Photograph of Gerri Nuval by Jim Resonable
Gerri Nuval was a pre-med student at San Francisco State, working part time at a little lingerie shop called Victoria’s Secret on Union Street, when she got sick and the doctors told her to slow down. She pushed through the pain and realized she had found what she really wanted to do: “to be around beauty and to make people feel beautiful,” she says.
She went back to SF State and got her B.A. in design, with a minor in business administration, all while working at Victoria’s Secret.
“I trained with Victoria’s Secret when they were still a small company,” Nuval says. “They had a small boutique shop on Union Street. Here is where the seed was planted. I knew that once they became corporate, they were going to miss out on specialized customer service. I knew then that I had to open my own store, my dream.”
So she learned merchandising, business administration and management and then took the next logical step: She opened My Boudoir Lingerie in June 1998 on Fillmore Street. In 2009 she moved back to Union Street, near where she had started.
“When I look at my store today, here on Union Street again, I see all the tears, the sweat and the hard work,” she says. “A sense of accomplishment is when a customer walks out of my shop, truly happy and confident about her beauty.”
Filed under: Body & Soul, Retail Report