Leading Destination for Luxury Designer Fashions – Mary Jane Denzer – Relaunches Under New Ownership

Mary Jane Denzer continues to deliver Expertise in Personalized Styling adding Couture Lines and Ready-To-Wear for the Everyday Lifestyle Needs of its Clients

 NEW YORK, September 7, 2017 – The four decades strong Mary Jane Denzer (MJD) fashion boutique – a top luxury fashion destination in the tristate area – today announced the brand’s relaunch. Under new ownership by co-CEOs and partners, Debra O’Shea and Anastasia Cucinella – both of whom share a deep love of fashion and passion for fine service – are carrying out boutique founder Ms. Mary Jane Denzer’s legacy of personally dressing women in the world’s most luxurious brands.

MJD’s new owners are traveling to the fashion centers of the world, carefully curating their selections for something new and unexpected. Their focus on the importance of its one-on-one client service and personalized styling and fitting continues. In this new era of the company, MJD continues its focus on important dressing and have collections for everyday with more ready-to-wear, designer and couture lines for women of style.

“What we love most about our boutique is serving the ever-changing styling needs of our clients. Being on the selling floor each day, gives us a precise eye into their lifestyle needs and preferences,” said Ms. O’Shea. “Our clients have a very specific expectation, which is what makes the MJD experience special and reliable.  It is the opposite paradigm of the department stores, where the buyers buy and the sellers sell, yet with no crossover. What gives us a seamless advantage is we know our clients well, and they appreciate our fashion perspective and making it unique to them.”

Ms. Cucinella added, “The new MJD is all about experiencing the extraordinary, through designers, personal styling and an intimate shopping experience. We closely follow the global fashion circuit to uncover the looks that appeal to our loyal clients, and we really enjoy bringing them new and unexpected collections.”

“MJD chooses not to do e-commerce for one simple reason – at our level of dressing, clothing needs to be touched, tried on and altered to perfection,” said Ms. O’Shea. “In today’s retail environment, it is a fantastic opportunity for the specialty retailer, and coupled with passionate service, we will always be relevant.”

As a result, MJD continues to experience a growing clientele from not just Westchester where the boutique is located, but from all over the region – from Long Island, New Jersey, Connecticut and New York City. As well, clients come to MJD throughout the year to see new collections off the runways, experience in-store trunk shows with designers and enjoy seasonal events to celebrate personal style.

About The Mary Jane Denzer Group
The Mary Jane Denzer Group (MJD) is a leading luxury fashion destinations, curating sublime collections from the world’s most coveted designers. Owned and operated by partners Debra O’Shea and Anastasia Cucinella, MJD is located at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in White Plains, New York. MJD caters to women who are seasoned shoppers looking to add the newest trends to their wardrobe. MJD aims to make every woman’s shopping experience relaxed and easy, so guests can drop by or schedule a private appointment. As well, clients come to MJD to see collections off the runways, experience in-store trunk shows with designers and enjoy seasonal events to celebrate personal style.

Reaching Us

Clients can visit MJD online at www.MJDenzer.com, in-store at the Ritz Carlton, located at 7 Renaissance Square in White Plains, NY and by calling to make an appointment at 914.328.0330.  Clients are also encouraged to visit MJD’s blog at https://mjdenzer.com/blog/ to hear the owners’ take on the latest fashion trends and experience branded events and trunk shows.  Clients can also engage with the brand on Facebook @MaryJaneDenzer, on Instagram and Twitter @MaryJaneDenzer .

Note to Press

To request phone or press interviews with Debra and Anastasia, contact Debra@mjdenzer.com.

Anastasia Cucinella in Erdem and Debra O’Shea in Paula Hian, partners in Mary Jane Denzer.

BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA  – APRIL 2017

For more than 35 years, Mary Jane Denzer has been a high-end retail anchor in White Plains, first on East Post Road, then on the corner of Mamaroneck and Maple avenues and, since August 2014, on Renaissance Square in a sleek, gray-and-white, 5,000-square-foot space near The Ritz-Carlton New York, Westchester.

Like any self-respecting fashionista, however, the store keeps evolving. Its latest chapter Mary Jane Denzer finds two new owners at the helm — Anastasia Cucinella, Denzer’s longtime right-hand woman, and Debra O’Shea, who for 16 years was the women’s personal shopper at Richards in Greenwich and served as a fashion columnist for WAG as Diva Debbi.

They follow in the well-heeled footsteps of a woman who was a cultural icon to Westchester. (It was Mary Jane Denzer who arranged the stunning Oscar de la Renta runway show fundraiser for White Plains Hospital’s 120th anniversary gala in 2013.) But she was also a mentor, lifesaver and friend to both women.

“She used to help me when I had a fashion emergency,” O’Shea remembers. “Mary Jane was always gracious. She’d say, ‘Come down. Take what you need.’”

When Denzer discovered she had pancreatic cancer — two months after opening her dream store on Renaissance Square — she met with O’Shea and asked her if she would be interested in continuing her legacy. At the time, O’Shea says, it didn’t feel right. Nor was it the right moment after Denzer passed away (in December of 2015) and her family decided to keep the business going.

The turnkey, O’Shea says, came when the family determined that the best way to carry on what Denzer started was to sell the business to her and Cucinella.

“I worked for her 13 years — 10 full time and three part time when I had my twin girls,” Cucinella says. “She taught me everything I know….But she was not just a mentor. She was my friend.” As was Denzer’s faithful Papillon, Bodhi, whom Cucinella describes as “a frustrated salesman.” (Readers will be happy to know that the feisty Bodhi is now happily ensconced in the home of the woman who took care of him during Denzer’s buying trips, though, Cucinella adds, he still comes into the shop, perhaps to work with select clientele.)

She remembers Denzer as the consummate saleswoman and stylist:

“She would find the dress that would look perfect on you and then she would tell you why it looks perfect.”

WAG observes that tradition on a bustling morning that serves as a harbinger of the soft seasons. While the phone hums, Cucinella and O’Shea attend to a customer interested in an evening gown, a client who intends to be a quietly elegant mother of the groom in a sleeveless mauve Elie Saab gown with velvet trim and a low-back effect and another who tries on a swingy electric-blue cocktail number.

As the pair consult, you’re beguiled by an array of creations from day- to evening-wear that stand at color-coordinated attention amid cases and vitrines of equally enticing accessories, such as the fetching lime and animal print clip-ons by Angela Caputi, a designer they planned to meet with during a recent trip to Paris. (See photograph on Page 10.)  Though the two women complement each other — O’Shea in Paula Hian with a look that says “glamorous Greenwich”; Cucinella, an Isabella Rossellini type in Erdem — they are on the same page when it comes to buying. During New York Fashion Week, they both thought, Why buy sleeveless and cover it with a shrug when you can wear the ever-flattering three-quarter sleeves?

They’re a trend, along with the color pink and citrus shades, O’Shea says. For fall, think florals, velvets and embellishments. And always high-low dresses, with a cocktail length in the front that sweeps to a ball-gown finish for a ’50s flair. (Think Kirsten Dunst in Christian Dior at the Oscars.)

Some things, however, remain classic, including the Denzer mix of well-known and new designers — Preen by Thornton Bregazzi, Tony Ward, Alex Teih, Monique Lhuillier and in-house designer Neil Bieff, among them. And the Denzer approach to salesmanship.

“As Mary Jane used to say,” Cucinella recalls, “Don’t just make a sale. Make the right one.”