Plainfield boutique won’t fully open until August

Jennifer Joho had to close her Plainfield boutique because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

And now she can’t fully open until Aug. 1 – for the same reason.

Joho opened J.Joho Boutique in 2018 in memory of her mother, Janet M. Palmisano, Joho’s mother, who died in 2013 from cancer.

The boutique offers women’s and some men’s clothing, as well as accessories and jewelry.

However, if Joho reopens before August, she’ll open a half-empty store, she said.

Most of the vendors that supply Joho’s merchandise are in California. One of the manufacturers – the one that puts the “wash” in her own brand of designer jeans - had to shut down in March because of the virus that causes COVID-19, Joho said.

In fact, Joho said only about 20% of her manufacturers are currently working.  So Joho pulled the merchandise from her 1,700-square-foot store, brought it home and took online orders “just to keep people happy and shopping,” she said.

Customers – the ones Joho knew well – picked their orders up on her doorstep or Joho delivered them to their doorsteps. For new customers, Joho mailed the items and picked up the cost of the shipping, she said.

“My son who’s 12, he would mask up and we’d take a ride and drop things off for people who could not get out of their houses,” Joho said.

Ironically, COVID-19 also helped keep Joho’s business afloat. One of her manufacturers told Joho that if her customers needed cloth masks, it could supply them. The masks cost $11 and came with a filter inside, Joho said.

“All of a sudden, two days later, our state said, ‘You have to wear masks,’ and then I had over 3,000 orders for masks in the Plainfield area. It just blew up,” Joho said. “So that brought people to my page because you had to order via my [Facebook] page, which people had to join. They saw who I was and what I was about and they started shopping.”

Joho sold the masks at cost and, in this case, she charged the price of shipping. But she also let people pick them up at her parking lot, where Joho distributed them from the back of her trunk.

If someone Joho knew was elderly or immunocompromised, she either dropped the masks off at their homes or mailed them.

In that case, Joho “ate the cost of shipping just to make sure people got their masks,” she said.

Joho had planned a fashion show for April to launch a second brand of designer jeans. That launch is postponed until October, she said.

She’s tried to keep positive, but “she hasn’t always been positive,” she said. “I’ll put it this way: I feel a lot better today than I did when this all started.”