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Holding on in the Button District

By Farnoosh Torabi | Special to amNewYork

June 26, 2006

For more than a decade, the button has been the proud logo of New York's Fashion Center. But during the same period, it has also become the symbol of an eroding wholesale sector. Manhattan's once-bustling Button District is more or less history.

With designers and fashion houses increasingly buying supplies from Europe and China, domestic demand for buttons has dropped some 90%, according to Daniel Maio, who has been surveying business activity in the Fashion District since 1992 for the Fashion Center.

"Locally, there's not as much business," Maio said.

But M&J Trimming at 1008 Sixth Ave. has survived. Even as neighboring button and trimming shops shutter their doors, the family business is entering its 70th year.

"We put a lot of effort into the store," said Michael J. Cohen, who, with his younger brother Steven, is a third-generation owner of M&J Trimming.

The company is named after Michael and Joel Cohen, the father-and-son team that started the business. What began as a tiny linen store in 1936 has expanded into a 7,000-square-foot retail space with an inventory of about 10,000 different buttons and a rainbow of trimmings, lace, tassels, sequins and beads.

The Cohens credit their longevity, in part, to operating without a landlord, liberating them from rent pressures. The family owns its space and works with the developer of the 46-story residential building that rises above the business. The partnership formed during the rebuilding of the property in 1997 after a major fire.

A massive inventory has also given M&J Trimming an edge.

"We focus on better quality goods and having things in stock," Steven Cohen said. "Customers come here for unique styles or because they need something right now and can't wait four to six weeks."

One afternoon, Cohen recalled, a Victoria's Secret employee rushed in and bought nearly every shred of pink ribbon in stock for a presentation she was making the next afternoon.

The company's Web site, mjtrim.com, also helps draw in orders from all over the world.

Aside from corporate buyers, M&J caters to individual consumers and hobbyists, which the Cohen brothers cite as another reason they've outlasted button businesses that sold only to wholesalers.

"Our retail business has helped us through the rough times," Michael J. Cohen said. Steven regularly updates the store's "trend" boards, which exhibit the latest styles and sequins, cut-outs from fashion magazines and how-to's that illustrate, for example, how to jazz up a pair of jeans with diamond studs.

The business banks on customers like Aurelie Passot, a 25-year-old lawyer who on a recent afternoon was shopping for orange and yellow trims to dress up a $20 H&M bikini.

Around the aisle, Cornell University student Alyssa Goldschmidt was shopping with her mom. The two had picked out black buttons for a gown Goldschmidt designed to wear at her cousin's wedding.

"I came in knowing exactly what I wanted," Goldschmidt said.

And she found it.

If you know of an interesting small business, e-mail Torabi at amSmallBusiness@gmail.com.