and Noble and has maintained the space as Punch Clothing’s flagship location ever since.

Going all in Santa Rosa

“I had two shops for a while, but the Fourth Street store just took off so much that it just didn’t make sense for me to be running both,” Scott said. “I was so new, I didn’t exactly know what I was doing. I was still learning along the way, so I closed the Sebastopol store.”

The Sebastopol location, which Scott still owns, now serves as a coworking space, CoWork Sebastopol, though she goes back and forth about whether or not to open another clothing boutique there.

As the economy has ebbed and flowed over the course of the past 26 years and commerce has transformed into e-commerce, Punch Clothing has weathered the storms utilizing a combination of economical marketing tactics, excellent customer service and their signature mixture of eclectic women's’ clothing.

As a women's’ clothing retailer, the style is quintessential streetwear with a throwback twist emblematic of 1990s California of graphic tees, cozy unisex-style outerwear and lots and lots of denim.

The unique and “just ahead of the trend“ style is what initially attracted Megan Olenberger, a native of Cloverdale, to Scott’s downtown Santa Rosa branch some 20 years ago. As a former corporate retail worker, Olenberger saw a distinctiveness in Punch Clothing’s selection that she couldn’t find elsewhere, particularly at a time when malls and large department stores were the preeminent clothing providers.

“I liked that it was always cutting-edge trends,” Olenberger said. “I think it was just that (Scott) stays really ahead of the trend and offers something for everyone. I don’t know if everyone realizes that when they look at us because we’re high-fashion, but we have clients from the teenagers in town to the 70-year-olds and 80-year-olds that are shopping with us.”

After more than two decades as a loyal client, Olenberger recently joined Punch Clothing team as a manager in February.

Finding fans on social media

While Scott initially resisted the idea of opening an online marketplace, she eventually caved to the concept in 2015 when Punch Clothing opened their second location on Healdsburg Avenue in downtown Healdsburg. With the advent of social media like Instagram and Facebook came a greater impetus on e-commerce, so a whole different revenue stream became possible without much need to alter Punch Clothing’s general business structure.

Currently, Punch Clothing boasts a robust 10,500 followers on Instagram, where a social media content creator continually posts snappy clips and product-laden stills once or twice a day, often with local models featured in their posts.

“We did really good numbers before there ever was an ‘Instagram,’” Scott said. “But I think the mentality now is that if people don’t see it, then they’re not thinking about it. Whereas, people used to just be like, ‘I’m going to go shopping and cruise around,” now it’s like, ‘I saw it, I’m going to get it and go.’ The shopping patterns have changed.”

Olenberger also recognizes the significance of maintaining Punch Clothing’s relevancy with younger generations who may be more inclined to discover something online.

“It’s wildly important because that’s how the new generation shops,” Olenberger said. “They don’t necessarily peruse stores, so it’s really, really important that we stay competitive in the social media game. People can shop anywhere; they can go to Revolve, they can go to Nordstrom, so it’s like, ‘What sets you apart?’”

Rolling with retail punches

For a small shop like Punch Clothing, though, the online portion of their business has been more of a supplement to their existing, physical clientele. Typical shopping seasons may be less exaggerated than they once were in a pre-digitized world, when back to school and holiday shopping provided a significant boon to local economies, but business has remained steady through economical hardships like the Great Recession and the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unsurprisingly, consecutive hyperlocal disasters have collected a much more significant toll than any global hardship has.

“It was pretty dead when I opened (in downtown Santa Rosa) and that was 25 years ago, but then it was on an upswing until 2017,” Scott said. “Everything changed (after the Tubbs Fire). Really, to me, what has changed Santa Rosa is the 2017 fire and the 2019 fire and then COVID-19. Otherwise, it was all good.”

If Punch Clothing has proven anything, it’s that there’s no reason to begin doubting whether or not they’ll continue to stay afloat when the tides get tough.

Not only has the Healdsburg location proven to be a hit with locals and tourists alike, but Scott will open a third location in downtown Saint Helena on Sept. 15, though the official date is subject to change. Construction is almost complete and the new store jitters haven’t quite worn off yet, but she’s still got a good feeling about it.

“Even though I’m literally doing construction, I’m having, like, commitment issues,” Scott joked. “It’s a really good location, it’s a big, huge store, but I’m still, like, ‘Am I crazy? What am I doing?’”