While the boutique side of Betty’s Girl Napa brims with quilted jackets and patterned skirts in every color imaginable, its atelier turns to one hue: white.
Both spaces belong to Betty’s Girl Napa, a shop tucked inside Antiques On Second that has become both a vibrant treasure trove for vintage lovers and a comforting destination for brides. Through the gray French doors welcoming customers into the atelier, owner Kim Northrop crafts handmade women’s wedding wear.
“The bridal (work) ranges from simple alterations on a dress that somebody gets at another boutique to redesigning an heirloom gown from the family to be worn by the bride, either for her wedding or for her rehearsal dinner or her reception dress,” Northrop said, seated behind the white sewing machine she was using to alter a dress for a customer. “And then I also do custom couture, where I can design a gown from scratch as well.”
In addition to bridal dresses, the atelier designs dresses for attendants and accessories like veils, garters and sashes to bring to life all of the details the bride envisions, something Northrop has been working at since around 2008 when she took on her first gowns.
A Cincinnati native, Northrop fell in love with Napa while visiting on her 30th birthday. She met her husband a few years later and has now lived here for 26 years.
After her mother died in 2003, Northrop named and launched Betty’s Girl in her honor, reflecting the values of sustainability, redesign and upcycling she had been raised on.
“I wanted to create a vintage boutique where when people came in they would go, ‘Is this old or new?’” she remembered. “So I opened my first store on First Street in September of 2003. And at the time, about 80% of the store were just great vintage pieces that I had found and procured. And about 20% of the store I redesigned. But what quickly happened was people were gravitating towards the things that I had my signature on.”
In particular, customers were drawn to pieces that had not initially been Northrop’s primary focus.
“They started coming looking for the dresses for eighth-grade promotion and Turnabout, for homecoming, for prom,” she said. “And so I started making more and more dresses, and it got to the point where I became the Napa destination for any party dress that you needed, for holiday parties or for all the high school dances and such.
“And then the girls graduated high school, and then they went away to college, and then they came back engaged, and one day one said, ‘Could you make me a wedding dress?’ And I said, ‘I guess I can.’”
Last year, after her colleague Molly Silcox retired, Northrop moved from her location inside the Nostalgia of Napa antique store to her current space within Antiques on Second. The casual retail items available in the boutique section of Betty’s Girl are rung up seven days a week at the store’s main register even when she is not on site, which has given Northrop even more time to focus on her creations.
Both alterations (ranging in price based on the amount of work) and custom creations (typically around $2,000) are developed through pre-scheduled appointments from Thursdays through Saturdays within the atelier. Initial consultations may discuss possibilities, and customers are welcome to bring any ideas they have – or don’t have.
“Some of my brides come in and they give me a Pinterest board,” Northrop said. “Other brides come in, and because I’ve known them, they literally go, ‘Can you please help me? I don’t know what I’m doing.’ For some of my brides, what I do is I’ll send them out, and I’ll say, go try dresses on, and your job is to find elements of dresses that you really like, the bodice of ones, sleeves of another, maybe lace from a third, train from a fourth, and then come back back with those, and then I can take all those different elements and integrate it into a custom gown for them.
“There’s so many different approaches, but I want it to always be personal to each bride. Sometimes we finish the project in one fitting and sometimes it’s 20 fittings. And that’s all up to the process.”
One way the process can take longer is when attendees get involved.
“A lot of times what happens is I have a bride that comes to me and asks if I can alter or design or rework her wedding gown, and then by the time of the wedding, I will have done all the bridesmaids, the mother of the bride, the mother of the groom,” she said. “So one gown can transform into eight or 10, because the bride says, ‘Oh, I really, like what you’re doing.’”
Since every wedding is different, Northrop understands how to adapt.
“Every dress I work on, the first thing I say to the bride is, ‘When’s your wedding date?’ And then from there, I look at the dress on her, and then I create the timeline that works with her schedule, because my schedule is very flexible,” she explained. “So I have brides that sometimes will meet at 7:30 on a Sunday morning. Or 6 o’clock on a Wednesday night, because that’s what works best with their schedule.”
Northrop’s flexibility is impressive considering the high demand she experiences due to the growth of the Napa Valley wedding scene.
“It’s much more than it used to be, and mainly because we have more and more locations that you can have weddings at,” she said. “When I got married in ‘99, there were three places in the valley – three wine-related places – where you could have your ceremony and your wedding. And that was Harvest Inn, Goosecross Cellars and Hans Fahden. That was it. And now look where we are all these years later. It’s a whole industry now.”
As a result, many Betty’s Girl customers aren’t Napa locals but are just holding their weddings nearby.
“I have done a lot of emergency work for people that have weddings here, that show up and their dress is ill-fitting or they forgot their veil. Or they don’t have a rehearsal dinner dress and all kinds of random things, and then I end up helping them,” she said. “Or I had a mother of the bride recently. The day before the wedding, she went to steam her dress and she melted her dress, so she came in and I helped salvage her dress.”
Northrop’s work shifts not only with changing circumstances but also with the personal taste of her clients. Over the years, she has produced pieces in a wide range of styles, drawing inspiration from films, fashion history and the secondhand scraps she collects. While much of her early work reimagined gowns from the 1980s and early ‘90s, she has since worked in silhouettes from the 1920s to the ‘50s and beyond.
“A lot of my inspiration is just the way a piece of fabric looks or the way it falls on the table, sometimes what it lands on the table next to,” she said. “There’ll be two things that are on my work table at the same time, and all of a sudden my brain goes, ‘Oh, that would be really cool together.’ And then I stop and I make it.”
But the most important influence is the bride herself.
“I love it when a bride comes in who doesn’t fall into the traditional camp and I’m talking to her, and I see all of a sudden that she’s got an idea, but she’s afraid to articulate it because maybe it’s not appropriate,” Northrop explained. “Maybe it’s not what’s averagely thought of. And then all of a sudden I’m like, ‘Let’s do it.’”
Through situations like those, Northrop has designed dresses of denim, suede and even 150-year-old vintage lace.
“I just did a whole wedding on July 5, and the entire wedding party’s, including the bride’s, dresses were made out of vintage tablecloths,” she said. “The girls’ dresses I dyed, and then the bride’s was white, and then we covered it with lace. And I knew as soon as she asked me to do the wedding that I was going to do a tablecloth dress, because I’ve probably made her about 50 tablecloth skirts and dresses in the 20 years I’ve known her.”
Having a longstanding relationship with a customer is typical for Northrop.
“This year in particular, I would say probably a third of my brides that I’m working with I’ve known since eighth grade,” she estimated. “I dressed them for their eighth-grade promotion. I’ve done all their prom dresses. And I even have a couple who live across the country and are having me do their gowns. So they’re making trips back and forth across the country so that I can work on the dresses. It’s a total community.”
The loyal customers don’t just come for the gowns Northrop designs. They also return for her and her advice.
“I spend probably 50% of my time working with a bride in a bridal party as a therapist, getting them feeling good about their gown, getting them feeling good about their wedding,” Northrop said. “I also provide a lot of insights into what the groomsmen should wear, how to manage issues that you’re having with your maid of honor, how to fire somebody from your bridal party, what’s the proper etiquette for who walks you down the aisle when you have a dad and a stepfather. It’s all these weird, random things.
“There’s just so much stress involved with weddings. So I always say, I’m gonna take the stress off the bride and I’m gonna put it on my shoulders. And I got some pretty sturdy shoulders.”
The customers notice how much Northrop cares about them.
“She always has this much energy and is this much fun,” said Novato resident Bridget Park while trying on a patchwork-style sundress on one of the visits to the boutique she makes whenever she’s in town. “Every time you walk in, she’s brimming with ideas, and she makes all of us feel so special.”
This personal touch is Northrop’s specialty.
“I really love, more than anything, the moment when a bride puts on a gown and it is her dress,” she said. “I always tell my brides my job is to take a dress and transform it into your dress. And there is that moment with every bride where you see the twinkle in her eye, and you know you’ve hit the mark.”
The boutique is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily inside Antiques on Second, 1370 Second St. in Napa. More information and atelier appointments are available at bettysgirlnapa.com.
